Insider Blog
Fuel your real estate business and brand with technology insights,
news, product updates, and advice from the Insiders.
Brokers: Does your real estate tech stack really help recruit and retain agents?
What tech really matters to agents, and what doesn’t? Invest wisely.
Your Website is No Longer Your Single Biggest Tech Asset
There seems to be an unspoken agreement that the single most important piece of technology a real estate professional can have is their website. Looking further into this belief many think that the website alone will produce an infinite amount of leads and business as long as it is a unique, one-of-a-kind custom site that has video and parallax elements throughout. So if a single tech asset, namely your website, is not your best tech asset, what is?
The Importance of Quality Agent Onboarding for a Successful Team
The real estate profession is unique when it comes to joining a new brokerage or firm. Unlike with traditional job onboarding, there is a combination of requirements to be successful as an agent. New agents need a thorough and effective onboarding process. Many new real estate agents drop out of the industry simply because they didn’t receive proper training when they started out. Here are a few tips for how to improve the onboarding process for new agents.
Facebook Business Pages
Want to maximize your presence on social media as a brokerage or individual agent? A Facebook Business Page is a great starting point— so long as you’re venturing past the default settings. Whether you recently set up shop or your business has lived on Facebook for a while, fine-tuning your page with the following tools is a must. Here's how to customize your layout, communicate with customers, compete for business, and analyze trends.
To Adopt or Not To Adopt
Technology solutions offered at a brokerage level to agents are intended to make agents more productive and their life easier at the same time. So why is there often so much hesitation and resistance to embrace these solutions that have nothing but good intentions towards the agent and their business? Here are 3 reasons agents use or don’t use technology.
Old School is… New School?
When a real estate brokerage, team, or agent is asked about what they are doing regarding their own individual marketing efforts the answers might surprise you. The majority of agents in the United States have an almost even distribution of their marketing dollars between print and digital marketing. To shed some light on how agents spend their precious marketing dollars, it is important to identify exactly what constitutes print vs digital.
3 Reasons Reporting Analytics Are Imperative for Brokerages
Real estate is a numbers game and because of this, it is imperative for brokerages to have the data they need to determine where their brokerage is succeeding and in what areas they can improve. BrokerSumo offers back-end support and analytics at a brokerage level so that firms can see firsthand what is affecting their bottom line. Here are 3 reasons reporting analytics are imperative for brokerages.
Facebook Business Page Strategy: SEO 101
Facebook has come a long way from its early days of college coders dreaming in a dorm room. Today, over 2 billion people use Facebook globally. More than 1 billion of those users log into Facebook daily.Want those eyes on your real estate listings? You’ll need to develop a strategy for search engine optimization (SEO), your key weapon in the fight for online visibility. These Facebook Business Page SEO fundamentals will point you in the right direction.
Agent-First Tech Drives Massive Success
Throughout the years, RE/MAX Advantage Plus has remained one of Minnesota’s revered and multiple award-winning real estate firms, primarily because of their commitment to cutting edge technology and redefining the real estate process.
Keeping Your Sphere of Influence Warm When the Real Estate Market Cools
What can you do as a real estate professional during the slow season to make sure you stay top of mind to your leads and prospects for when things really pick up again in the Spring? Here are a few tips to ensure that your sphere of influence does not freeze this winter.
The Unseen Perks of a Strong Broker Tech Platform
Having strong technology at the foundation of your brokerage isn’t something "nice to have". It’s a necessity. Here are some of the benefits of incorporating great technology tools into your brokerage landscape.
To Our Friends and Industry
Inside Real Estate will be here, independent, and leading the way, arm in arm with you, keeping your data secure and driving the innovation that champions the agent, and empowers you to serve this industry every day.
Does Tech Increase Transaction Volume? Yes—And There’s Proof
The data is indisputable. Inside Real Estate’s kvCORE Platform is getting more business for real estate professionals across the board.
Real Estate Teams Get What They Deserve
Teams just scored the most sophisticated solution ever created thanks to the latest release by the newly combined Inside Real Estate and BoomTown teams.
Does the Real Work Start After the Real Estate Transaction? The Numbers Say Yes.
Post Close Companion is your answer to client nurture after the transaction. And it makes it easier than ever.
Elite-Level Marketing Materials Don’t Need to be Time or Labor Intensive– Here’s Why
kvCORE is innovating tools that allow agents to do it all, without having to do it all.
Will 250k Agents Leave the Business Next Year?
What can you be doing to make sure your agents stay loyal with you and stay productive?
Pulling back the curtain: How top independent brokerage, Samson Properties, recruits over 100 new agents per month.
“Once agents see and hear about our tech stack, and find out it’s free to them, the deal is done,” says Donny Samson, CEO of Samson Properties. "The tech stack offered by Inside Real Estate's kvCORE Platform has been a game-changer for us."
Canvas Real Estate Sees Massive Growth Through Independent Tech & Training
Canvas Real Estate is among Florida’s leading independent real estate firms. Spanning the east coast from their base in Ft. Lauderdale, the firm is generating over $13 million in gross commission income across 800 agents. WAV Group founding partner, Victor Lund met with Canvas CEO Ernesto Vega to learn about the key strategies that are powering success at Canvas.
One More Time, with Pam Johnson O'Connor
Pam O’Connor retired only two years ago from Leading Real Estate Companies of the World, where she was more than its President and CEO, she was an industry leader and a mentor to many. Inside Real Estate was thrilled to have her join us on the second edition of Insider Spotlight.
5 Takeaways from 7 Talking Points on Making Your Brokerage Profitable in a Shifting Market
In an insightful and candid discussion with Inside Real Estate’s Executive Vice President of Marketing and Enterprise Sales, Alissa Harper, and REAL Trends President Steve Murray. They offer slew of suggestions on how brokerages can cope with the inevitable changes that the COVID-19 crisis will bring to the industry.
How Weichert is Supercharging its Engine for the Future
National real estate powerhouse, New Jersey-based Weichert Realtors® has a long history of innovating to grow...50 years to be exact. With the recent launch of its brand-new technology ecosystem—myWeichert, powered by kvCORE—the firm has upped its value proposition for the more than 13,000 company and affiliated sales associates it serves.
What we learned in 2019 and what it means for you in 2020
With the landscape more crowded and confusing than ever, we reflected on the lessons we all learned last year, uncovering three ideas that we believe can lead us back to a path toward service, collaboration, and smart growth. And, it favors the agent-based model that’s worked for more than a century.
Homes of Idaho
Homes of Idaho experiences record growth by breaking the "one-size-fits-all" mold. “We’ve been able to build our own tech ecosystem that fits our culture and brand, so even if another brokerage in our market is using kvCORE, it isn’t going to look like our kvCORE.” -- Colby Lampman, Broker/Owner, Homes of Idaho
Small and Midsized Brokers Power Recruiting with CORE BackOffice
Actually working out the commission program needed to recruit agents presents much less of a challenge than tracking these unique commission programs designed for each agent on something other than an Excel spreadsheet. Small and midsized firms need to support variety in their compensation plans in order to recruit and require an affordable solution that integrates with QuickBooks. In 2016 and 2017, entrepreneur Jeremy Shoenig developed software for exactly this purpose, called BrokerSumo.
Real estate teams should demand more. Here’s why.
Teams are often the highest contributors to brokerage sales volume and one of the fastest-growing segments in real estate. This makes teams a critical part of today’s real estate landscape, so it’s important for brokers to make an effort to do whatever they can to recruit and retain teams in their organization. Fortunately, industry technology has improved in recent years and there are solutions today, like kvCORE Platform from Inside Real Estate, that effectively support teams and individual agents on one platform. Now, broker-owners have complete control, but can also allow their teams and agents to customize the platform to fit their needs and create their personal and private platform within the broker platform.
Tapping the Zillow Gap - Competing on Consumer Experience
Ah, Zillow. The real estate portal we all know and love? It’s no secret that many homebuyers leverage the “Z word” to begin their initial stages of the homebuying process. Due to the popularity of Zillow with homebuyers, many brokerages and agents alike feel they must be committing a dedicated monthly budget to the platform for a perceived fear of missing out on a potentially limitless stream of leads. Many real estate professionals also feel there is an unspoken expectation they need to be present on the search portal to truly compete with those who are also on Zillow. However, often the cons/disadvantages of advertising with Zillow outweigh the perceived pros.
Two Industry Leaders Team Up on 'A Journey to Tech Perfection'
REAL Trends and Inside Real Estate set out to answer an age-old problem for brokerages: How do you get agents to use the wonderful products and services that you offer? Many times, the technology is complicated, or the agents don’t want to invest the time into learning a new program. However, much of the time it’s due to a lack of management support, few training opportunities, and a dearth of incentives for sales associates to commit to your brokerage tech platform.
What Wins the Broker Tech Battle - Exclusive Interview
Joe Skousen, Founder/President of Inside Real Estate weighs in on what’s really behind the broker-tech battle, and how brokers can win the war.