I don't know what's worse at the moment, being forced to register for each real estate website where I want to browse a listing or having fake contact data pre-populate when an online account is generated by an agency's contact management system. From time to time, I'll comp neighborhoods around where my rental is located to see if housing prices of the existing home supply (vs new housing starts) are rising, falling, or staying the same. The web contact form lead wall with Keller Williams is just one of those examples of a poorly thought out lead generation plan. I'm not sure why their web form thought I'm from NY, but it does. Unfortunately I have seen this type of web form behavior before where the back-end software captures and saves the contact info of the most recent transaction; in this case, a user from NY.
Here is an example of a pre-populated customer account that you probably don't want replicated with your own website:
 |
| Keller Williams: post-login from new account creation, user account profile |
And, to make it worse, you actually do have to check your account profile to see what email items the opt-in signs you up for because while there was only one checkbox to opt-in for email marketing, there were three options from KW. See below:
Surely, much success can be attributed to this lead gen program in terms of quantity of lead generated and number of validated email addresses that are added to one's in-house or partner email list. But, I'm not sure what they really mean by a trusted mortgage partner. There's also no double opt-in upon signing up, like a confirmation of an email address for starters. That's bending the opt-in rules a bit. Banks, insurance, and credit card companies do it all the time because they have subsidiaries or divisions that do partner-like activities. Also, there's no mention about a privacy policy or data usage policy on a user's account profile, or how to find out more info about it.
It's unclear from the web page's source code if this is a home-grown web form or hosted by a third party provider. I'm not terribly inclined to check out other KW agency websites to test this out.
