We all know the mantra, “Work smarter, not harder”. However sick of the expression you may be, as a professional in the real estate industry, can say that you actually consider this concept on a regular basis and actively practice it?
Real estate is hyper-competitive. According to the 2012 Economic Census, there are 86,004 real estate brokerage firms operating in the United States. This means you have competitors around every corner vying to overtake your market and your business. However, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is focussing on your competition. Successful brokers focus on determining their own strengths and figuring out how to build a solid foundation for their agents and clients. Here are some key facts that are moving forward-thinking brokerages in the right direction.
For large brokerages, cash and power drive growth. But for the single Realtor or small team, the improvement road can be rocky if you lack funds, knowledge, resources, and opportunities. You want to exploit strategies that will yield a high return with low risk and preferably with a marginal investment of time and money. Here are some simple growth strategies you should be implementing now.
If you haven’t heard, the acquisition baby of Trulia-then-Zillow, Market Leader, is for sale. But what does this really mean for real estate professionals, and especially Market Leader’s customers? I can’t claim to be unbiased in my view on the technology, but there are some clear, facts that are important for Market Leader customers and others around the industry to know.
Are you nurturing leads at the right time and in the right way? Here's what you should know about the journey your clients take when buying a home.
The leading provider of hyper-local school, demographic, and lifestyle data, Local Logic makes it easy for brokers and agents to help customers search by local qualities that matter most.
For Donny Samson, CEO of Samson Properties, kvCORE has been a game-changer. He wanted the best tool out there — and he wanted to offer it company-wide for free. He tells his agents, “I can't hit the home run for you, but I can give you as many times as bat as possible.” Here’s why Samson and his agents love kvCORE.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
Chris and Leigh Russell started Plum Tree Realty from scratch about seven-and-a-half years ago. After taking took some time to define what “being the best” meant for their firm and researching the many lead generation programs out there, they chose a platform they felt was "the best technology available." Now, from lead generation to recruiting, Russell has built his brokerage around the value proposition of getting leads to his agents.
The winning combination of technology plus culture sets Russell Real Estate Services apart. "The trust cultivated in our organization has led to a reciprocal tech relationship: Our agents have embraced our approach to consolidated technology, which has led to widespread adoption, and, consequently, unprecedented success." - Jeff Russell, Broker/Owner of Russell Real Estate Services
Find out how this brokerage struck gold with a well-thought-out tech strategy, a near flawless platform rollout and record numbers of agent adoption.
What tech really matters to agents, and what doesn’t? Invest wisely.
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?
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.
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.