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.

Mr. Vega has a fundamental belief about what success means in real estate. He uses the metaphor of a wheel to describe the key elements of growing his brokerage. For Vega, the key spokes in his wheel are technology, recruiting, and training. Vega’s view is that independent firms who become the hub of these key spokes will outperform franchise organizations every time. Vega explains, “You cannot outsource your recruiting, training, and technology to your franchise organization and expect to have good results in your company. Your agents will not adopt those tools; they will not actively participate in this training. You must earn the confidence of your agents by being the trusted source for these key spokes."

One of the ways he’s earned this trust is by aligning with an independent tech company, Inside Real Estate, to offer the technology, systems, and tools that he has personally researched and vetted, and completely believes in. “I tried the franchise path where you rent a brand and tools. That didn’t work for us,” says Vega.For his critical “technology” spoke, Canvas uses kvCORE, Inside Real Estate’s comprehensive platform that integrates easily with other solutions he uses and is customized to fit his unique business. “I really wanted a single platform for everything, but one that also gave us the flexibility to customize it into what we needed, and kvCORE was our answer,” says Vega. “With kvCORE, we have so much of our business integrated into one platform including the broker websites, marketing platform, intranet, CRM, email, calendar, tasks, action plans, and so much more.” In addition to empowering his teams and agents with all of the tools they need to be successful, the platform also builds upon agents’ trust by providing them with a personal, private database and independent lead gen tools.

kvCORE has also been at the center of Vega’s recruiting strategy. Since implementing the platform, Canvas Realty has solidified its leadership position in their market. Their massive growth, happy agents, and proven results help attract top agents and teams alike. Vega shared that “an intro video to our kvCORE technology platform is texted to the recruit when they are in our lobby for the interview, and there have been times when the agent preempts the interview and says they are ready to join before I even get started.”

The third important spoke is training. You get the impression from Vega that he has a training program that is tailored to every single one of his 800 agents. Vega tracks the usage of their technology tools on an agent by agent basis. Whenever an agent is failing to use the tools, they are on it. The spoke metaphor is also carried through the training. There is a wheel for managing and growing your business as an agent that includes lots of open houses, telephone calls to sphere, targeted email campaigns, buying leads, social media marketing, etc. “Our reporting allows us to visualize the activities of our agents and deliver prescriptive training to support any success tool that an agent is underutilizing,” says Vega.

No doubt, 2020 has proven to be an interesting year with COVID-19, but we feel very confident that Vega and his team at Canvas are perfectly positioned to weather this storm based on their fundamental philosophy to empower their agents with technology and training that everyone—from the broker and office staff to the teams and agents—fully buys into.

It is worth noting that Inside Real Estate provided financial relief to their clients in the form of a deferred payment program to help their customers through the crisis. This gesture shows what happens when you are aligned with a great partner.