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What Compass Is Planning in Your Market
By Tiana Baur
Chatbots and new tech are barreling towards the industry. Everything is moving to a cloud environment. And now, Compass is coming for your market share.
The CEO of Compass, Robert Reffkin, recently announced a 2020 by 2020 plan to the company. What does that mean, you ask? A plan to expand into 10 new markets in the U.S. by 2020, and to grab 20 percent of the market share in the 20 largest U.S. cities. Casual, right? The cities they’re expanding to are: Seattle, San Diego, Phoenix, Dallas, Austin, Houston, Atlanta, Charlotte, Philadelphia, and Chicago.
Compass has now raised a whopping $325 million in capital and their success feels imminent, especially since they’re already the #4 largest brokerage in NYC, #3 in DC, and #2 in Cambridge. Not only that, but their agent count is up 500% over the past two years, now at 2,000 agents and gaining more traction every day. They have the capital to buy agents with massive signing bonuses and the funds to invest in an entirely new CRM and targeted marketing tools designed just for their agents. By the end of this year, they are projected to do 16,000 transactions, $14 billion in sales volume and $350 million in revenue, annually.
An obvious question is: Will they have a durable and lasting impact? What happens to aggressive brokerages, such as Compass, when the value proposition of a big signing bonus isn’t attractive enough for agents to make the move? Meaning, what if their culture doesn’t align with what an agent wants out of their brokerage? Pockets are deep, but might never be deep enough for the many that love the brokerage they currently call home.
In the shadow of Compass’s other recent announcement that they’re also considering an IPO, lies a sad-looking Redfin, whose stock dropped over 5% that day. The waters are rough out there right now and it’s obvious many brokerages won’t make it out of the impending storm. The reality is, few are safe. Fewer are “too big to fail.” When tech and industry are changing at such a rapid rate, it’s impossible to predict the future of winners and losers. Whether Compass is successful or becomes another Redfin, remains to be seen.
Looking to future-proof your brokerage for these massive industry changes? This is a good starting point. An open platform allows your brokerage to combat the massive technology budget Compass has with your very own unique suite of tools, in an affordable way. 2018 is right around the corner – start it off on the right foot.
Introducing: CallAction, Now Available in the Moxi Cloud
By Tiana Baur
We recently added another best-in-class tool to the Moxi Cloud! CallAction instantly responds, engages, and tracks all inbound leads for agents. With CallAction, agents never have to miss another call or email lead ever again.
CallAction is the only marketing automation service that can be used with your offline or online lead generation efforts to respond to inquiries from phone calls, emails and texts. Their powerful integrations bridge the gap between agents’ top of the funnel lead generation and their existing lead nurturing CRM systems for increased productivity.
Here is how it works:
Answer every call
Agents no longer need to worry about rushing to the phone or nervously watching a call come in during a meeting they can’t step out of. With CallAction, agents can ensure they keep ALL of their inbound leads engaged with automated responses through SMS and email.
Building agent databases
Every inbound call is saved to a secure cloud-hosted database and appended in real-time with caller information aggregated from the world’s largest consumer profile databases. It is also passed into Moxi Engage, so the leads go directly into their sales flow. From there, they can nurture the lead and show their new prospect why they are the best in the business.
Track every inbound call
Agents can instantly create a local or toll-free phone number for each of their marketing channels to automatically track every inbound call that is seamlessly routed to their phone.
“50% of buyers choose the vendor or service that responds first, according to the InsideSales.com 2014 Lead Response Report,” mentioned Mike McHenry, VP of Channels and Partnerships at MoxiWorks. “In a perfect world, every call is answered right away, the first time a lead calls an agent. But with CallAction, all missed calls are automatically responded to with CallAction’s SMS responses to guarantee the lead stays engaged. All the responses are fully customizable so the agent can keep their own voice and style.”
We’re super excited to have this company in the Moxi Cloud! When we say we only let the best-in-class tools and services into the Moxi Cloud, we mean it.
For more information on CallAction, visit callaction.co.
Relatability: A Winning Strategy for Staying Fresh
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE “Our focus is to form strategic partnerships with other cutting-edge companies that bring a dynamic arsenal of resources to our agents, and, in turn, our clients. So far in 2017, we’ve enhanced our agent dashboard to include SkySlope, Moxi Works, MoveEasy, Proxio and Spacio. And there’s more to come.”
How Going Digital Is Making Agents More Money
By Tiana Baur
What if we told you that you could be saving over $4,000 per year by going digital?
By going digital, we mean throwing out that shoebox you keep your receipts in and making it your New Year’s resolution to stick to digital when it comes to taxes. Your pocket will thank you for it and this is why.
Most agents have some sort of mile tracking app on their phones. You use it somedays, you don’t even know if it’s tracking the miles properly on others, but it’s an easy and realistic way to take advantage of write offs for your taxes. Sound familiar? We’re telling you point blank: that’s just the tip of the iceberg for business write offs and your wallet is suffering from not being proactive about all the others. It’s time to go digital.
To get specific, QuickBooks Self-Employed users find on average $4,340 in tax savings per year. When you first look at that number, it might seem big or small depending on how many sides you’re doing a year, but let’s break it down and make it a bit more tangible. That’s 87 bouquets you could be sending your clients, 44 bottles of champagne you could be toasting their new home to, 20 of these Notion home monitoring systems, four new iPhone X cell phones, or this BMW Active Hybrid e-Bike – crazy, right?! Basically, what we’re saying is, that’s a LOT of money you’re missing out on. 
Sure, the QuickBooks Self-Employed app tracks your miles, but it ALSO helps you track deductions for meals and fun, prompting you to take a quick pic of your receipt and uploading it so you can throw it away and never think about that old shoebox ever again. Really, how many coffees, meals and happy hours do you buy your clients and prospects each week? We’re guessing the number is pretty high up there. QBSE also helps you track write offs for marketing and ad spend, home office or space, desk fees, those big purchases like furniture and laptops, fees and licenses, travel and education, and tools and services. That’s a long list.
Up to this point you’ve been haphazardly trying to save paper receipts and remember where you drove when. Life as an independent contractor is stressful enough. Real estate agents hardly ever even get a weekend in! By going digital with QuickBooks Self-Employed, it will help bring a little sanity back to daily life and more money back into your business.
Start your New Year’s resolution early this year – your 2018 self will thank you for it!
This Brokerage Does Onboarding the Right Way
By Tiana Baur
Some brokerages just get it. They embrace change. They prepare; they future-proof their brokerage. And they totally rock agent onboarding. William Raveis is a shining example of just that.
William Raveis was founded in 1974, and is the No. 1 family-owned real estate company in the Northeast, and No. 9 real estate company in the country, according to REAL trends. They have 120 offices in nine states, with 4,000 agents that account for $9 billion in sales volume annually.
We recently held a webinar with RE Technology and were lucky to have a special guest, Bill Gamelli, COO at William Raveis. We asked him what drove him to MoxiWorks and he answered by saying, “When we started looking at MoxiWorks, one of the things that got me really excited and got my team really excited, was the simplicity and the open platform that MoxiWorks provided as well.” He went on to say, “The simplicity and the focus on SOI were things that were really, really important to us. And increasing the agents’ productivity.”
From our end, Daniel Bailey, Senior Account Manager at MoxiWorks, added, “The Moxi rollout at Raveis was by far one of the best rollouts I’ve participated in. The team followed the success recipe in our engagement cookbook to a tee, but really made it their own. They went the extra mile to make sure agents were prepped for launch by getting started with engage materials to build excitement though constant communication. They understood agents need extra help adopting new technology, so the rollout team lead by the COO himself visited every office in their org to make sure agents were trained and ready to go! Not only that, they invested in other tech to help agents get their databases into Engage without the headache.”
The Raveis launch was carefully coordinated on both ends, but what made it so smooth, was their step-by-step training program. Brokerages can give their agents tools, but if they don’t train them, the adoption rate is low and the ROI is nonexistent. We’re lucky at MoxiWorks to have clients like Raveis that understand the importance of onboarding their agents the right way.
So, did the simplicity factor of Moxi and training agents pay off? Bill said, “Getting agents to understand the power and simplicity of what MoxiWorks does, creates an adoption rate that far surpasses our expectations. As of September, we had already reached our adoption rate that we had hoped for by year end. The simplicity factor is critically important.”
Raveis also understands the importance of keeping up with technology and embracing technology that has an open platform with an API that allows the pieces of their ecosystem to share data with one another. Bill said, “When you talk about the future, much of what we’re doing now is to look at how we can integrate other technologies as well. Let’s face it, we have suffered in this industry with disbarred data sets.”
If you’d like to hear more about William Raveis and their MoxiWorks onboarding journey, you can watch the recorded webinar below.
How to Implement Naming and Folder Architectures at Your Brokerage
By Andrew E.
If you handle marketing or create content for your brokerage, have we got a treat for you. Incorporating a folder architecture and file naming convention for your brokerage’s data management system can do wonders for boosting brokerage efficiency and agent productivity.
Setting up a standardized way of naming and finding all brokerage assets and collateral can make your brokerage look – and act – like a well-oiled machine. Plus, there’s an added benefit: tears of joy and applause from all your colleagues. This simple act can have far reaching effects top-down and back again.
At MoxiWorks, we utilize a naming convention and folder architecture derived from Platform as a Service (PaaS) best practices. Here is a sneak peek into how we use folders across a number of our teams and help to keep everyone sane.
Parent-level (team) Folders
In our ecosystem, there are platform components where teams utilize common tools. To help each easily distinguish “where to play,” we start with parent or “team-level” folders.
- Admin
- Marketing
- Account Management
- Sales
- Relocation Services
- Finance
- (z)Testing
- (z)Training
By calling out these folders initially, each team can easily navigate to their pertinent place of truth.
Child-level Folders
Child folders are those that live within the parent or team-level folders. As a best practice in the marketing team, we name child-level folders to align with either asset or marketing channel type.
Marketing (Parent Folder)
Child Folders
- Calendar: Launch dates for campaigns and programs with parents, vendors, internal, etc.
- Campaigns: Years, type/channel
- Content: Images, videos, collateral like case studies, infographics, white papers, Bit.ly links, etc.
- Emails: Sent emails, draft emails, and email templates
- Forms
- Landing Pages
- Search Marketing: PPC, Google, Bing, Paid Social Etc.
- Social Media: Content media posts, copy, mockups, etc.
Grandchild and Great Grandchild Folders
I know what you are thinking right now: “you guys have a lot of folders!” Yes, we do, but it keeps us extremely organized and our productivity up!
Grandchild folders nest under the child folders. An example would look like this:
Marketing (Parent)
- Campaigns (Child)
- 2015 (Grandchild)
- 2016 (Grandchild)
- 2017 (Grandchild)
- 2018 (Grandchild)
- Advertising (Great Grandchild)
- Blog (Great Grand Grandchild)
- Direct Mail (Great Grandchild)
- Email (Great Grandchild)
- Public Relations (Great Grandchild)
- Seminars/Trade Shows (Great Grandchild)
- Social Media (Great Grandchild)
We utilize channel at the great grandchild level to quickly navigate between past and present for easier benchmarking and reference of initiatives Year-over-Year.
Naming Conventions for Assets and Collateral
Just like your folders have a naming structure and architecture, so should your files. First, you should define which types of files need naming. For marketing assets, here are some suggestions:
- Header: Email headers images
- Footer: Email footers images
- Content: (White papers, case studies, flyers, onesheets, etc.)
- Social Icon: Images for your social media channels
- Logo: Brokerage and partner logos
- Ad: Digital advertisements for PPC or paid social
Here are some working examples how you might be able to customize naming for your own brokerage:
[File Type] [Purpose or Name] [Intended Audience] (where applicable)
Header – 2018 Market Trends Webinar – Real Estate Agents.png
Content – Brokerage Communication Success Guide – CMOs.pdf
Content – Agent Success White Paper – Agents.pdf
Logo – 2017 Your Brokerage Here – Large – New Prospects.png
No two brokerages or teams are alike, so, what works for you may not work for someone else. So, figure out what best aligns within your own organization.
How to Compete Now That Marketing Has Gone One-To-One
By Andrew Eberting
Fact: The average person is exposed to as many as 5,000 ads per day (Source: Media Dynamics, Inc.). The ability to cut through the noise and compete for people’s attention is growing more precious with each passing minute.
Blanket, unimaginative marketing efforts like sending out a yearly calendar isn’t enough nowadays and likely isn’t moving the needle or making your brand standout as a real estate agent. Alternatively, to put it another way: marketing like this today is the equivalent of the old Publishers Clearing House mailers or getting yet another invite to Play Candy Crush – people tune it out.
If you are still marketing like this today, then you are losing potential clients and money with each calendar you send out. Utilize these three techniques to revamp your marketing and start branding yourself as someone potential prospects will want to work with vs. wanting to avoid.
One-to-One Marketing
Personalizing your marketing is the new Marketing 101, or, as it is more commonly referred to, one-to-one marketing. Simply speaking, each marketing touch you put out to the market should have a personal or targeted element to it.
Facebook Ads
With more than 2 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the standard for where many of us go to catch up with news, friends, and share moments of our lives. Placing online advertisements on Facebook then only makes sense, as this is where all the eyeballs are.
Let’s say you won a new listing (yay!) and you want to promote this to people in your area. By creating a new listing advertisement for your client via Facebook, you can promote your new listing to people using criteria like:
- Geographic radius
- Income
- Age range
Why this is important: 93% of buying decisions are now influenced by Social Media.
(Source: Erik Qualman, Socialnomics)
These things can help to optimize your Facebook ad and get it in front of the types of individuals who are most likely to be interested in your new listing. This helps you spend your marketing dollars more effectively while making your client happy. Moxi Works now offers a native Facebook tool to help you jumpstart your marketing efforts; you can check it out here.
Direct Mail That Actually Works
Remember that calendar of yours I mentioned earlier? Well, it isn’t personable. However, as we head towards the holiday season, this is the perfect opportunity to share something personable from you to your past clients. Run down to Kinkos and put your favorite cookie, pie or other holiday dessert recipe onto a set of postcards along with a small description of why it is your favorite. It is okay to pull the curtain back a little bit, sincerity and authenticity go a long way. Mailing something like this out to clients is more memorable and thoughtful than a calendar ever will be.
Bonus tip: If you really want to make a lasting impression, measure out some of the dry ingredients in the recipe, put them in mailable bags or packaging, and also include that with the recipe card.
Join Nextdoor
Confession: I am grossly addicted to Nextdoor, a social media network specific to the neighborhood you live. I have been able to network with people in my immediate and surrounding neighborhoods to find folks that are great gardeners, woodworkers, mechanics, and the list goes on. I cannot begin to quantify the number of posts from my neighbors asking for recommendations on a landscaper, painter, real estate agent, or someone else that can help them with something monetarily associated with the upkeep or value of their home. Whether it is the office or the neighborhood, every group needs a go-to person that specializes in something – why can’t the real estate pro in your neighborhood be you?
When it comes to one-to-one marketing, these tips, and techniques only scratch the surface, there is so much more out there that you can do.
Want to know how you can take your one-to-one marketing efforts even further? Check out this article from our August edition of Mile 62 magazine for more personalized marketing strategies that you can implement in your own market.
Why Agents Are Loving Advertise Your Listing
By Tiana Baur
Advertise Your Listing is a newly launched Facebook Ad tool from MoxiWorks that allows agents who just won a listing to create a Facebook ad for said listing with ease. By ease, we mean in three steps and typically in less than five minutes. Advertise Your Listing helps you impress your clients, stay competitive, win more business, and generate more repeat and referral business.
Advertise Your Listing also sends reports directly to your clients. These reports are automatic and help in showcasing you as the trusted advisors you are, without taking up more hours in the day. The best part? Agents don’t need a Facebook Page to run ads. Tie your business page or keep your personal, personal. Either way you can use Advertise Your Listing and win more listing presentations, prove value to your client, and make yourself visible to your farm.
Here’s a quick list of some of the many reasons Advertise Your Listing can up your marketing game:
- It helps you win listings by showing potential sellers how you’ll be promoting their home
- Demonstrates to potential sellers your digital savviness
- Can automatically send a report to your seller showing how many people have seen the ad for their home
- By increasing client satisfaction, you earn more repeat and referral business
- Makes you visible in the neighborhood, potentially generating leads for you
- Each ad is typically seen by thousands of people
- Shows the people in your area you have active listings
- Proves to your seller you are working hard for them to earn your commission
- By showing past ad campaign performances in your listing presentation, you can demonstrate that you can promote their home to thousands of people
- The ads include your Facebook business page, potentially driving many people to your page
We’ve been hearing feedback from agents and thought we’d share one of our favorites from Frankie Hagan, a stellar agent based out of the Fonville Morisey (a Long & Foster Company) office in Raleigh, North Carolina. Here’s what he had to say about it:
Agents love Advertise Your Listing because it gets more eyes on their listings, positions them as marketing pros, and allows them to spend more time on doing what they do best: sell.
You can now start reaching more of the 2 billion people on Facebook (that’s more people than the population of China by the way) and impress your clients at the same time right from the Moxi account you already have. Showcasing listings on Facebook will make you look like a digital marketing superstar and add to the reasons why you deserve more repeat and referral business. Start today.
Have you heard about our Halloween Promo? Today, October 31, is your LAST chance to get 25% off and enter to win the new iPhone X! Each time you choose to advertise your listings using this tool, you’re entered to win. Click here to start.
Everyone Is Moving to The Cloud
By Andrew E.
Fact: 70% of U.S. organizations are now utilizing cloud technology to run at least one application of their businesses. The growth of cloud technology adoption is on the rise as the business benefits have proven to be worth their weight in gold regarding profitability and efficiency standards.
Gone are the days of investing heavily in never ending hardware, and with good reason. The infrastructure of old limited growth of organizations in several key areas that we all have come to demand from our “on-the-go” lifestyles. Vendors such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Microsoft Azure are the leaders in cloud computing space that run backend of many of businesses today. While each company offers their own competitive advantages for cloud technology, they all offer standardized benefits regardless of industry, size, or sophistication.
Accessibility
Like being able to get an email or watch Netflix on your phone, tablet, or watch from nearly anywhere in the world? Enter the cloud. The ability to get anything at any time while anywhere regardless of device used is by far the most tangible benefit each of us utilize of cloud computing each day.
Customization
Remember AOL CDs? Well, gone are the days of needing a new disc to update applications or programs in order to have the most current version for your business operations. The Cloud provides scalability at lightning speed to meet your brokerage’s everchanging needs. This gives you the power to keep yours happy with the latest and greatest tools while sunsetting those that have fallen out of favor.
Affordability
With the burden of data transfer, storage, and throughput now shifted online, the need for fixed computing servers or other hardware and the demand of routinely updating them drastically decreases the technology costs required to stay competitive.
Security
Another advantage of the cloud is capitalizing on the nonstop landscape of data safety and encryption advances. Along the same lines of affordability, cloud-based utilization by organizations keeps them in stride with how to best protect their digital currency – their data – vs. being landlocked to onsite systems that require dedicated personnel bandwidth to oversee and maintain a high level of both technical hardware operating efficiency but also protection of those systems.
With so many benefits it can be naive to think that migrating to cloud is an easy task to administer. The Cloud just like anything else can be challenging to get right unless the correct systems are in place to connect everything together.
Open Platform to the Rescue – Cloud Migration
Like clockwork every year heading into the holiday season, it seems like the amount of lights and other powered decorations we need to plug into a power strip seems to grow. Enter Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) or, simply put, an open platform.
Think of all your different brokerage data sources, vendor apps, etc. as all those holiday lights, inflatable snow globes, and everything else you put up in front of the house each year. An open platform, or, brokerage “power strip”, enables you to plug all of those different things together into one common place so that they all work together at the same time. The Moxi Cloud is that power strip.
As an open platform, the Moxi Cloud empowers brokerages to capitalize on the many benefits of the cloud in one common place without all the headache of hooking everything up by itself with no ability to get everything working together. Quite the opposite, utilizing our open platform permits you to turn on and off parts of those “decorations” or swap them out for something else entirely if you feel like it. Your brokerage, your business, your way.
Want to learn more about how an open platform can save you money while also growing your profits? Click here to watch the video.
Partner Spotlight: iTourMedia’s New Social Boost
One of our fabulous partners has some new exciting features you have to see! iTour’s Social Boost allows agents to get the maximum exposure to social audiences, helping take their online game to a whole new level. Here is how it works:
1. Automate the process of uploading listings to your office Facebook account.
2. Expand the exposure for your listings automatically, without agent involvement.
3. Reduce the time you spend dealing with Facebook posting and boosting.
4. Create beautiful video posts in seconds that auto-play and engage the audience.
5. Know that your listings are receiving maximum exposure and you are benefiting from upcoming BoostBucks for social marketing credits.
Plus, with Social Boost, you can…
- Access via an office dashboard account (web/mobile)
- Manual Social Boost button for each office listing
- Connect your office Facebook page / Business Facebook Account
- Push, Push + Boost, Boost available for all office listings to an office FB page
- Push automation through the Social Boost scheduler
- Uses the clients’ Business Facebook Ad account
- 100% of all Ad $ goes toward the Facebook advertising – no hidden fees
- Audience targeting customization through Ad Settings
iTour prides themselves on creating tools that truly make a difference, and Social Boost is no exception. One of the many reasons why they’re a best-in-class tool on the Moxi Cloud open platform!
