Link: WSJ.com - Online Referrals For Home Sales Gain a Toehold.

Here's a way to gain incremental mortgage sales, new banking customers, and potentially a bit of direct fee income from your online services.

Develop an online real estate agent referral program.

Visitors would be able to query your website to find qualified agents specializing in their target neighborhoods. You could do it as a pure marketing play, with no incentives or referral fees; or you could provide eye-popping incentives, such as $2500+ gift cards from Home Depot or American Express offered by LendingTree at their realestate.com site.

In the LendingTree program, the value of the gift card depends on the size of the home purchased and/or sold (you receive an incentive for both buying and selling) as follows:

Incentive  Combined Value (bought & sold)
$250         $100,000
$500         $150,000
$1000       $250,000
$1500       $350,000
$2000       $450,000
$2500       $550,000
$5000       $1.1 million
$10,000    $2.1 million

The incentives are funded by the agent receiving the referral, who rebates a third of their sales commission to LendingTree. The consumer ends up with approximately $500 for every $100,000 in home value over $50,000.

LendingTree also tacks on an extra $100 if the buyer gets the mortgage from a LendingTree lender.

Currently, 7% of home buyers say they found their real estate agent through the Internet. (Source: National Association of Realtors study of transactions in 2003 and 2004, as cited by The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 9, 2004)

Caveats
This strategy is not for the faint of heart. While consumers will love it, driving additional business to your mortgage products, most real estate agents will hate it. So you have to weigh carefully whether it's worth the potential heat. If you rely on real estate agents for mortgage leads, you might want to consider the non-incentive version, where you simply forward home sales leads to agents based on zip code.

-- JB