There has been a tectonic movement (not to mention massive investment) in and around real estate technology lately. And that’s been especially true at Inside Real Estate. With strategic acquisitions and new offerings, the company has been optimizing its platform to better serve real estate agents, teams and brokers, and has been growing rapidly.

In this exclusive interview, President Joe Skousen of Inside Real Estate took the time to share what has been driving this industry movement, and what brokers can do to win.

There have been major shifts and investments in real estate tech. What’s fueling all this change?

The industry’s brokers, teams and agents know how vital technology is to their business — more important than ever before. Everything from the consumer experience to intelligent behavioral nurturing to AI-driven assistants… they all need sophisticated tech to compete and win.

It has also been pretty widely accepted now that the older legacy systems that many brokerages were or are still using have generally failed them. There are a lot of good people and companies in the space, but these days, it’s imperative to have fully scaled solutions, that leverage every bit of cloud computing and AI technology — then you have to make it incredibly simple for people to use. Older tech just doesn’t cut it.

This is a big part of what is driving the effort at some of the larger franchises and brands in the country who are building their own tech — they had tried older solutions that failed, and felt they should try to build their own.

That being said, building an entire tech stack and solution is not only expensive, but throwing money at the project doesn’t always speed it up. It just takes hard work, experience and technology maturity, maintenance and constant innovation. It will be years before some of them finish their builds, and we’re happy to be providing these solutions that can be tailored and branded to brokers today.

At the end of the day, the goal for brokers should be to not get too caught up in lengthy RFP processes or overly aggressive custom builds they announce in bright lights on stage. Instead focus on the best customized solutions that can drive serious ROI and results for the brokerage, teams and agents.

There has been some rapid growth at Inside Real Estate. You must be doing something right! What’s your secret?

First, we saw that a true end-to-end solution was needed that empowered the complete broker, team and agent experience. This means a significant investment into solutions, tech, automation and tools that make a difference for agent productivity every day.

Things like our AI-driven Mobile App that shows agents who they need to speak to, and when and why, based on all sorts of data and indicators. But it also includes things like our landing and squeeze page tools for organic lead gen that are time-tested and super productive. These are things other solutions just miss all together.

Second, we also knew that a team or broker with disconnected tech is bound for failure. That is why we built our kvCORE Platform with a complete, robust API; built-in integrations with the industry’s best solutions; and very importantly, a Marketplace that is unique and gives the ability for individual agents, teams and the brokers to extend their business as they’d like.

The whole purpose is to provide “best of breed” solutions that brokers, team, and agents need in one place and also give them the ability to extend to proprietary features directly within the system. We aren’t talking about just a hub to sign on to different systems at once. Our integrations are deep and engineered to work in tandem — making the whole system easy to use which is key to agent adoption overall.

We have an entire Success Model and Program that requires our team drives a certain level of results before we consider the account “Adopted”. With our recent rollouts with some big brokerages and brands, they’ve been able to achieve 3x higher results than other solutions in the space. We also see agent production growing on average more than 12% across the board. A recent case study produced by REAL Trends shows The Keyes Company experiencing 90% of agents logging in in the first 60 days, and 35% of agents actively using the platform daily.

Lastly, brokers need to own and be able to leverage their data — we empower that. But we also allow agents and teams to have their own personal, private data stores and systems. This is the heart of their business, and they really to need to maintain ownership of that at their level.

So what can the industry look for next from Inside Real Estate?

We are happy and honored to have seen so much demand and success rolling out our kvCORE Platform, and we still have a lot of work ahead. As we go through this year, look for some really powerful AI-driven enhancements on mobile, innovations around search and consumer interaction, powerful seller tools and even more great integration options.

We’re listening closely to our broker partners and what really drives business for their teams and agents.