Your Website Is No Longer Your Single Biggest Tech Asset

Over the last decade, real estate technology has come a long way. We have seen a surge of products, tools, and platforms claiming to be the "silver bullet" piece of technology that will instantly resolve all of your lead, adoption, and recruiting woes. This pattern of an overwhelmingly large surge of technology offerings becoming available in the space is just as strong as ever.

The foundational core of many technology platforms and ancillary tech is a broker's/team's/agent's website. There seems to be an unspoken agreement that the single most important piece of technology a real estate professional can have is their website. Looking further into this belief, many think that the website alone will produce an infinite amount of leads and business as long as it is a unique, one-of-a-kind custom site that has video and parallax elements throughout.

While a website is an extremely critical component to your overall technology structure, it is by no means the undisputed single piece that can alleviate the challenges your business has. Having consulted with the top brokerages across the country for over six years, I have seen many trends come and go. From dedicated mobile apps to QR codes, there seems to always be another shiny penny to be chased.

One school of thought that is proving itself over and over to be false is the belief that a brokerage should be dedicating most (if not all) of its technology resources into a custom website. Going into 2019, there are many top designed websites that can be obtained in a semi-customized template format or fully customized WordPress format that provides just as great of a UI and UX as customized HTML websites that are five times the cost while, in many cases, delivering more leads than those that cost so much more.

So if a single tech asset, namely your website, is not your best tech asset, what is? The best tech asset is actually a strong tech foundation containing multiple components running on a single platform. This allows leads that come in through your website to accurately be captured and nurtured through the same connected platform. It also allows for guaranteed nurturing via native marketing campaigns in the system as well as messages to ensure you stay top of mind to the potential buyer/seller lead you have captured.

Components of your foundational technology platform should include the following:

• A visually pleasing and functional website that provides a great search experience and information
• A CRM that can capture, qualify and nurture leads and your sphere of influence with relevant and timely data. Preferably via phone, text, and email.
• Native marketing components and capabilities (landing page builder, squeeze page builder, mass text/email, mobile dialer)
• Transactional capabilities
• Ability to connect and deploy other technology platforms from within the system to ensure a true integration

To view the original article, visit the Inside Real Estate blog.