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Tips and Tricks for Getting Your Agents to Adopt Your Real Estate CRM
Brokers, you know how crucial it is to invest in a rock-solid, reliable, and scalable real estate CRM for your business. But getting your agents to learn, use, and rely on the tool can be tricky. How can you balance driving agent adoption and proving the value of your tech investment? By highlighting the importance of a good CRM and lowering the barriers to entry. The Importance of Technology Adoption by Agents Most brokers know getting their real estate agents to adopt the technology they invest in is an uphill battle — to say the least. While commonly considered an inconvenience and gap in ongoing agent training, lack of tech adoption by agents is actually a threat to the brokerage and its success. Brokers typically purchase CRMs not solely for having a centralized database, but also having a singular view into their agents' activities. This includes key milestones like: Lead generation, follow-up, and conversion rates Client outreach efforts Retention efforts Nurture campaigns and reminders Email drip campaigns Performance reports By straying off-course and not using the CRM provided by their broker, agents pursuing the beaten path can struggle to track their follow-up, conversion rates, and other key metrics. Or, if they have these key performance indicators dialed into a systematic approach of their own, the lack of their broker's visibility and alignment to aligned processes means customer experiences can be inconsistent. This can jeopardize your bottom line, brand, and your brokerage's reputation. So, why would agents risk not using the tech their broker provides them? Skip the Learning Curve and Get Early Tech Adopters in Your Brokerage It's not uncommon and is usually a result of plain old-fashioned human behavior. New technology always comes with a learning curve, and even a broker with the best intentions won't always beat out a determined agent spending their time chasing deals. Brokers need to invest in educating their agents on the new tech they've invested in and carve out dedicated time for ongoing training and maintenance. They also need to pitch the benefits of a CRM and its centralized view to their agents. However finding the time, resources, and capacity to dedicate to agents getting boots off the ground and behind their desks can also threaten ROI. What's a broker to do? Agents are chasing their next success story and making time appear out of thin air to serve their clients and nurture new ones. It's well-known agents wear a lot of hats and have countless conflicting priorities to juggle. Because of this, it's crucial brokers get agents to adopt — and actively use — the CRM they've invested in. If the learning curve is one of the biggest risk factors for agent tech adoption failing, brokers can actually eliminate that hurdle. How? By investing in a CRM that's extremely easy to use and designed with an agent on the go in mind. To a seasoned, determined broker, finding an easy, seamless real estate CRM to invest in can sound a lot like finding a unicorn or stumbling upon a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. But by investing in a proven tool CRM needs, brokers can give their agents' tech adoption rates a significant boost. To view the original article, visit the Inside Real Estate

Understanding Your ListTrac Report
The image below is a clip from ListTrac Web Insights for an MLS. ListTrac is now reporting metrics from nearly every major IDX vendor, the major portals, and the MLS systems including Black Knight, Matrix, FlexMLS, and Rapattoni – in total, over 100,000 real estate property search sites. This particular report shows listing views. It should be no surprise that Zillow is the leading consumer site for viewing property. In most MLS areas, Zillow has more traffic than all other sites combined (which is true in this market). Here are some interesting observations: The MLS system matters The MLS system is a major point of engagement for consumers who are home shopping. Moreover, consumers viewing property from the MLS system are working close enough with a real estate agent that the agent goes through the trouble of setting up their saved search. Of course, the MLS views will also include the research done by agents when they do searches. It is a hard number to dissect, much in the same way that traffic to Zillow is hard to dissect the intention of consumers on Zillow or other consumer sites. Homes.com? Homes.com was contested by Realtor.com when CoStar CEO, Andy Florence, announced that Homes.com has garnered enough traffic to become the second highest ranking portal in America. Realtor.com CEO, Damian Eales, stated in a podcast that Andy's statement is easy to make "when you are grading your own homework." WAV Group has not seen a ListTrac report that validates the claims of Mr. Florence in any market, but we have no reason to doubt him. If you have evidence, please pass it along. Homesnap? Sadly, Homesnap has also disappeared from these reports. Homesnap was the partner to the Broker Public Portal and was garnering tremendous traffic in many markets. Before the sale to CoStar, I believe that 1.2 million real estate agents were benefiting from their service through their MLS. I still do not understand why CoStar killed that product. As you can see, Zillow has retained Trulia, which is outperforming Homes.com in this market. Who is IDX vendor Cyberitas? A Google search result of the company indicates that they are working with Anywhere brand Century 21. In this market, Century 21.com is slightly ahead of virtual tour vendor Property Panorama in terms of traffic, and slightly behind Homes.com in overall traffic. I found it interesting that Century 21 has more traffic than Coldwell Banker in this market. Typically, it is reversed. The Power of IDX (or powerless IDX) In terms of IDX vendors, Reliance Networks and MoxiWorks were tied, followed by IDX Broker and iHouseWeb. But overall, IDX is dwindling in terms of attracting consumers to search for properties. WAV Group believes that IDX vendors have failed to keep up with the portals in one key area: IDX sites do not display listings of all parcels. They only display the listings for sale or recently sold (in many markets). Consumers love getting the listing information at the parcel level published by Zillow, Realtor.com, Trulia, Homes.com, Movoto, Redfin; and the newly appointed sites by RE/MAX and Compass that have also become parcel centric. If you are a broker, remember to log into ListTrac and look at how your listings are performing in the market. Share that information with your agents so they understand these numbers and remind them that ListTrac has seller reports that show where a client's listing is being viewed. If you are an MLS and would like help interpreting the ListTrac report and communicating that to your brokers, agents, or consumers, reach out to our team. WAV Group Communications can help. Other ListTrac Data Points ListTrac will also show you how many leads were generated off of listings, and which sites generated the most number of leads. They will also show visitor trends. You will be amazed at how much traffic dips in the MLS on weekends. I love the top agent report. As you might expect, the agent with the most listings has the most views of their listings. The geographic traffic report is fascinating. It allows you to look at where the consumer is searching from. This particular market has significant search traffic from the major Texas cities. The national narrative is that everyone is moving to Florida and Texas – but this area is attracting folks from Texas. Last but not least are the most popular price points. Seventy percent of all search traffic in this market was for homes under $500,000. As you can tell, I am a ListTrac fan. If you have it in your market, make a point to review it every month. Be sure to include it in your training and communications. To view the original article, visit the WAV Group

New FCC Regulation Deals Blow to Real Estate Lead Generators
New consumer protection regulations from the Federal Communications Commission aims to protect consumers from the scams and spam caused by the "lead generator" robo-calls and texts loophole, and encourages an opt-in approach for delivering email to text messages. The law extends the same do-not-call protections and CAN/SPAM to text messages, making it illegal to send text messages to numbers on the Do-Not-Call registry. Real estate leads are among the most expensive leads generated across all American business, often leading to real estate professionals paying as high as 40% of their commission for a sale generated from a lead. Many leads generated at online shopping websites are sold over and over again, causing consumers to be inundated with spammy text messages and robo-calls that seem to have no end. Now, there must be a clear opt-in by consumers to this form of communication. The FCC wants the consumer to opt in on a one-to-one basis to each company that will receive their contact information. According to the FCC, U.S. consumers receive approximately 4 billion robo-calls per month. In their enforcement efforts, the FCC has issued fines to some companies, like a Texas-based health insurance company whom I am not naming, of $255 million. A Florida-based timeshare operation was fined $120 million. The FCC also adopted new rules to stop illegal robo-calls that originate overseas from entering American phone networks. U.S. Federal Communications Commission moved to make AI-generated voices in robocalls illegal on 8 February. Real Estate Impact Firms should update their agent independent contractor agreements. Real estate agents routinely use robo-call/robo-text services for lead generation and lead incubation. If the firm provides an agent with lead information that is added to a robo-call/robo-text service, there could be significant liability to the firm. Many brokerage firms also share consumer information with their affiliated services companies. For example, a lead generated on a broker's website gets shared with a brokers' mortgage or insurance affiliate who also uses similar robo-call/robo-text systems for lead incubation. Agreements should be updated to prevent violations by these third-parties from blowing back on the real estate firm. Moreover, the consumer will need to opt-in to each service (i.e. checkbox for mortgage, title, insurance, etc.) When you collect consumer information on a lead form or elsewhere, you likely need to update your terms of use to explicitly require a consumer opt-in to text messaging. Examples of opt-in language from portal sites: Figure 1 Realtor.com Figure 2 From Zillow.com From our reading of the FCC rulings, these sites would need to specifically say that they are going to send my information to Agent Name, Firm Name, Mortgage Company, and so on, and the consumer needs to check the box to agree. Most of the portals send consumers to their in-house call center before they send it to an agent, so there may be a loophole where the call center gets permission from the consumer at the point of transfer. Greg Robertson and Rob Hahn did a great podcast on this with Matthew Marx of Evocalize. See below to watch: Not to debate Rob – he is a very strong debater – but his view is: "calling expired listings will not be a problem with this new FCC rule." I would suggest that it could be a problem if the consumer is on the Do-Not-Call list. Rob would likely agree with me. Existing clients of the firm or prior lead gen records may be excluded from the FCC ruling. The FCC is still processing the outline of their policies, so there are many unanswered questions. In the aforementioned "Industry Relations" podcast, they believe that the FCC will go after the lead generators and not the robo-dialers/texters, but there is no certainty there. I guess if you buy leads, you need to CYA to make sure that it does not blow back on you as an FCC violation. To view the original article, visit the WAV Group