Technology provides immense benefits to brokerages, teams and their staffs and agents, but only when they learn to harness it.
T3 Sixty tracks over 900 real estate brokerage technology vendors with close to 1,000 products in 96 categories on the T3 Tech Marketplace. That is a lot of technology to navigate. No broker or team needs to cover all the tech categories within their company, or consider anywhere close to all the vendors and products.
However, they should develop a tech strategy and implement it in a focused, planned way. In T3 Sixty’s work in supporting real estate brokers’ and teams’ technology efforts, T3 has identified three chief best practices that brokers and team leaders have used to successfully utilize their technology: match tech to value proposition, establish a tech “success team” strategy and actively support the company tech stack.
These are each covered in more detail below.
Match tech to value proposition
It’s crucial for companies to match their technology to their overall value proposition, as this will focus decision making and selection, and ultimately will greatly aid in increased production, improved efficiencies and successful recruiting.
To do this, brokerages and teams need to identify what makes them unique in the market, and then apply that to their tech strategy. Incorporating systems to support their core values will enhance the experience their staff and agents have at their company.
Integrating tech solutions into their overall strategy, including but not limited to onboarding new agents and staff to the solutions they offer, will increase tech engagement and adoption. This makes company technology a more integral part of the firm’s DNA and reinforces the brand and value in the market and within the company.
Establish a “success team”
To really find tech success, companies need to facilitate internal buy-in of their technology stack. One of the most effective ways to do that is to set up an in-house “success team” of key stakeholders to serve as the front line in providing tech feedback to company leadership and for demonstrating effective use-cases of it to broader staff and agents.
With a success team in place, brokerages and teams should also establish an escalation process that outlines the vendor’s and success team’s roles when challenges arise. Part of this should be a communication routine in which the company users provide feedback on the system and features and suggested product enhancements.
For example, the success team can send short videos or blog posts about the best use-cases of the solution to agents, with stories about the achievements or benefits they’ve seen by using the system. The success team will be the company’s go-to advocates that help increase agent and staff adoption and boost return on investment.
Actively support the company tech stack
Companies should make their key technology offerings a core part of their onboarding, training and regular strategy. This is by far the most important habit to assure success.
Systems undergo regular updates. Companies should have a plan to regularly keep up with these and introduce these updates to their staff and agents. In addition, they should provide regularly scheduled training or educational sessions on best practices for using the company techology.
The technology and success team should play a big role in this feedback and training process, and showcase the real-world examples of how changes and updates can be leveraged to improve productivity and sales to the larger team.
These updates are best attended with regularly scheduled breakfast or lunch-and-learn sessions and can be fun with games or contests associated with the sessions.
Takeaway
Technology is advancing at an increasing rate. We’ve seen dozens of recent technology acquisitions that will only propel the tremendous real estate tech development underway. The three successful brokerage technology habits portrayed in this article are a good start to a full-fledged tech strategy.
If you have any questions about any of these suggestions or technologies or would like assistance in evaluating the appropriate solution for your brokerage, please reach out to me, Jonathan Peterson, T3 Sixty vice president of brokerage solutions, at jonathan@t3sixty.com.