Success Guide: Teams

Welcome to RE Technology's Success Guide for Teams. You will learn how to become THE expert in your market with industry-leading ideas and solutions. We have hand-picked our favorite tools proven to help real estate professionals grow their businesses. Download the FREE guide to learn how you can leverage online marketing in new and exciting ways to beat the competition!

Growing Your Team Business With Productivity Software

Operating a team is pretty similar to operating a brokerage. The advantage that teams have over brokers usually relates to having more influence over the activities of the team. Quite frankly, beyond compliance related activities, most brokers have little or no control over how agents operate.

Teams come in all shapes and sizes, but one shared commonality is a unified approach to how they operate and how they provide services to clients. For example, some top producing agents focus on listings, often carrying an inventory of 10 or more listings. At that rate, it is hard for the listing agent to also take on buyer clients. So, they create a team of buyer’s agents to respond to leads generated on their listings, both digital and from yard signs. The biggest concern by the listing agent is the effectiveness of buyer’s agents at converting those leads to grow the business.

Another key common element between these team solutions is buyer and seller lead tracking paired with powerful follow up actions that generate business. More than anything, these platform solutions offer the team leader the ability to empower team members with great follow up software while simultaneously evaluating the strengths of team members converting opportunities into business. Another prevalent feature of these platforms is a focus on lifetime relationships with every client in the database. With the entire team able to see what the last touch was with the customer and how they responded to it, this component creates continuity with client engagements, driving home future repeat business and referrals. For too long, real estate teams have primarily targeted new business generation while allowing existing customers to stray from insufficient relationship maintenance.

All of the tools in this year’s Teams Success Guide facilitate collaboration between you and your team, helping your customers receive the best possible service. These platforms are proven to help you stay organized. You will be able to run reports on the effectiveness of your team members and have visibility into their activities. Each of these companies invest in dedicated staff members who deliver awesome support resources, ensuring that your team maximizes their productivity when using these platforms. But remember, you must make sure that your team of agents and staff attend those trainings and maximize the features of whichever platform you choose.

LATEST TRENDS IN TEAM PLATFORMS

Website

Some team platforms develop excellent websites with a high focus on lead generation, content creation, and search engine optimization. Teams doing a lot of online digital advertising will need to look for websites that offer the ability to create lead generation pages – also called squeeze pages. Others recognize that a team website is like a business card. If you are not in love with the activities around online lead generation, having a fancy website is probably not that important to you.

Mobile Apps

Mobile apps have been an exciting growth area for team platforms over the years. The driving trend among these mobile apps has been less about developing branded mobile search apps that are in the Apple App and Google Play Stores, and more about delivering functionality that allows teams to access customer records on the fly, or to take a group approach to responding quickly to customer requests. If your team is mostly mobile, rather than office based, this may be a very important feature for you.

Contact Record Monitoring

One of the biggest areas of new development in software for teams has to do with reference data and client monitoring. Using artificial intelligence, the software can track activities across all of your client records. Using this data the software can, for example, tell you when there is a customer that you have not interacted with in the last year or suggest that you reach out to a customer who has been spending an insane amount of time looking at listings on your site. The goal of contact monitoring is to make sure that you stay connected to everyone in your database, and to focus on those customers who show the most activity in the process of executing a transaction. Some solutions even monitor Facebook and LinkedIn for the most recent posts made by your clients so you can check up on them from within your contact records.

Contacts, Calendar, Email Integration

Most business professionals lack time for administrative upkeep such as scheduling meetings or updating contact records in multiple places. An important feature in team software platforms is mobile phone integration. It allows an iPhone or Android device to connect to your CRM. If you get a new customer call on your phone, and you save that contact– your phone will then sync the contact record to the CRM in your team solution, so you do not need to re-enter it. Likewise, if a team member schedules a task or meeting for you – they can access your calendar for your availability and set that appointment so it displays on your phone’s calendar. If you are speaking to a tech supplier for your team, ask them about Google Sync, or Outlook Sync.

Reporting and Forecasting

One of the challenges to operating a team is to measure team productivity. These metrics fall into the realm of reporting and forecasting. Depending on the role of the team member, good reporting and forecasting can provide the team leader with data that shows how team members are using the system, the value of business they have in the pipeline, etc. Remember, when you are running a team, you need to think about it like you are running a business or running a brokerage. Productivity per team member is a key matrix that you need to track.

Dynamic Automation

The idea behind software has always been automation. In the past, automation in team software was pretty linear. Linear automation is when you schedule things to happen at a specific time in a specific order. On day one – do this, on day two, do that on day 5 do this other task, on their birthday do this, etc. Dynamic automation uses the intelligence of software to observe consumer actions and adjust the behavior accordingly. In tech speak, they use the term “if this, then that.” For example, let’s imagine that a past client comes to your website to read an article about home improvement, then starts looking at houses. Dynamic automation would bring this to your attention and save the search for that client without them needing to do anything. The software could then send them a follow up email the next day with the listings that they reviewed and ask if they have questions or would like to see any other homes. These auxiliary communications use machine learning or artificial intelligence to anticipate the needs of clients dynamically and automatically.

WHAT MAKES TECHNOLOGY RIGHT FOR TEAMS

When you think of teams in real estate, you imagine a group of people that are working together as a unit. As you translate this into technology for teams, you recognize that technology for teams is designed to allow two or more people to use software in a way that allows them to share work.

One example of a core piece of team functionality is access to client records. If a customer calls, any member of the team should be able to pull up the client record to track the call with the customer, and also to review past customer interactions.

For the most part, technology that is designed for small brokers is no different than technology that is designed for teams. The common theme is that these platforms are solutions that support multiple users and, if you want to get intricate, you can also set permissions for different user types. For example, your teammate that works on Transaction Management, may want to grant only the team leader(s) permission to view more than a transaction.

RE Technology has selected five leading team technologies for this special edition Success Guide. Those platforms include Boomtown, Chime, CINC, Elevate, and PropertyBase. As you review these platforms, you will see that each of them has a set of shared functionality, and a few pieces of functionality that make each platform best-in-class because of how well they execute certain niche features.

TEAM PRODUCTS