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Turbocharging Agent Productivity to Increase Profits
How does agent productivity affect your bottom line? It seems obvious that if your staff is more efficient, the business will be more profitable. Yet, agent productivity is rarely a main consideration when big decisions are being made for a brokerage, such as which technology solutions to adopt.
Windermere Real Estate has experienced this correlation first-hand. For far too long, they suffered from ‘shiny tool syndrome’ which was disruptive, inefficient, and caused a lack of cohesion across their organization. When the organization shifted to focus on a sphere selling methodology and put a fully integrated, flexible open platform in place, things changed. Five years ago, Windermere did approximately 60,000 transactions with 6,000 agents. Last year, they handled 83,000 transactions with 6,500 agents.
So… focusing on agent productivity and seeing the average agent increase their annual sides from 10 to 12.8? Not bad for your brokerage profits and growth, but how do you get there? It can be difficult to track the ROI of productivity, so we decided to break down how agent productivity and brokerage profits are interconnected.
Agents can focus on the things that matter
What happens when effective productivity tools are in place is that people have the ability to rely on those tools for the things that make them unproductive. Traditionally, agents are juggling hundreds of little tasks at a given time, trying to maintain relationships with their clients post-sale, trying desperately to acquire new leads, planning open houses and completing transactions, and much, much more. The home sale process has a lot of moving parts, so when a defined process is in place, it relieves the agent from unnecessary stress. Agents spend less time on busy work such as data entry, transaction management, managing their schedule, and client research, and more time developing relationships and closing deals.
Revenue increases
Brokerages that have adopted the sphere methodology understand the importance of building strong long-term relationships. Agents need the unique ability to be able to nurture relationships with clients over a long-term period of time to stay relevant in between home sales and gain referrals. With the right systems in place that focus on productively nurturing these relationships, agents can maintain routine touchpoints with their clients in the long-run. What does this result in? High quality referral leads, repeat clients, and easy sales.
Agent recruiting and retention improves
We all know that turnover is expensive. Agents are quick to make the switch from one brokerage to another given the right reason. Work/life balance is a priority for agents, which means productivity is key. The more productive agents are, the better balanced their life is, and the more money they’re making. Providing tools that allow your agents to reach a balanced, lucrative workflow will, in turn, improve your brokerage profitability. Take a manager dashboard, for example. Agents feel more supported, because managers have a level of visibility and become aware of coaching opportunities as they arise rather than after the fact. When agents are used to using a system that makes their business operate more smoothly, they’re less likely to leave. Happy agents make successful brokerages.
As a productivity tool provider, we live and breathe this stuff. Our goal with the Moxi Cloud is to improve margins for brokerages by leveraging technology.
So, what should you do? Take a step back and look at your business critically. Ask yourself what the three major pain points are for your brokerage right now and think about whether they’re linked to productivity and, if so, how brokerage profits might be getting affected.
Providing Best-in-Class to Your Agents
Agents today have more options than ever of which brokerage they can take “their talents” to. The ability to attract, recruit, and retain top talent is more crucial than ever if your brokerage is going to dominate the competition in your market. What measures are you taking to ensure your business is the “it” place to work?
If it has been awhile since you reviewed your brokerage resources for agents, perhaps it is time to take an internal audit and reassess your value proposition. Questions to consider:
- Why would agents want to work here?
- What do I offer agents that the competition does not?
- How do I help agents be more productive and focused on selling?
If these answers are not immediately coming to you, chances are there is something dated with your brokerage process. To get back on track think two words: open platform.
An open real estate platform gives you the power to customize your brokerage to fit your brand and business needs. An open platform works like this: pick and choose, or, “plug and play” from a wide range of options to provide the types of solutions that best fit your needs. Just like a power strip, you can connect the things you want at your brokerage, and not the other stuff.
Competitive Advantage #1 of an Open Platform: Customization. Tools and services come and go all the time. With an open platform, choose the right combination of CRM, CMA, Leads Management, Print, Intranet, etc. that works best for you and your agents. In other words, keep the products that are used most plugged and sunset or unplug those that have fallen out of favor. The ability to customize your platform as needed empowers you to continuously providing best-in-class to your agents.
Competitive Advantage #2 of an Open Platform: Continuity. The power of having all of your tools plugged in and able to talk to one another in real-time should not be underestimated. If your agents know that their listing information will be shared and viewable from their CMA, to the CRM, and even to digital advertising solutions like Facebook advertisements, how much more productive does that make your agent’s time?
Competitive Advantage #3 of an Open Platform: Your Data. Why is data important? Think of brokerage data like digital currency; the more you have, the richer the intelligence and value proposition of your brokerage. If you can articulate both historical and current information data across property, brokerage, agent and consumers across all levels of your brokerage, the ability to identify new areas of business opportunity can be yours for the taking. Seriously.
Need help in determining your current brokerage proposition to agents? The first place to start: figure out which type of brokerage platform do you have.
Download this handy checklist to determine which type of platform you currently have.
Why You Should Be Concerned About the Redfin IPO
York Baur – CEO, Moxi Works
Redfin went public last week, raising well over $100M at a valuation of $1.5B. That’s what all the media is focused on, but what does it mean to you the brokerage owner?
The bad news is that you should be concerned. Redfin has deep pockets, deep technology, and now has access to the public markets to raise more capital as needed to grow further. They invest tens of millions of dollars in their technology annually, have a great website, and spend lots of time and money driving traffic to it. Like it or not, they’ll be a factor, and they’re going to put pressure on you to deliver better technology and a slicker experience for both your agents and their consumers.
The good news is that you have everything you need available to you to compete successfully. How can I be so sure? Because Seattle-based Windermere Real Estate has had Redfin operating in its home market of Seattle for 12 years with $200M of capital, and despite all the hype, tech and money, Redfin still has only 2.6% market share compared to Windermere’s 21%. Even more important, Windermere did 38% more transactions last year than 5 years ago in the tightest inventory market we’ve seen in a long time.
How can Windermere continue to dominate in the face of Redfin? And Zillow for that matter (also based in Seattle’s tech-centric market), supposedly siphoning away business by selling leads to the highest bidder? And how can you do what they’re doing? The answer is:
- Continue to focus on agent’s sphere of influence – the people that already know, like, and trust their agents. Sound obvious? It is, but I’ll bet you’re not doing it enough. We talk to brokerages across the country every day who are distracted by chasing a lead generation battle that they can’t win. How are you seriously going to compete with the billions of dollars of capital that Redfin, Zillow, and Realtor.com spend every year driving consumers to their sites? You can’t. Period. Lead gen will continue to be a small piece of your business, but that’s it – a small piece. The biggest piece of your business is the core business, which is transactions coming from consumers an agent already has a trust relationship with.
- Quit focusing on buyer leads. Every realtor and broker wants a seller, not a buyer if they have the choice. Redfin generates buyer leads. Zillow generates buyer leads. What’s the overwhelming source of seller leads? It’s an agent’s sphere. Control the inventory in your market by concentrating agents on their sphere, and you make money. There are only around five million homes transacted every year no matter how many buyer leads are generated – don’t you want to control the seller side of that equation?
- Control and centralize your data. Windermere decided years ago to put an open platform in place. It’s like a power strip where they can plug in all their agent tools and have them work together. How? By putting all their property data, agent and brokerage data, and consumer data in one place. Windermere currently has over 2.6M consumer names in that platform, allowing agents and the brokerage to market to those consumers to generate listings, using dozens of tools in various markets to do so. Do you have a centralized database of your agent’s contacts? What are you doing to help them stay in front of their sphere of influence?
- Quit creating islands of data and technology. Windermere has taken the platform concept to heart, and has solved the problems of tools that don’t work together, redundant data entry, and not being able to get a comprehensive view of their business. A technology platform allows them to save millions of dollars annually in office staff time, custom software development, and management overhead. This is in sharp contrast to most brokers, who don’t have a technology strategy. They buy the latest shiny technology object, and don’t even ask the question of how it works with the other technology they have now or might use in the future. Agents are demanding a better experience, and that means not having to start over from scratch with every new tool you provide them, upload their database for the 17th time, or having to rekey data.
- Training, coaching and sales discipline. Redfin has made much out of the fact that they hire agents and support staff as full-time employees, not contractors. But that’s not the big difference – we hire contractors in the tech world all the time, and they contribute just as much as our employees do. So what’s the difference? It’s not the person, it’s how they’re trained, coached, and held to a standard of how to do business. That means having a training program, providing good coaching (which means training your coaches), and having a technology (specifically a CRM system) that reinforces the sales discipline every day as agents do business. Windermere has trained over two-thirds of their agents in the Windermere sales discipline (heavily influenced by Larry Kendall’s Ninja Selling), puts an emphasis on managers doing agent coaching, and has built their discipline into their CRM to provide ongoing reinforcement.
With Redfin beating its chest on Wall Street, you need a response for your agents and your consumers – now. Do nothing and you’ll lose agents, because they won’t tolerate inaction. And don’t forget the Millennial agent who isn’t just comfortable with tech, they demand it as a necessary tool for doing business. But despite all the hype and money spent, Windermere did eight times as many transactions in the greater Seattle market last year than Redfin did. With performance like that, we’d all be well served to look at what they’re doing right.
Find out more about brokerage open platforms and how they work by clicking here.
Use Automation to Stay Connected with Clients
Day-to-day life for a real estate agent is hectic to say the very least. Work/life balance is a hard thing to come by when you decide to plunge into the world of real estate and start your own sphere-based business. Having to juggle clients, leads, business growth, family, friends, and often children, means real estate agents could use a few more minutes in the day, everyday. Agent marketing automation can get those minutes back. Here are some easy ways to go about using agent marketing automation.
Marketing automation comes in various shapes and sizes. It can be something as simple as planning and scheduling out your social posts for the week or a monthly postcard you pre-planned at the beginning of the season or year. But wait, it can be even simpler. You can click a button that allows you to stay in flow with all of your clients and leads every month. Yes, all you have to do hit the (easy) button one time, and your clients are forever in flow.
Neighborhood News
Do you use Moxi Engage CRM? Then you’re in luck. Neighborhood News sends automated market snapshots and overviews, personalized for each subscribed contact in an agent’s Moxi Engage account. These monthly emails keep your sphere up-to-date on market happenings in their neck of the woods – or wherever they’d like updates for. Clients can even change the area they get each month by putting in a new zip code. You can even see when they make these changes as well. #Winning.
Just Listed/Just Sold
Gently let your sphere and prospects know when you list and sell. Just-Listed & Just-Sold is another Moxi Engage feature that automates notifications to select members of your sphere to keep them in the loop. Automated email updates as you close transactions are a great way to keep your sphere (or those you want) in the loop. Manage all of the subscriptions directly in Moxi Engage CRM.
Besides saving extremely valuable time, these are some other key benefits of exercising agent marketing automation:
Be more effective. Having an email that your clients can expect and look forward to each month is much more effective than emailing them something random when you find the time to do so. Consider the market snapshot, you “checking in” with them, while providing them valuable content.
Know exactly when to call. If someone changes the zip code on their market emails, chances are they’re thinking of moving. Looks like it’s time to pick of the phone!
Automatically follow-up with leads. A study on the Harvard Business Review suggests that you’re 60x more likely to qualify a lead if you follow up within one hour, compared to waiting 24 hours. Set it up so all of your leads are instantly signed up to Neighborhood News.
Agent marketing automation is one of the easiest, most effective way for real estate agents to have a little extra time, with a lot less stress weighing them down.
How Much Do You Know About Facebook Ads?
With 1.94 billion active users on Facebook, it’s not hard to believe that 93% of buying decisions are influenced by social media. Facebook is only growing, which means more and more clients and leads will take action from things they see on their feeds. In fact, five new profiles are created every single minute. But how familiar are you with Facebook Ads or Facebook in general? Do you have a Facebook Business Page or have you stuck with your personal profile? How do you take advantage of the largest social network in the entire world?
Social media advertising has become a major player in real estate marketing, especially given how visual of an industry it is. Since the system was built for digital marketers, a significant number of agents find social media marketing intimidating and cumbersome, and therefore never get around to trying it. Although they are expected to be doing great and consistent social media marketing, rarely do they find time in their busy days to do so.
The other problem is that although many agents want to run ads, they can’t do so because ads can only be created from a Facebook business page, not a profile. Real estate is emotional. And very personal. People feel fear and excitement all at once when making such a large transaction. That’s why many agents use their personal profiles as opposed to pages for their business and why many brokerages advise their agents to do just that.
So, although smart agents desperately want to get in the Facebook Ads game, there’s a large barrier to entry and even when they have the time and gather the information needed, they might not feel like a Facebook Page is in the best interest of their clients.
This needed to be fixed. That’s why Moxi Works stepped in.
Advertise Your Listing Allows Agents to Create Facebook Ads in Under Five Minutes
Advertise Your Listing allows agents who just won a listing to create a Facebook ad for said listing with ease. The best part? Agents do not need a Facebook Page to run ads. Agents can keep their personal profiles to stay on that intimate level with clients or never have to create a profile at all. Agents can start reaching more of the 1.94 billion people on Facebook and impress their clients at the same time starting today!
Not only that, but Advertise Your Listing sends reports directly to their clients with the click of a button. These reports help in showcasing agents as the trusted advisors they are and doesn’t take up more hours of their day.
Find out more about Advertise Your Listing, other products, and the Moxi Work’s open platform known as the Moxi Cloud.
Moxi Works Adds iTOUR to Cloud Open Platform
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE Moxi Works has added yet another partner to their ever-growing open platform. iTOUR lets real estate agents create and edit videos, and through their partnership with Facebook, makes it easy for agents to reach their target audience.
Now with the help of iTOUR, agents can create visually compelling short videos and push them straight to Facebook all with one app. Perks like iTOUR’s optimized social schedule allows you to push and boost posts based on the most optimal time of day.
How to Standardize Your Materials With a Brokerage Intranet
Your brand is what represents you and sets you apart. It’s why agents join your efforts and why clients remain loyal.
Standardizing your marketing materials and sales tools is vital for building a valuable, recognizable brand. We know that brand consistency is key, but it can be a big challenge for growing brokerages. It’s difficult to effectively distribute updated materials and keep track of what collateral your agents and staff are using when everyone has their own set of materials saved on their individual hard drives. You end up losing control over your brand message and becomes nearly impossible to uphold standard, consistent branding. Those days are over. The companies with the highest brand value keep all of their up-to-date, relevant sales and marketing materials in one central intranet.
When your agents go out into the field, you want them equipped with the best, most updated branded collateral. Everyone in your organization should be talking the same talk, which means they should all be using the standardized version of your materials.
Keep one master version of all of your brand assets in one, central place. This library is an easily accessed hub for your agents to find whatever they need, whenever they need it. Set the necessary permissions for each document, ensuring the right people within your brokerage see the right info and can easily find what they need.
A brokerage intranet is the hub of it all, the central place where agents go for anything branded.
It’s where all managers and agents can find branded materials, see company updates, receive messages from brokerage leadership, and locate HR documents when necessary. It ensures your agents have access to the most updated, standard version of everything they need. Moxi Hub is the brokerage intranet that holds your agent roster, enables agents and staff to easily search for documents, presentations, and more, and hosts your document library as well as all of the tools and services available to your organization.
Having a central library of brand assets is a step in the right direction when it comes to standardizing your brokerage materials. Your leadership and marketing teams now have an effective way to provide your agents and staff with exactly what they need, and have a way in which to communicate it all. Not to mention, rebrands and brand updates become increasingly easier when leveraging a brokerage intranet. Updating your collateral in an effort to standardize materials becomes painless and simple.
New Service: Comprehensive Moving Concierge Now Available on Moxi Cloud
We’re happy to announce another service that has been added to our open platform ecosystem! MoveEasy is a comprehensive moving concierge service offered to clients directly from your website while saving you valuable time on researching post transaction tasks for them. Basically, MoveEasy does all the legwork while the agent can focus on creating happy memories for their client.
York Baur, CEO of Moxi Works said, “We’re delighted to have MoveEasy on the Moxi Cloud. They provide a unique solution to a common problem in the industry. It’s not an agent productivity app, but rather, a great app for agents to extend to their sphere of influence – keeping the agent in-flow and valued.”
How It Works
1. Help organize the move. Clients can organize their move with a personalized moving dashboard, assign tasks, and get weekly email reminders, with your branding included!
2. Assist in completing moving tasks. From updating utilities and changing their address, to finding storage options and shipping their car. They manage this all in the same place!
3. Connect them with your favorite vendors. Add all your preferred cleaners, painters, and other vendors that you know will get the job done. Clients can find them easily without having to call you. Everything is accessible from the unique dashboard.
4. Stay on top of your client’s mind throughout the entire move. With the entire service branded for you, it’s easy to stay top of mind, even after the transaction has closed.
Moxi Engage CRM Integration
MoveEasy is integrated into the Moxi Engage CRM. When a transaction moves from active to pending, MoveEasy pulls all the necessary details from Moxi Engage into the MoveEasy dashboard. The client can access the dashboard and keep up to date with everything going on and organize schedules for tasks. Everything done on the dashboard is sent back to Moxi Engage, within the activity section.
While the client can access everything on the MoveEasy dashboard, the agent can access everything they need right in their CRM.
Venkatesh Ganapathy, CEO of MoveEasy said, “We are extremely excited to be part of the Moxi Cloud. With so many different tools available for the real estate agents to help their clients, they have to constantly keep learning different systems. Our integration allows agents to continue using Moxi Engage CRM as they normally would, while MoveEasy operates in the background, guiding their clients through the stressful moving process.”
Discover more from MoveEasy and how it can keep your agents consistently top of mind, while saving them precious time when they need it most, by clicking here.
Using Neighborhood Recaps for Lead Generation
As a real estate agent, you’re always looking for lead generation tips that produce high-quality leads while remaining cost-effective. Staying relevant and reaching new audiences can be challenging. It’s easy to get caught up using the same methods, even if they aren’t working for you. So, why not mix it up and try something new?
Try this: Put together a thorough neighborhood recap and promote it via your go-to channels.
Create a neighborhood recap of the transactions in a given area over the past quarter or year to date. The best part? This can all be done quickly and easily for those agents using Moxi Present. All you need to do is create a new presentation, fill in the parameters, and the MLS data will auto-fill. Select a handful of home sales that happened within your chosen area and timeframe to give a market snapshot, comparing properties and showing trends. This ease is what makes neighborhood recaps possible as an efficient lead generation source.
Check out this neighborhood recap presentation to get an idea of what you could include for your local area.
Be strategic about the area you choose as this recap positions you as an expert. Homeowners appreciate the feeling that their realtor knows their aimed neighborhood like the back of their hand. It’s a token of comfort in a taxing process.
Once you’ve created a robust neighborhood recap, it’s time to promote it through multiple channels for lead generation. The presentation can serve as its own landing page using Moxi Present, or you can post it to a blog post. Then drive traffic to it through social media (both organic and paid), paid search ads, and email marketing. Different agents prefer different channels, so select which ones work for you and your audience. Find where your strengths are and where you generate leads most effectively, and leverage those channels with the valuable piece of content you’ve created. If you like more traditional marketing methods, you could also choose a local printer to print a handful of presentations onto fine paper and mail out hard copies.
If someone looking for a home in an area sees your neighborhood recap online, finds it valuable, and learns from it, you instantly become a trusted advisor. You are then someone who can guide them through a thoughtful, educated decision making process because you’ve already proven that you have the know-how and expertise that they need.
It’s a perfect scenario: they’ve been thinking about making a move, are entering a new stage in life, or have been chatting with their spouse about moving, you present the information they need to move the conversation forward. Who should they contact if they want more information? You, of course. So, you meet up with them to discuss the market, the neighborhood, and ultimately, the opportunity for you to find them their dream home.
Update: Moxi Present
We’re excited to announce that we’ve made some updates to Moxi Present, the presentation builder designed specifically for real estate agents. Moxi Present is unique in that it’s completely customizable and is integrated with the MLS, pulling property data directly into an agent’s presentation. It can be used to create any type of presentation, from CMAs, buyer presentations and open house presentations, to neighborhood tours and more.
This tool consistently earns high adoption rates, which is why making it available for all agents within client brokerages is of high importance to us. As of mid-December, we’ll be sun-setting the TouchCMA iPad app. Why? Because the web-based version of Moxi Present is completely responsive and even better. We’ve found it has a better user experience and better integrates with the other Moxi tools.
Don’t worry… the presentation builder you know and love isn’t going anywhere. In fact, it’s only improving.
If you currently have the app, it won’t be disrupted for the foreseeable future. The iPad app will still be available, but will no longer be updated or supported. Come December, the iPad app will no longer be available in the app store. This will inhibit any new downloads or updates, but will have no effect on existing installs.
For agents who currently use Moxi Present, they’ll still have the same Moxi Present tool, but only the web app version will be supported in the future. The tool is entirely responsive and can still be accessed on an iPad, but instead of having to download it through the App Store, agents can simply log in online.
A few months ago, we officially changed the name of TouchCMA to Moxi Present. The product didn’t change, it just started coming in better packaging. Now, we’re streamlining the tool even further. In order to continue the necessary support and updates, it makes the most sense to focus on continuing to optimize the web-based app to be used by agents on any device.
It’s no secret that we’re committed to integration. These are just a few steps we’re taking to simplify and enhance the user experience for agents – making them more productive and successful.
