Engel & Volkers Deploys SmartZip's Innovative Predictive Marketing and Referral Platform across Its West Coast Advisers

With SmartZip's Enterprise solutions Engel & Völkers has leading-edge tech tools to attract and retain agents positioned for success.

PLEASANTON, CALIF. (NOVEMBER 15, 2017) - Engel & Völkers West Coast, licensed partner of the global real estate and lifestyle brand, has announced a new partnership with SmartZip Analytics, the pioneer in predictive marketing solutions for the real estate ecosystem. The partnership will put powerful home seller analytics and targeted marketing tools into the hands of its agents and branch managers, in turn accelerating their growth through smarter and automated recruiting of new agents and their acquisition of new, repeat and referral customers.

With this partnership, Engel & Völkers is rolling out SmartZip's flagship predictive marketing platform – SmartTargeting, including its seller targeting and referral marketing components – to agents in its western region from Tahoe and the San Francisco Bay area, down to Laguna Beach and to Park City.

SmartTargeting is an analytics-powered customer acquisition system that combines predictive seller analytics along with automated and turnkey multi-channel marketing to help agents and brokers accelerate their business and recruiting efforts. The initial deployment across Engel & Völkers includes several integrated components of SmartTargeting for both the agents as well as the company and its branch offices.

SmartTargeting Basic will help agents efficiently generate more repeat and referral business from their own sphere of influence database. Every agent gets several branded seller lead capture websites that provide homeowners with their automated home value estimates, each with its own personalized vanity URL. For up to 50 of their sphere contacts, SmartTargeting also continuously monitors their predicted selling intent – additional seller predictions can be purchased for a fee. Agents can set-up automated marketing campaigns, leveraging the extensive built-in design library of seller-oriented direct mail, online and Facebook ads – once scheduled, these campaigns ensure the agent's brand stays consistently top of mind with their sphere, so the agent never again misses the next transaction opportunity. And SmartTargeting comes bundled with the CheckIn mobile app that empowers agents to systematically prospect and nurture up to 10,000 of their sphere contacts.

SmartTargeting Basic provides easy upgrade paths for agents that want to expand their sphere by adding a custom territory ("farm"). The system will then continuously pinpoint new seller prospects within their chosen farm, and its automated multi-channel marketing campaigns can nurture such targets to give agents a competitive edge to win more new listings. Marcus Wood, Engel & Völkers Advisor in Park City, a SmartZip client since January, 2016 said, "SmartTargeting is one of the best platforms we've encountered in a long time. The tools provided are some of the most powerful in the industry. The analytics allow us to successfully capture listings in our farm and sphere. The automated marketing fine-tunes our marketing, giving us visibility across multiple marketing avenues."

In addition, in an industry whose lifeblood is referrals, SmartTargeting's integrated Reach150 tools help agents, even freshly-minted ones, to strengthen their online brand, boost SEO and win referrals. Reach150 automatically requests a testimonial from a happy customer as soon as the agent closes a buy or sale transaction. These testimonials get syndicated on the agent's personal branded Reach150 reputation website as well as across the web with pay-as-you-go online ads. Testimonials collected by each agent in a local branch automatically roll up to the Reach150 websites for the branch, and up to the region.

The Reach150 tools also help Engel & Völkers and its branches elevate their recruiting efforts by aggregating testimonials from happy agents in their offices on their Reach150 recruiting pages, then turning them into powerful online ads that are automatically and strategically placed in front of local agents they want to attract. Once recruited, Reach150 helps the company rebrand a new hire by advertising the agent's move to everyone in his or her personal database, thus ensuring a smooth transition for the new hire and building the company's brand with their sphere database.

"Engel & Völkers is a strong technology company with a clear vision for our new as well as our seasoned agents, and we're excited and fortunate to be getting in on the ground floor of a technology that empowers this vision," said Engel & Völkers CEO for San Francisco Real Estate Inc, Paul Benson. "The SmartZip solution works and complements what we're doing. Its (marketing) approach is smart and its success lies in how targeted and automated it is for agents and our recruiting teams. SmartTargeting with Reach150 matches that philosophy by making the agent better known, more popular, more searchable and more credible."

"We couldn't be more excited to partner with a company of Engel & Völkers' caliber and reputation," said Avi Gupta, CEO of SmartZip. "In a very short time since we began this rollout, over half the agents are already using the solution or activated their accounts to begin using it. It's a testament to their agents as much as it is to the obvious benefits and ease of use of our SmartTargeting platform."

About SmartZip, Inc.

SmartZip is a pioneering leader in predictive marketing solutions for real estate, lending and related industries. SmartZip's SmartTargeting platform uses patent-pending predictive analytics, multi-channel marketing automation, and smart CRM to identify top home seller prospects, engage them through targeted marketing campaigns, and ultimately close more business with smart nurturing and prospecting tools. It also integrates the recently acquired Reach150 system that automatically requests and publicizes client-generated testimonials and referrals to help agents and loan officers boost their word-of-mouth business. Together, SmartTargeting and Reach150 help enterprises and professionals across the real estate ecosystem efficiently grow their business with the targeted acquisition of new, repeat and referral customers.