By Victor Lund, June 27th, 2022, originally published on wavgroup.com

As technology companies grow and gain market share in the industry, only some are building for the future with ongoing innovation. The challenge for all of them is to remain innovative in a competitive environment, where the leading brokerage platforms offer many of the same features and functionality. For the longest time, the themes of elegant, front-end design and consumer lead generation was the goal line. Those elements remain relevant today, but the most innovative broker technology firms have emphasized deeper productivity applications for teams and agents, like sophisticated AI-driven lead followup that acts like a 24×7 smart virtual assistant for every single agent. The most innovative tech firms today are tapping into the perennial struggle of our industry – creating the tools to create and maintain customers for life.

In 2021, Inside Real Estate launched two significant productivity components to their broker platform, named kvCORE. The first was CORE Present, an integrated CMA and Listing Presentation solution. CORE Present allows the marketing team of the brokerage to construct on brand listing presentation templates. The seamless integration to the kvCORE system eliminates the need for agents and teams to sign into a third-party application to run their CMA and build a listing presentation. The quality of the product earned them a perfect 5-star rating by Inman News.

The second product innovation to kvCORE was the release of CORE Home – the first of its kind lifetime homeownership technology that puts the coveted consumer relationship in the hands of brokerages and their agents. Like CORE Present, CORE Home is seamlessly integrated into the platform to empower agents to deliver better service to their clients, over the lifetime of homeownership. What’s completely groundbreaking is that the technology is 100% branded to the brokerage and agent, giving them the opportunity to provide value to consumers all throughout their homeownership journey. There are four main components – Current Home, Next Home, Buy and Sell, and Move. With Current Home, clients have a portal containing real-time alerts around home value and detailed market data, and the ability to monitor mortgage and insurance to ensure competitive rates. Next Home is an agent guided search solution. Buy & Sell contains vital transaction related task management, and Move delivers a concierge type solution for moving, home improvement, and home maintenance. There is no doubt that the demand and need for this technology is fierce. They’ve rolled out CORE Home to several thousand agents in two major brokerages and have already seen a 30x lift in consumer engagements. The new homeownership technology is available exclusively to Inside Real Estate’s kvCORE customers.

Aside from these two significant building blocks being added to kvCORE, there were more than 300 additional product additions and enhancements made to other elements of the platform last year. That is a lot of innovation when you are also growing and onboarding new clients at that high of a growth rate. The results of driving innovation have been significant for Inside Real Estate. The company reports that user satisfaction is a perfect 5 out of 5 for 75% of their customers, and 4.5% overall rating.

In four years, Inside Real Estate has grown their brokerage client base to serve 250,000 agents managing 115 million client relationships. Some of their notable clients include eXp Realty, NextHome, Weichert Realtors, Royal LePage, The Keyes Company, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices The Preferred Realty, JPAR Real Estate, Samson Properties, La Rosa Realty, Better Homes & Gardens Real Estate Gary Greene, HER Realtors division of Howard Hanna, among many others. Company employment has grown past the threshold of 250.

As we move through a transition year in the real estate market that is expected to cool off the seller’s market, we expect platforms like kvCORE to play a more significant role in helping brokerages create efficiencies and helping agents grow their client relationships for maximum repeat and referral business. The effort to find and nurture home buyers has not been a consideration for the past few years. Companies who focus on onboarding buyers into solutions like kvCORE today will be poised to gain market share in a slowing housing market.

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