Brokerages roll out tech tools

It’s quickly becoming apparent that real estate is one of the most technology-dependent industries in Canada, and, unsurprisingly, brokerages are all busy rolling out tools to ameliorate their agents’ productivity.

REMAX Integra is equipping its tech savvy millennial-aged agents with an update to its Launchpad by improving widgets for leads and listings, tracking goals, and adding new resources.

“The way the Launchpad is set up is with a series of widgets for leads and listings,” said Cameron Laird, REMAX Integra’s director of technology. “Any other sources coming in through the lead generation tool coming in all show up there. It increases activity to show where things are and makes it easy to find. The other thing we bring in is listings—as an agent with active listings on the market, you’ll have a centralized location to make it easy to find and to enhance them to add more photos of open houses.”

The resources application stores everything like listings presentations, logos, templates, documents and marketing materials. “It’s also great for content sharing on social media and for marketing campaigns,” said Laird. “We’ve stored it and made it super easy to use because we want agents to get value from what we’re providing.”

As any agent can attest, it is imperative for agents to track goals. REMAX Integra shadowed agents and identified pain points.
“Individually, you go in there and set goals for the year,” continued Laird. “Go in and pull information from the previous year so that you know your baseline and then you can set goals for yourself. The average transaction price and volume you move in a year and units you sell can be used by agents to set goals for themselves. As they move through the year and transact, we’re pulling the agent’s information and displaying it in a nice visual dashboard. As soon as Launchpad is opened up, you can see how you’re tracking on each goal with goa forecasting, too.”

Sotheby's International Realty Canada endeavours to equip its agents with the tools to service their on-the-go clients, but with an emphasis on expedience.

“As part of this, Sotheby’s International Realty builds cloud-based marketing and real estate practice management software in-house to give our agents and company tools and technology that are proprietary,” said Elaine Hung, Sotheby’s vice president, marketing and communications. “Over the past few years, we’ve launched and evolved technology like Folio, an online platform that offers a full, transparent view of all the sales and local and global marketing activity completed for a home. Clients can log in to Folio anywhere, anytime for documents, marketing summaries, live campaign performance updates. As another example, we also recently launched Agent ID, a cloud-based platform that gives every agent with our company a complimentary, customizable website that’s easy to set up and personalize, fully branded, and that seamlessly pulls in digital content to market their business and client listings.”