The Experts at Real Estate

How Social Media Can Help Recruit Top-Quality Agents

by the Experts at Real Estate Express

As a broker, you are always on the lookout for that next special real estate agent to join your team. Fortunately, there are inexpensive ways to get the word out that you’re hiring. One of the most effective, and often underused, methods is social media. We talked to Tina Lapp, president of Hondros College, Real Estate Express’ sister school in Ohio, to learn more about how brokers can utilize social media for recruitment. WE’RE HIRING!

1. Attract New Talent on Facebook

“If your brokerage doesn’t already have a Facebook page, it’s about time you got one,” says Lapp. Having a Facebook page is a great way to promote yourself to potential buyers and attract future employees. “Even if you don’t post regularly to your firm’s page, which you should, merely having a Facebook page opens you up to a wealth of resources.”

Job board Did you know that Facebook has a job board now? They do, and it’s growing in popularity for job seekers and employers alike. You can see what your Facebook job posting will look like on both a desktop and mobile phone before you publish it.

Facebook ads Facebook ads are a great way to get your content seen. Facebook has a robust Business Center where you can find helpful articles and guides to help you get the most bang for your buck.

2. Recruit Seasoned Professionals on LinkedIn

When people think of online networking, LinkedIn is often top-ofmind. Lapp asserts, “LinkedIn is so much more than a way to connect with your current and former colleagues; it’s where a lot of people look for work opportunities.” Here are some quick tips for recruiting via LinkedIn:

Post a job Just like Facebook, LinkedIn is a great way to get the word out that you are hiring at your brokerage firm. Although you have to pay to post a job to LinkedIn, you only pay when a candidate sees your job post, and you can set the budget for how much you are willing to spend.

Poach from competitor brokerages Real estate is a competitive business, for both listings and employees. Reaching out to a real estate agent that you know could add value to your team via LinkedIn can be a great way to recruit agents.

3. Recruit Potential Real Estate Agents on YouTube

YouTube is the fasting-growing social media channel in the United States, with 73 percent of adults using it. In many households, YouTube has replaced cable television. Thanks to inventions like TiVo, the only television ads most people are watching these days are on Superbowl Sunday.

Luckily, you don’t have to spend millions to get your ads seen. There are many ways to advertise on YouTube, but one of the easiest is with overlay ads. You can learn more about YouTube advertising on Google’s support website.

“Of course, attracting the right candidates is only the first step,” Lapp concludes. “To get them on board, you need to convince them that your brokerage will help them achieve their career goals. Benefits like mentorship opportunities can make your brokerage stand out from the crowd.” RE

Real Estate Express is one of the nation’s premier online real estate schools, providing pre- and postlicensing courses, continuing education courses, and professional development to hundreds of thousands of real estate agents across the country. Real Estate Express, along with its sister schools McKissock Learning, Superior School of Real Estate, Allied Schools, The Institute for Luxury Home Marketing and Hondros Education Group, helps real estate professionals achieve sustainable success throughout each stage of their real estate career. Learn more at realestateexpress.com.

It’s Your Data—You Should Be Able to Use It A case for open APIs in the real estate industry

Commentary by Scott Oakley

As a real estate brokerage and an agent, you rely heavily on technology—maybe even more than you realize.

How’s this for a quick list? You rely on your MLS and all of its technology vendors to house your data and feed your listings to hundreds of websites to get to consumers’ eyeballs. You store and manage your customers in a CRM. You enter your contracts and lead data into a transaction management system. Then there’s the eSignature platform and the accounting software—and last (at least for now), you probably have a single sign-on to combine all these platforms into one pretty package. Phew. That’s a lot of tech!

All of this technology is completely dependent on data management. The easier it is to get your data where you want it and how you want it, the easier it is to run your business.

Let’s be very clear here. This is your data. These are your customers. You have spent hundreds—if not thousands of dollars—and years to nurture and serve these clients. When your data goes into a system, it’s still your data, right? Shouldn’t you have access to that data when you want, where you want and at any time you want?

The answer is a profound yes.

These are your clients, and this is your data. Don’t let any technology vendor tell you differently.

Most technology vendors are getting paid by you to help you with your data flow and solve a problem in your business. Maybe you want to tie in a print campaign, a closing gift subscription or a utility concierge service. All of those vendors need your data to automate the experience.

To make this more efficient for you and a more seamless experience for your clients, the industry must embrace open APIs. When you want your data, it should be there. You should be able to innovate how you see fit.

MooveGuru is a technology vendor that provides 1,000 brokerages and 60,000 REALTORS® with moving concierge technology. We work with innovative real estate technology favorites like Dotloop, DocuSign, SkySlope, BackAgent, MoxiWorks, appFiles, Profit Power and 40-plus others. All have open integrations with MooveGuru. Why? So, together, we can support your brokerage and agents to innovate and acquire more business.

We support 90 percent of all brokerages in the U.S.

For the remaining 10 percent, well, the truth is, there are some technology vendors that still hold your data captive. These companies make choices for your business without your interests in mind. They make data integrations cumbersome based on relationships they have formed to profit on your data.

Trust me, we see it all the time. More than 100 brokerages that want to work with MooveGuru have to curb their progress because they’re waiting on integrations from existing vendors who are hoarding their data.

So the question I have for the industry is: Why doesn’t every real estate technology vendor have an open API so the brokerage and its REALTORS® are empowered to make decisions to best run their businesses?

As a veteran to the real estate industry, and the founder of several real estate technology companies, this is a question and subject I’m passionate about. I’d love to hear your perspective. Reach me directly at soakley@mooveguru.com. RE

Scott Oakley is founder and CEO of MooveGuru. For more information, please visit www.mooveguru.com.

2 Trends From 2020 That Will Carry Over Into Next Year

Commentary by Allen Alishahi

This has been a year of upheaval for real estate, but now that we are nearing the end of 2020, we can look back and see how we made it through after adapting quickly and becoming more flexible in how we do business. Looking ahead, I see two trends that emerged in 2020 that will continue into next year.

First-Time Buyer Expertise Will Be Crucial Real estate made it through the pandemic with the help of multiple forces that seemed to align all at the right time. Technology, of course, was the foundation that let us all continue doing business, while low interest rates made it feasible for more buyers to obtain a mortgage. But it was the segment of buyers at the lower price tiers that helped buoy the market enough to see us through. The same is going to be true for next year, too. First- and second-time buyers are much more comfortable with technology, so compared to older buyers, watching an agent give a video tour is not likely to turn them away from buying a house. Also, since they most likely aren’t looking for a forever home, they understand that it doesn’t have to meet all their criteria, so they may not feel the need to visit the house in person.

As a side note, these video tours

can save agents time, proving beneficial even if you aren’t required to use them due to social distancing rules becoming more relaxed in your area. Since video tours let you “show” buyers a home they may not necessarily want to buy, your buyers can come to that conclusion without taking up your time with an in-person showing.

Mortgage Expertise Will Be What Closes Deals When it comes to first- or secondtime buyers, obtaining a mortgage tends to take more time and requires more advice from a professional. This is where we can demonstrate our added value by letting buyers know about mortgage products they may not be aware of—or those they don’t think they’re eligible for. Low down payment mortgages are going to become popular options for lenders, and I predict that we’ll see even more “professional mortgage” products come on the market. These are loans where someone nearing the end of their training for a high-income profession, such as physicians or lawyers, will be approved for larger loan balances based on their predicted income a few months down the road. I’ve seen more than a few young buyers commit to buying a home sooner than they thought they could based on these types of products.

With interest rates staying low for at least another year, we can expect even more buyers at lower price tiers to try to buy a home this coming spring. Even if they won’t have as much of a down payment saved up, they will have higher purchasing power based on the lower rates. Marketing your services to younger buyers will be one way to see success next year. Knowing the mortgage options that are available as well as you know your neighborhoods is another. RE

Allen Alishahi is president of ShelterZoom, the technology company behind DocuWalk. For more information, please visit www.docuwalk.com.

Focus and Finish Lines

Commentary by Darryl Davis, CSP

What you focus on can either empower or disempower you. The awesome thing is that we get to choose what gets our attention, even in a year that has thrown us many curveballs.

Some of you may already know that I ran the New York City Marathon. This was no easy feat for a man like me. I’m not into sports, in case you couldn’t tell, but what I was into was my commitment to helping kids who were battling Leukemia. Once I made the commitment, I was in. But once I truly understood what running 26.2 miles looked like in reality, I became overwhelmed. That’s too far! I’ll have a heart attack! At least that’s what I thought at first. (Wouldn’t you?)

It made me want to quit before I even started. Ever feel that way? Like maybe a thousand times or more this year?

The key is to break your goals into little milestones.

I often say, “inch by inch, life’s a cinch. Yard by yard, it’s hard.” Whether you’re running a marathon, starting a career, working through a pandemic, learning a new technology, breaking down a big goal, or running whatever kind of personal or professional race you’ve got going on in your life, keep that in mind. When we focus on the big gap between where we are and where we want to be, we can disempower ourselves and become overwhelmed—sometimes to the point of quitting.

When we focus on the little wins along the way, and the commitment that made us want to get in “the race” to start with, we fuel our energy and drive, empowering ourselves to reach our finish lines.

That’s my wish for you as we head out of this year and into the next. To keep your eyes on the prize and focus on the goals, not the gaps.

I know markets are changing, the competition is fierce and a lot of you feel that sense of anxiety creeping in. You’ve got this. And we’ve got your back. One of the most powerful tools we offer is our weekly coaching calls. Every single Monday morning at 11 a.m. Eastern time, we field your calls and your questions, helping agents empower themselves to stay in their races and come out winners. RE

Darryl Davis has spoken to, trained and coached more than 100,000 real estate professionals around the globe. He is a best-selling author for McGraw-Hill Publishing, and his book, “How to Become a Power Agent® in Real Estate,” tops Amazon’s charts for most-sold book to real estate agents. He is the founder of the Next Level® real estate training system The Power Program®, which has proven to help agents double their production over their previous year. Davis is currently hosting free weekly webinars to help agents navigate the new real estate reality. To learn more, visit www.DarrylSpeaks. com/Online-Training.

Trestle: Your Gateway to Unified Listing Feeds

Commentary by Amy Gorce

The promise of data sharing standards has always been increased efficiency. Less friction, less effort, less cost. In practice, it hasn’t always worked that way, especially for larger brokerages trying to get their own data back from different multiple listing organizations (MLOs) in neighboring markets.

When CoreLogic® launched Trestle™ in 2016, our grand vision was to deliver RESO-compliant listing data feeds to every member of our industry’s ecosystem. From MLOs to brokers and technology providers, Trestle’s mission was to be North America’s premier destination for listing, public record and other property data.

It’s taken a while, but our goal to deliver listing data from multiple MLOs to brokers in a single feed has come to fruition in 2020. That’s right: unified multi-MLO feed is now a reality for brokers. It’s a major upgrade for Trestle, and our broker clients are thrilled. With unified feeds of broker back-office data, IDX and VOW data, and public record data, Trestle has truly realized the vision of “one hub, one feed” for brokerages everywhere.

It’s an understatement to say this is a gamechanger for our broker clients. For brokers that operate in several markets served by different MLOs, amalgamating their own listing data has always been a bit like stitching together Frankenstein’s monster. Trestle does the work automatically, saving brokers all that time and effort. If their MLOs are part of the Trestle network, brokers can get everything they need in a single RESO platinum-certified data feed.

Eliminating back-office inefficiency is a chief goal of Trestle. For both brokers and technology companies, Trestle takes what used to be a frustrating job ingesting, normalizing and storing data—and makes it elegant and simple. Many senders, one receipt.

If you want to add efficiency to your operations, sign up for Trestle today and see which of your MLOs are part of the Trestle network. If any of them aren’t, give them a call and ask them to join—it costs them nothing, and the benefits are enormous. Today, Trestle has nearly a million active listings flowing through it—more than half of the National Association of REALTOR’S® housing inventory—and that number is just going to continue to grow. RE

CORELOGIC, the CoreLogic logo, and TRESTLE are trademarks of CoreLogic, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders.

Amy Gorce is principal, Business Development at CoreLogic. For more information, please visit www.corelogic.com.