Call her Leanne. Fifty-one, a four-bedroom house in North Lakes, the youngest has moved out and the plan is to sell and move closer to the coast. She is not looking for an agent. She is looking for the answer to a question she has been putting off since Easter: what does it actually cost to sell? She types it into Google at 8:02pm.
She lands on our Queensland commission guide, the one that works the dollars on a real sale and says out loud that commission is negotiable. She reads all of it. Then she does what a lot of our readers do next: she opens the commission calculator and puts in her own figures. Eight hundred and fifty thousand, two point two per cent. Just under nineteen thousand dollars, and a number she can now negotiate.
By 8:10pm she is not a form fill. She is a homeowner who knows what selling will cost her, and has decided she wants a local agent to talk it through.
That is when she starts the selling guide. Seven questions, one tap each: her suburb, the house, the timeframe (next three months), whether she has talked to an agent yet (no), why she is selling, and what she thinks it is worth. Contact details come last, with a plain sentence at the point she gives them: a local agent will contact her about selling. She adds her mobile.
By the time you are at your desk, the lead is in your inbox. Scored hot, because she is selling inside three months and has not signed with anyone. One copy. Yours. And when you ring at 8:30am, she is expecting you.