By David Dickey
Chief Technology Officer
United Country Real Estate
The best real estate franchises offer a single-source solution for your brokerage technology requirements, challenges and advantages. Implemented the right way, such a solution saves brokers and agents money, improves marketing, increases free buyer leads, reduces the vendors you manage, simplifies your technology and helps you stand out among the competition.
As you consider your current and future technology requirements and review what the best real estate franchises offer, the benefits to your business become evident.
Embrace the Power of Private Website Marketing
High performing websites for local offices and agents, national real estate companies, niche property types and others provide a point of difference to win listings. Some real estate franchises offer all of these websites and more, allowing you to not only feature listings on your office’s site and the MLS (like every realtor), but also to provide additional coverage on 5-10 private, wholly-owned national websites driving more free buyer leads to your office and agents.
With syndicated, public websites such as Realtor.com and Zillow.com, you are either sharing the same leads with other competing agencies, required to pay high and increasing prices, or left with paying referral fees for leads. None of this differentiates you from any competitor out there.
On the other hand, with the correct approach private websites can result in top-ranking Search Engine Optimization (SEO) results, giving brokers and agents opportunities to distinguish themselves from the competition and gain new clients. The best real estate franchises also provide training on SEO techniques to enable personal, local area and property-specific SEO success for their brokers.
Some top franchises also advertise their affiliates’ listings on highly-trafficked third-party websites at no cost. This directly feeds listed properties into the sites instead of brokers inputting their listings manually, significantly saving time and money.
Automate Your Marketing with an Effective CRM System
An effective and proprietary Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system integrated within the franchise program can be a massive benefit. It provides an efficient, single-source solution to respond to leads in a timely manner, automatically.
This frees up brokers and agents so they can focus their time on higher-value listing and selling activities.
A great CRM can warm and help sift through leads to find the roughly 10% of leads that will more likely convert. It’s an approach that can save you a whole lot of time, and it eliminates having to either manage leads manually, or pay another vendor to achieve the same result you can get on your own.
Easily Create, Customize Your Own Marketing & Advertising Collateral
An enormous amount of effort, money, and yes, that most valuable commodity we call time, goes into developing the different types of marketing and advertising collateral required to run a successful real estate company. From social media campaigns to direct mail, fliers, brochures, signage and other pieces … there’s just so much to keep in mind and track.
To remain competitive and drive growth, you must make sure all of these elements are regularly updated. Designing and customizing creative materials is a very time-consuming activity that often requires special editing software and skills, and sometimes multiple programs to handle different media types.
The best real estate franchises offer these services at no cost. Comprehensive marketing and advertising that is easily accessible offers numerous options, is customizable and is kept current. It’s important for franchisees to have a variety of creative options from which to choose within the same system. This includes the ability to fully customize collateral with preferred imagery, copy and individual branding.
Stay Current on Evolving Technology with Dedicated Support & Training
Technology is vital to every real estate brokerage and every franchise. There are certain tech services that are foundational to brokerages today, but still constantly evolving. Innovations in technology are rapidly increasing, and keeping up with these related changes in the real estate industry can be extremely challenging.
Sifting through technology that is actually useful, reliable and of high quality can be very difficult. But a talented and dedicated technology team such as those many of the top real estate franchises offer can be an ideal solution for affiliate franchisees. An effective tech support team should be focused on the specific technology needs of affiliates, while also staying ahead of trends and innovations designed to improve affiliates’ services for their clients.
On a related note, none of these tech advancements are very useful without the proper training. Any excellent real estate franchise should offer complete training on all systems in numerous formats – live sessions, online virtual training, special events and so on – to account for brokers’ and agents’ individual needs and learning styles. The best franchises tend to have trainers with expertise in each technology solution, while offering affiliates on-demand support as needed.
When looking at all the facets of technology covered in this article as they apply to leading real estate franchises, there’s a lot to be said for how technology can save affiliated brokerages time and money while also limiting frustration. The ultimate result can be boosted productivity, more listings won, and ideally, more sales closed. And the convenience of a single-source solution is a big benefit that can’t be overstated. A competitive advantage in real estate is critical to success. Consider a franchise that thrives on that very notion to help you succeed.
