Primary marketE-Marketing Leaders
Three leading brokers say they never had a problem choosing which services to buy, nor in getting agents to take advantage of them. What these brokers have in common is that each has made significant material investments in marketing technologies, and believes wholeheartedly that the broker should be in control of the listings.
Their collective suggestion to brokers is to put the agent first and offer a killer application to help agents market themselves better to consumers.
J. Lennox Scott, John L. Scott Realtors
Killer apps - wireless e-mail/cell phones, individual Web addresses for every listing
Key phrase - real time information
One of the early proponents of broker reciprocity, (shared Internet listings by broker cooperation,) J. Lennox Scott, president of John L. Scott Realtors, says that developing Internet strategies is easier when you keep two things in mind - what is going to help agents deliver better service and what will give a better experience for consumers.
Scott believes that listings should be local and has discouraged cooperation with the national listings sites. "We set up our network five years ago so that agents could set up listings at home," explains Scott. "They get the marketing web address (a dedicated Web page and URL, web address for every listing) to use in their marketing."
The strategy has paid off, says Scott, whose agency gets over 375,000 unique visitors, and over 30 million "hits" per month. "We do more marketing than anyone in the nations, and focus on our agents," says Scott. "And in our area, 57 percent of buyers come to our site, while only 12 percent go to Realtor.com."
Scott puts over $1 million a year into Internet strategies, he says, including staffing an Internet manager, computer services manager, home services manager, and training and technology support. "We put Web addresses (URLs) on every listing, and we have the whole inventory from MLS, so you have real time marketing with photos and the web address in advertising."
Sums Scott, "The Internet is all about relationships. If you have the inventory, there is no need for the national portals. That"s perception over reality. Businesses are only going to be able to compete if they apply real-time marketing. Information, communication, relationships, and productivity gains all depend on real-time marketing."
Ed Krafchow, Prudential California Realty
Killer apps - WebTop, an Intranet system developed by PCR for its agents, eHomeSales
Key phrase - agent/client relationship
"It is becoming evident that that consumers are not ready or willing to walk through the maze of buying or selling a home without professional assistance, and agents are not about to roll over and give up their livelihood to a mouse," says Ed Krafchow, president of Prudential California Realty. "Thus, the playing field is becoming much more grounded in a blend between the traditional and online options."
There"s no doubt that the consumer is demanding faster, more efficient processes from agents and brokers, and greater control of information, acknowledges Krafchow. "This has caused proactive brokerages to invest in technology to accommodate growing expectations from both agents and their clients," he says.
"I call it my job as a broker to create a frictionless environment between agents and consumers," suggests Krafchow. "Technology sometimes interferes with that relationship. The tools of a cyber agent should keep them in direct touch with their clients so they know what the client is selecting and when and why they are changing their minds.
"Technology is filled with a rigor that only a systems person will follow. But that is not how clients work, so you have to have a client management system that is flexible, with the agent at the center."
Krafchow discloses that Prudential California Realty (PCR) has spent more than $3 million in technology advances in 2000 alone. He is particularly keen on the company"s proprietary agent WebTop, an Intranet system developed by PCR for agents, which enables them to conduct a myriad of activities online, from ordering listing materials, to communicating escrow status to all involved parties.
"The agents can select their business cards and order them online," explains Krafchow. They don"t order through headquarters and they come back from the printer wrong."
PCR was also the first company to embrace the eHomeSale, a proprietary platform developed in partnership with Homebid.com, www.homebid.com, and launched with Yahoo! Real Estate, www.yahoo.com, last year, resulting in over 900 registrants and $10 million in home sales in its first 10 days.
Like Scott, Krafchow is also not a fan of national listings services, particularly now that Homestore and Cendant"s Move.com have merged, he says. He funds a public Web site that allows consumers to conduct property searches, activate a Listing Watch, select an agent, check mortgage rates, and find information about buying, selling and owning a home online.
"And the pilot of our first six "Offices of the Future," which will retrofit traditional offices to be completely technologically advanced, so agents can conduct business via their laptops and cell phones efficiently and quickly," says Krafchow. "We have found these advances have made a huge difference in agent productivity, because let"s face it, a top producing agent actually spends very little time tethered to an office."
Gary Keller, Keller Williams Realty
Killer apps: front page lead capture tool for agents, MLS listings
Key phrase - business model - low margin, high volume or high margin, low volume
Not every brokerage has to keep up with the Jones" technology. But your need to do so should depend a lot on your business model and how much you want to control lead generation, says Gary Keller, co-founder of Keller-Williams franchise brokerages. According to Keller, there are three basic models for brokerages and the models should dictate how much to invest in technology:
Dependent - lower commissions to agents, higher marketing costs; high technology investment
Independent - higher commissions to agents, lower marketing costs; low technology investment
Interpendent - shared costs and revenues between agents and brokers; shared technology investment
"In the dependent model, the agent is dependent upon the broker for leads and most supplies," explains Keller. " So it stands to reason that a broker would be more willing to invest in Internet tools to enable agents to better serve customers. They are more likely to provide in-house solutions such as T1 lines, parallel servers to upload MLS listings daily, and pay IT personnel to be on staff.
"In the independent model, brokers are basically leasing space to agents," says Keller. "They aren"t going to do a big investment in advertising or technology, and are more likely to outsource training and support services to third-parties. In the interdependent model, you work it like a partnership where the individual brokerages are run by what the managers and agents agree they want to do."
To simplify where a brokerage may fit in and how it should position its technology purchases, Keller poses the question, "Are you a low margin, high volume business or a high margin, low volume business? There"s your answer."
In addition to his franchise duties, Keller owns two brokerages in the Austin, Texas area. Although Keller accepted stock options from Homestore which he later cashed in, he has had a change of heart about the national listings services. What flipped Keller"s switch was a seminar he attended put on by HomeAdvisor Technologies. "The speaker told us that the broker was no longer in control of the listing information," recalls Keller. "I asked him, if that"s true, why should he have control of it? He couldn"t answer my question. Then I knew I had to be the best source of information for the customer."
His response? Become the source of the information. "I pay the Austin Board about $3.500 a year to get the listings so that our agents will have all the listings in the area," says Keller. "Real estate is local and consumers should be coming to us to search for listings."
Where Keller Williams plans to take the lead is by using the brand to tee agents up to capture leads, something agents and brokers pay dearly for on most third-party sites. On the front page of the site, the company offers a Q & A lead capture feature that invites consumers who want to browse listings to ask questions. The lead is directed by zipcode. "All the Keller Williams offices are in a database which self-routes the lead to the office, at no fee," explains Keller. "Each office is free to set whatever lead distribution policy they want." See http://new.kw.com/ask-keller.html for more details.
"In future versions our
goal will be to try to figure out if there is an agent who might have
generated their interest in sending this request and self-routing it to that
agent," plans Keller. "thus eliminating the need to have an office policy when the system
can figure out who the agent was they were most interested in."