Last week we posted Part One of a listicle about what real estate agents are looking for in their brokers. We took to Reddit to find out the top four things that agents want, and then reached out to Kelvin Wong, Broker of Record at Living Realty, to weigh in about what his firm is doing to address these pain points. In the end, it all boiled down to four main criteria: training, support, quality leads and resources.
Read on to find out what else agents are looking for in a brokerage!
Quality Leads
“Lead Gen. If you have that you have something worthwhile. If you don’t, the frills won’t keep someone long…I left a brokerage that was free for me to be at and currently pay 200/mon and split 50 to gain leads.” –Reddit User: GTAHomeGuy
“Very unique, but the key is real leads. If you supply bad ones the average person will see that quickly and jump ship. So be realistic on the lead quality, and train them how to make the most of it.” —Reddit User: NewFloridaBroker
“Provide leads! A lot of newbies fall through the cracks because they can’t get that first good closing. My old brokerage had a Boomtown account and charged $50/lead, paid at closing.” — Reddit User: akaHAMBURGER
“I’ve found that the most valuable thing a brokerage can provide is leads. Only one brokerage I worked for provided good leads but I paid an extra 20% on those deals. Still, it was the best way for me to get started in the biz.” — Reddit User: seaboat90
“What’s of value to a realtor? LEADS. Get good at that and you’ll win.” — Reddit User: GTAHomeGuy
Kelvin: “We have many lead-generating programs, including an online web chat program (www.livingrealty.com to see our chat interface), web leads for new projects via our newhomes.livingrealty.com site (we get anywhere from forty to sixty leads a month from that). We also get walk-ins to most of our locations, and several of our branches are located in premium retail spaces (Mississauga, Yonge/Bloor and North Markham branches). The retail exposure encourages walk-in traffic.”
Resources
“Good social media management and content automation services.” — Reddit User: ecc10394
“An easy-to-use, extremely accessible online forms library that contains every individual document I may need while performing my job, but also contains “packages” of required documents for standard/common workflows. For example, I should be able to access the office cloud storage from anywhere, and download all the documents required for a new listing in just one click instead of searching for each individual document and downloading them separately. Agents shouldn’t have to go to 3 different document libraries to get the state-required documents, the MLS-required documents, and the office-required documents for a standard transaction.” — Reddit User: VelocifoxDigital
Kelvin: “Our tech program is pretty robust. We have a totally integrated central server. Agents are able to access the company network by standard windows account, but that account works for all office locations. Their files on the network drive are available from any agent workstation they log into. We have unified WiFi. If you log into WiFi at any of our branches, you will automatically login at any other branch you go to. This also applies to printing – agents have an account that tracks their print/photocopying and they have access to that account at any branch. All our branches are protected by a commercial grade SonicWall firewall and data is sent via encrypted VPNs between the branch offices. All our agent workstations and internal computers have commercial grade antivirus. We have an outsourced IT service provider monitoring our network and network traffic, who can detect and stop intrusions.”
We currently have a number of very active web properties:
Our corporate flag ship site that gets updated for new listings/featured listings, all the time:
news.livingrealty.com
Our blog and news site that gets new articles once or twice a week:
newhomes.livingrealty.com
Our new home pre-construction website where we profile new projects that come out and try to get public interest in registrations.
Our agents can also get their own personal and customizable web sites: This is a sample website: http://agents.livingrealty.com/
Do any of these points pique your curiosity of check your boxes? If so, feel free to reach out to Living for opportunities to learn more, or to get on board.
