Facebook
X
Pinterest
Copy Link
The Problem with Compass: “We’re About the Agent”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE You may have seen the open letter to Compass by MoxiWorks’ CEO, York Baur. I happen to agree with pretty much everything he says. In short, Compass’ tech strategy of choosing best of class vendors and stitching them together (along with developing some proprietary tech) is not new. MoxiWorks is one of several companies has been doing it for a long, long time.
The July Roundup: News to Know
By Jessie Trapp, Marketing Coordinator & Tiana Baur, Content Marketing Manager
This month has been a bit of a whirlwind. In just several weeks we’ve had Inman Connect, tons of tech news, and some announcements that continue to elevate industry pressures on a very real level. A lot of the news has been “hype” and had enough fluff to fill a million build-a-bears, but what are the main headlines we should all be focusing on? We put a little list together of the important news stories that came out in July and recapped them for you.
Here are the top five bites to know in the July Roundup:
1. “Cryptocurrency, Cyber Fraud Focus of Trump Task Force”
Don’t worry, we’re not getting all political. With a new-found focus on cyber fraud in the U.S., real estate will hopefully see less cyber-crime events, especially with cryptocurrency coming into the industry from all angles. Fraud in general, whether that be banks or cyber-related, has heavily impacted the industry. “According to an RISMedia survey, 27 percent of agents and brokers are ‘not sure’ if their brokerage has a cybersecurity policy, and 19 percent have no policy at all. The most common crime is phishing/wire fraud, in which buyers are duped out of their funds.” Hopefully this new focus will find a way to combat it.
2. “Gary Keller Slams Real Estate Startups, Refuses to Sit Down”
Gary Keller made moves at this year’s Inman Connect and made his agents across the nation extremely proud to be with his brokerage. He argued that many real estate tech companies, such as Redfin, Opendoor, etc. would get rid of agents if they could. Agree with his stance or not, he made it very clear and now everyone knows about it. Well played, sir.
3. “The ‘For Sale’ sign gets a modern update”
Well, it’s pretty obvious how we feel about Compass, but putting all that aside for a few moments, they had a major-ish announcement at Inman Connect and it deserves a spot as a top headline. Not only did they turn a rectangle into a circle, but they also illuminated the sign and added a connection to the internet so smart phones can connect. Sort of feels unnecessary for our industry, sort of feels like teenagers are going to go around vandalizing them, but who knows. To each their own.
4. “Overstock is making a push into real estate”
So, this is one we might have all overlooked. While July mostly focused on Inman, Compass, and other industry related news, this should’ve been a main discussion topic. The big boys are getting into real estate. Overstock announced they they’re relaunching Houserie, a property management website focusing on background checks, that basically helps landlords out. The juicy plot twist? It’s going to become a giant real estate platform in September for buying, renting, and managing properties. Alright, alright, alright Overstock.
5. Redfin announces $240M stock offering for potential acquisitions
Looks like Redfin has hopped into the dating pool. In their press release, the company stated that “it may choose to use a portion of the proceeds to invest in or acquire third-party businesses, products, services, technologies or other assets.” With this news, they’ll be looking for potential acquisitions, swiping right on dime piece businesses that catch their eye.
“Trash-talking” and “distortion”: What a tech rival is saying about Compass
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE CEO of MoxiWorks claims his competitor has overstated its market share, agent retention rate.
Home Design Trends and Features: What Homebuyers are Looking for Today
By Jessie Trapp, Marketing Coordinator
The changing trends within the housing market are often fast paced and challenging for agents to keep up with. Thanks to the popularity of smart homes and Joanna Gaines (the queen of home-remodel TV), today’s home buyers and sellers are becoming surprisingly knowledgeable about home design, and specific about which features and trends make up their never-ending lists of must-haves.
While this heightened level of clarity can be helpful for some, it also tends to make the process of finding a client’s dream home an increasingly difficult task for agents. Buyers are constantly perusing the internet and covering their beloved Pinterest boards with professionally designed inspiration, driving their expectations for their future home to seemingly impossible heights. Knowing what trends are attracting attention will ensure that you are looking at prospective listings through the eyes of clients you are bound to work with in the near future. Surprising your customers by highlighting popular trends in your presentations will likely deepen the value they see in your proposed listings and heighten the overall interest they have in them. The wow factor is a huge part of what you do, and every bit helps! Don’t worry, we are here to keep you in the housing trend loop (you’re welcome).
Gardens.
That’s right, get out your shovels and rakes – gardens are making a major comeback. With cities expanding and becoming increasingly crowded, tiny homes are “in” and the concept of having a significant chunk of land is becoming a thing of the past for the vast majority of urban dwellers. Many of today’s current homebuyers are looking to bring surrounding greenery back into their living space, especially in the form of a garden. Whether it is incorporated into the actual property or merely a local community garden close by, it is a trend that is likely on the minds of your clients. Be sure to familiarize yourself with nearby community gardens or consider a home’s potential for an indoor or outdoor garden when prepping for your next open house!
Smart homes.
This is a hot topic that we recently wrote a full blog post about. Smart locks, smart thermostats, smart windows, and smart kitchen appliances are just a few of the most popular smart products stirring up excitement among homebuyers. If a home has smart technology, be sure to showcase it. If a home is lacking in this department, make sure to have a trusted technology source on hand to pay a visit and provide an estimate for incorporating some of this smart tech into the home. Dare I say, a closing gift? Here is a breakdown of some of the potential costs associated with adding these types of tech.
Industrial.
The industrial style of showing off raw building materials is a trend that homebuyers are taking to quickly. Neutral tones, exposed pipes, wood beams, concrete, and metal surfaces are quickly growing in popularity within the interior design universe. If you are working with clients who are in search of this style, point out aspects of homes that can serve as a starting point for them to create this style within the existing space. These are a few great examples of how this trend is being showcased.
Patterns.
Think grandma’s “exotic” wallpaper. In addition to the industrial trend, there is a large population of home decorators that are using patterns as their go-to for creating flair within their home designs. Whether they are found in the bathroom tiles, bedroom wallpaper, or merely accents throughout the house, patterned fabrics and materials are making waves in today’s design trends. While these may have steered clients away in the past, today they could be viewed as a selling point. Bring along a catalog with some examples of how others have incorporated patterns into the look of their homes to share with clients.
As you know, tastes and trends are not one-size-fits-all and often differ greatly among clients. As always, feel out what your clients are looking for and help them visualize how they can rock the trends they love in their new home.
MoxiWorks CEO Calls Out Compass for ‘Trash-Talking’ Real Estate Industry
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE RISMedia has obtained the following open letter from MoxiWorks CEO York Baur to Compass, a technology-centric real estate company based in Manhattan.
An Open Letter to Compass From a CEO
Dear Compass,
I have to call you out on your boastful approach to an industry that we all know and love. While we agree that there’s a great opportunity to employ technology in ways to make both the consumer and agent experience better, we don’t think you need to resort to the trash-talking and grandstanding that we’ve heard from you – you’re better than that, and frankly we don’t want you to tarnish an industry that has funded the creation of the very technologies you now claim credit for.
You claim to have started the tech talk in real estate. In your recent LinkedIn post titled Before Compass, Technology Was Barely Mentioned in Real Estate you said: “As it relates to technology, Compass truly revolutionized an industry that had become complacent and had fallen behind terribly.” In just a few words, you risk losing your credibility. The first wave of brokerage tech took place in the 1990’s. For instance, Windermere Real Estate, just one example of many, launched Windermere.com in 1995, creating the first known brokerage website, and added a complete suite of agent tools by 2000.
Since then, Windermere, Long & Foster and Howard Hanna have funded MoxiWorks, whose platform and tools now help make 60 brokerages and 110,000 agents better at what they do. Other obvious examples of innovative technology use in real estate include Zillow (founded in 2006), Redfin (2004), and the long list of startups that have been hard at work for decades, funded by hundreds of millions in capital that was invested prior to your founding.
And stated by your head of product Eytan Seidman in his recent Built In Chicago interview, Compass claims to be “the first and only company to bring engineers together with agents under one roof.” Yet Windermere, Long & Foster, Howard Hanna and countless other leading brokerages have had software engineers and agents working side-by-side in their brokerages to evolve real estate technology since the mid-1990s, developing the technologies, data exchange mechanisms, and standards you now rely on.
You claim to create all your own technology. And speaking of untruths, your CEO Robert Reffkin has publicly stated, “We build everything in house, and all the tools and support is in house.” But anyone can look at the websites you run and see that they’re licensed from MoPro, that you’ve licensed MailChimp as your email marketing tool, and that you licensed Honey for your internal social network. These are all fine choices, but you don’t “build everything in house,” so why the distortion?
Your CEO Robert Reffkin recently claimed in a live interview on CNBC that Compass “just launched Seattle five weeks ago and we already have 5% market share.” We took it upon ourselves to do a deep dive into the data – the Moxi Cloud Open Platform now contains the data for 90% of the home sale footprint of the United States, so like everyone out there with access to MLS data, we can calculate your actual market share in any of your markets. For example, that data shows that for the Seattle metro area, the best you could claim is 0.7% of transactions where Compass was either the listing or selling agent. That’s a far cry from the 5% you claimed. Your CEO Reffkin also said Compass “is the only company empowering agents.” That’s not credible, so why say it other than to antagonize the industry you’re clearly a part of, and in business with on the other side of many of your transactions?
You say that your goal is to “improve the lives of agents.” You pay six figure signing bonuses “to less than 10% of your agents” and claim 98% retention, yet notable agents flee to their former brokerage as soon as the contract is up. We did a deep dive into that data too. For agents that joined Compass any time after January 1, 2016 and have left Compass since, the average tenure was only 245 days.
Bottom line. The tech stack you tout is something every other brokerage can quite literally replicate on the open market – many already have. Compass may not be a brokerage that is great at building technology (that has yet to be seen), but you are a brokerage that is great at integrating the technology you buy, and you happen to build some of your own tools too. That sounds like Windermere, Long & Foster and others before they recognized that choosing the best mix of tools from the vendors that use the $1B of capital invested annually into real estate technology was a better strategy.
Side note to all the brokerages out there: You are investing in tech. Keep your independence. If you haven’t already, choose a platform, whether that’s from MoxiWorks or from any one of our worthy competitors and mix the unique set of agent tools that match your brokerage value proposition and business style. That’s all that Compass has done, only their platform isn’t open, which means they don’t have the flexibility you’ll have.
Compass’ strength of integration is one MoxiWorks has already built and established – nothing new here. The Moxi Cloud has been available to our customers for exactly this purpose for three years and has over 40 partner companies whose products work with it, sharing and contributing to the broker and agent data in the platform for the benefit of all. And we’re not the only ones – many of our competitors have similar abilities, and brokerages are mixing their unique blend of technology to support their value propositions just like you are.
We set out to better the industry, not terrify it or antagonize it. Consider this open letter an invitation. Consider it an opportunity for you to set the record straight.
Candidly,
York Baur, CEO of MoxiWorks
Checkout more of the data at moxiworks.com/compass.
Differentiating Your Content Between Social Media Channels
By Jessie Trapp, Marketing Coordinator
The number of social media users worldwide is estimated to reach an excess of 2.77 billion by 2019, so if you aren’t currently incorporating it into your marketing efforts, you’re going to want to start – ASAP. Not only does it give you access to this booming population of users and potential clients, but it also allows you to do so without breaking the bank, a major plus for any business. Although it is becoming a widely used marketing tactic, many professionals are spending valuable time posting on various social media channels while failing to generate the levels of ROI they are searching for.
We get it- the world of social media can be confusing and a tad messy at times. Luckily navigating it isn’t as difficult as it may seem, however, it’s essential to make a game-plan for how you plan to utilize it. One of the keys to making the most of social media marketing is knowing what types of content to post where. No two channels are exactly alike, as they all tend to be used by different groups of people that are in search of unique types of content. If you don’t have one already, creating a social media content strategy should be at the top of your to-do list! Plan out what kinds of post would likely build value on which channels and create an action plan to bring them to life. Here are some content-related recommendations for a handful of the powerhouse channels to keep in mind as you develop your plan!
Facebook.
Where to begin. Let’s just say, if social media channels were bees, Facebook would be the unrelenting queen. According to NAR, 69% of real estate agents use Facebook and it’s quite obvious why. The channel should be an integral aspect of your marketing endeavors, as it provides you with a variety of different ways to grow your sphere quickly via shares and word of mouth (or mentions). Virtually anything goes here, as adding a variety of content will increase your likelihood of it resonating with a wider reach of users. Blog posts, articles, videos, announcements, contests, and content that shows your brand and personality should all be in the line-up. In addition to the wide variety of acceptable content, Facebook also gives you the ability to get specific when it comes to who you would like your posts and ads to target. This is why Facebook advertising is known to be so effective, and why we here at MoxiWorks incorporated it into the Advertise Your Services feature that many of our clients have already started using to grow their business.
LinkedIn.
Hold off on the gifs and memes, and instead keep things purely professional. LinkedIn is all about growing your network and connections, so avoid posting anything that could potentially hurt your image to prospective clients and partners. This is the perfect channel to practice recruitment marketing – essentially marketing that makes people want to work with or for you. Focus on sharing content that expresses what your brokerage specifically brings to the table and what you can provide to others in real estate. Blog posts, articles, calls to action, images from company events, and sneak peeks into your business’ culture are all forms of content that will likely perform well on LinkedIn, enabling you and your followers to get better acquainted with one another.
Instagram.
As you know, real estate is an incredibly visual industry – all the more reason that channeling your efforts into Instagram is something you’ll likely find beneficial. With more than 800 million users, the app is mainly accessed by people who are on-the-go via tablets and smartphones. It’s a valuable opportunity to share images and videos that tell a meaningful story with just a glimpse, but make sure to maintain a level of high quality content. Experimenting with hashtags in your comments is a powerful strategy that can rapidly increase your reach on Instagram. For example, #RealEstate and #justlisted are both top preforming tags in the real estate industry specifically. Using tags related to your geographic location is also a powerful tool. Graphs and visual representations of data tend to perform well here too. Utilizing the story feature of this channel can go far in terms of giving followers a more personal and approachable look into the daily life of your business. And don’t forget those high-quality professional listing photos you’ve already paid for!
Twitter.
80% of Twitter’s users are said to be affluent millennials, the very group that is currently making up a major portion of the buyers in today’s real estate market. With that in mind, it’s likely worthwhile to incorporate this channel into your plan. The content that seems to perform the best here is videos, which have been shown to be 6x more likely than images to be retweeted. Engaging with followers through polls and contests are also great ways to take advantage of Twitter.
Although these guidelines are definitely important to keep in mind, being truly successful at social media marketing often entails a whole bunch of trial and error. Make sure you are tracking your analytics and monitoring the success of your content, so that you can make adjustments and see continually improving results. Doing so will contribute to increased levels of loyalty, marketing effectiveness, and profits – who doesn’t want that?
Why You Need an Open-Door Policy Right Now
By Tiana Baur, Content Marketing Manager
In their latest round of funding, OpenDoor scored $325 million in funding. Late last year, SoftBank invested $450 million into Compass. VC money is alive and well, and it’s found a home in real estate tech, pouring into the industry. And as we all saw at Inman Connect last week, the competition is as hot as five-star Thai food. It literally hurts to digest.
In a sea of change…
As all of us in the real estate world are saying, the industry is evolving quicker than most can keep up. It’s a treadmill that only seems to be getting faster and faster with no pause button in sight. What was super cool last quarter is the status quo today. There’s no room for lags and fear. What do these higher monetary stakes and complex competition mean for traditional brokerages? The value prop of your brokerage and its brand is key.
Question: Why should your agents stay at your brokerage?
Staying relevant and valuable to agents will continue to gain in difficulty. Without the money to offer six figure signing bonuses, your brokerage value proposition has to be hard as rock. If I were sitting across from you and asked, “Why do you think your agents should stay at your brokerage versus going somewhere else?” What would your answer be? Do you have a sophisticated tech stack? Do you train your agents on it or just hand it off and hope for the best? Do you continuously stay in contact with your agents or do you forget about them until they tell you they’re going to a different brokerage?
The magic of an open-door policy
There’s a top brokerage in Virginia – that will go unnamed – that is taking a very logical approach: They have an open-door policy. They’ll answer any and all questions – even about Compass. If an agent has concerns, they feel empowered enough to walk into the Managing Broker’s office and ask them, knowing they’ll get an honest answer. Because of that, their retention numbers are insane. They’ve invested in tech, and they’re investing time into their most precious asset: their people, their real estate agents.
Action items:
Don’t
- Don’t lose your current agents because you’re only focused on recruiting new ones.
- Don’t let any agent feel like they’re being left in the dark (including on the topic of Compass).
Do
- Build on your existing relationships.
- Let your agents know you care and want them there.
- Implement an open-door policy if you haven’t already. It’ll be the best decision you’ve made all year.
- You can even try hanging a sign on the wall by your office, letting your agents know that they’re always welcome to come in.
- Have a proper recruiting system in place. This will focus your time on top talent inside and outside of your brokerage, making sure you’re getting the full picture and avoiding agents slipping through the cracks.
Brokerages today are worried about losing top producers, concerning themselves over the revenue and sales volume that those top producers take with them if they leave. It makes perfect sense. Losing one agent isn’t going to have a dramatic shift on market share, but it will impact a brokerage’s sales volume. This whole storm is why we created our Moxi Talent recruiting system in the first place. Too often, Managing Brokers don’t pay attention to agents until they threaten to walk. Moxi Talent helps you build relationships with the right people at the right time.
Introducing: HomeActions Email Marketing
A complete email marketing system to keep your agent’s pipelines full.
We’re stoked to introduce our newest Moxi Cloud partner, HomeActions! We’ve partnered with HomeActions to provide an easy email marketing solution to our client brokerages. Not only is their tool intuitive, it instantly turns agent’s email marketing efforts into a goldmine.
What is HomeActions Email Marketing?
HomeActions is an e-Relationship platform that starts out as an e-newsletter but ends up as a flawless conversation starter and lead-gen system with the help of their amazing content and tools.
The Ultimate Email Marketing Database
HomeActions helps your agents consolidate their contacts and create their very own exclusive marketing database.
Extensive Metrics
HomeActions provides extensive metrics for their e-newsletters. See when someone opens the newsletter, clicks a link and get immediate feedback as readers respond to how well they liked a given article.
Knowing who is engaging with what content makes it easy to know who to direct your marketing efforts at and who you should pick up the phone and call asap.
In-Demand Content & Widgets
HomeActions delivers content and articles your readers will love that triggers predictive behavior. They drive traffic to an agent’s CMA request page and even works with TrendGraphix reports!
Neighborhood 360
Neighborhood 360 is their newest feature. Recipients can get the “Inside Scoop” on any neighborhood they wish. Home value estimates, cost of living data, demographics, lifestyle data, school info, nearby sold properties, and so much more. This widget covers 150 million street addresses and neighborhoods!
MoxiWorks Integration
HomeActions is integrated into the Moxi Cloud and streamlines an agent’s day-to-day with their Moxi Engage CRM.
Think of HomeActions as the frosting and cherry on top of Engage. It gives the agent the ability to upload their exclusive HomeActions database into their email in the correct format to connect to MoxiWorks tools. That means their CRM and email marketing efforts just got a whole lot sweeter.
Find out more about HomeActions here and read the official press release here.
Up Your Recruiting Game with This System
If the grass is greener on the other side, what side are you on?
By Nick Van Valkenberg, Director of Business Development
Growing your brokerage is an ambitious endeavor, especially in the ever-competitive real estate landscape. Two lingering questions are: how do you find the right talent for your brokerage and how can you make the process easier for your recruiting team? I plan to answer both of these questions but first you need to define what you are looking for: is it the “fresh to the industry” agent, an agent early in their career, or a more senior agent?
As the busy season winds down the “low hanging fruit” would be the agent that, well didn’t have a busy season and is looking for help or better yet, a place where they can thrive. If this is who you focus on recruiting, then do you have the systems in place that are statistically proven to increase an agent’s number of sides? Have you made it easy for them to run their business? How about an open platform? Single sign-on doesn’t sound like a whole lot but to the new agent that doesn’t know all of the technologies offered in your brokerage it could mean the world. Open platforms and single sign-on is a whole other conversation but if you don’t have the technology in place for today’s agent you may want to look around because your competitor down the street has this in place creating a very compelling recruiting and retention tool.
The harder agent to recruit is the successful agent. They say the grass is greener on the other side but what happens when their grass looks like the a fútbol field during the World Cup? Do you know your elevator pitch, differentiator, your WHY statement? If you answered NO to any of these three mission critical pieces to the puzzle, then step one is to clarify your message. May I suggest you take a look at the book Story Brand? The premise of Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller is how to clarify your message, your WHY statement. The idea of a WHY statement sounds easy but really you need to have a smooth couple sentences that clearly state why an agent at any level in their career would benefit from joining your brokerage especially a successful agent. Let that sink in and think about this for a minute. Sure, you can offer a more competitive split but how does that help you the broker out? REAL Trends recently published that the average brokerages margin has been compressed to 14.8%. Talk to us about how you can recruit a top performing agent not because you will take less money but because you have what they need to become even more successful.
Through conversations with your fellow brokers I have found that the structure of a recruiter tends to be the broker themselves or the manager of an individual office. Time is of the essence, with an already full plate how do you add the time to recruit? In a perfect world a “recruiter” should be spending an hour a day dedicated to finding new talent. At this point you may have guessed that I am going to talk about technology, and you guessed right. Honestly to achieve the desired outcome you need to have a solid system in place. Does your recruiting technology incorporate your goals? Is it easy to ingest MLS data so you have insights on your prospects? Does your technology offer next steps and coach you for each individual recruit? Does your technology offer public records data on your prospects? Could you imagine hosting an annual golf tournament and knowing the subset of your pipeline that has golf as an interest? I’m not a gambling man but I would venture to say that you could easily win over some new agents on the links, remember that greener grass metaphor from earlier? Do your “recruiters” have the ability to easily boast about what your brokerage can offer, maybe in the form of a dynamic presentation imbedded with video testimonials, live links, and your WHY statement?
Your Agent Recruiting System
You may have been seeing the recent industry hype around Moxi Talent. The hype is because we have answered all the above questions. Take the time and let us show you not only how Moxi Talent can increase your productivity recruiting the correct agents but how you can actively recruit your current agent. We can even show you statistics on how the Moxi Suite of products can increase the business for your agents, but don’t take it from us, ask around. To quote the legendary football coach and now inspirational speaker Lou Holtz “In this world you’re either growing or you’re dying so get in motion and grow.” Now more than ever things are changing at a rapid pace, there is a time to sit and watch and there is a time to act, now is the time to act. Take a moment this week and reach out to our team, learn why top brokerages are leveraging our platform to outperform their competition.
