The world of real estate has been revolutionized by digital tools designed to streamline operations, automate everything, improve efficiency, and elevate success. Two platforms that have emerged as significant players in the field are Brokerkit and Seize the Market. Let’s dive into the specifics of what each platform offers and its unique strengths, along with a comparison to help you decide which one may better fit your needs.
Brokerkit: A Real Estate Recruitment Powerhouse
Brokerkit is a specialized recruitment platform for the real estate industry. It’s designed to make attracting, managing, and onboarding talent more efficient, allowing brokerages to focus on their core business. Brokerkit is, in essence, a comprehensive talent acquisition and management tool.
Strengths of Brokerkit:
- Specialized Functionality: Brokerkit’s niche focus allows it to provide tools specifically tailored for the recruitment process in real estate. This focused approach enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of your hiring process.
- User-friendly Interface: The simple and intuitive interface allows users to navigate the platform quickly, reducing the learning curve and boosting productivity.
- Data-Driven Recruitment: Brokerkit offers free detailed analytics and reporting features enabling data-driven decision-making and optimizing recruitment strategies.
- Automated Follow-ups: Consistent engagement with potential hires is required, and Brokerkit’s automatic follow-up feature ensures you never miss an opportunity.
- Integration with Other Platforms: Brokerkit easily integrates with popular job boards, email platforms, and LinkedIn, streamlining your recruitment process further.
- Focused Customer Support: Brokerkit’s specialized nature allows it to offer expert customer support tailored specifically to issues related to recruitment software.
Seize the Market: A Comprehensive Real Estate Business Solution
On the other hand, Seize the Market is a holistic business management platform for real estate companies. It provides tools required to manage multiple aspects of the business, from gained lead generation and customer relationship management to transaction management and marketing automation services.
Strengths of Seize the Market:
- Wide Range of Features: With its comprehensive suite of tools, Seize the Market can tackle multiple facets of running a real estate business, making it a one-stop solution.
- Holistic Approach: By addressing a broad spectrum of business functions, Seize the Market allows for a holistic and integrated approach to managing your business.
- Customer Relationship Management: Its robust CRM system enables businesses to better manage customer interactions and relationships, improving customer satisfaction and retention.
- Marketing Automation: Seize the Market’s marketing automation tools to make it easier for businesses to attract, nurture, and convert leads, thereby driving growth.
So, if you’re in the process of deciding which of these platforms to implement in your real estate business, consider your primary needs. If recruitment is your focus, Brokerkit’s specialized functionality, user-friendly interface, and data-driven approach could be a game-changer. On the other hand, if you’re a buyer looking for a comprehensive solution that can manage multiple facets of your business, Seize the Market could be the ideal choice.
Regardless of your chosen platform, remember to stay updated with recent changes and enhancements, ensuring that your system remains the most beneficial for your business.
Why Brokerkit Might Be Your Preferred Choice Over Seize the Market
The real estate industry is no stranger to the digital revolution. With countless software solutions flooding the market, picking the right tool that aligns with your unique business requirements can be challenging. Today, we delve into an in-depth comparison between two popular solutions — Brokerkit and Seize the Market.
Specialized Functionality – Focused on Recruitment
At its core, Brokerkit is a software solution designed explicitly for recruitment within the real estate sector. This laser-focused approach ensures that all features and functionalities are finely tuned to enhance and streamline your recruitment process. Unlike Seize the Market, which offers a range of generalized features, Brokerkit’s specialized tools can provide a more efficient recruitment experience.
User-Friendly Interface
Ease of use is a critical factor when selecting a software solution. With its simple, intuitive interface, Brokerkit makes navigation a breeze, allowing users to focus on what truly matters – recruiting the best talent for their business. On the other hand, Seize the Market, with its broad-spectrum functionalities, might present a steeper learning curve, especially for those who primarily require a recruitment solution.
Data-Driven Decision Making
Brokerkit excels in providing in-depth analytics and reporting that is crucial to refining your recruitment strategies. The ability to track communication with potential hires, response, and conversion rates sets Brokerkit apart from generalized platforms like Seize the Market. The platform also features much stronger pipeline tracking. This data-driven approach ensures that your recruitment strategies are constantly evolving and improving.
Automation – A Key to Efficiency
In recruitment, the importance of consistent follow-ups cannot be overstated. Brokerkit’s automated Smart-Campaigns 2.0 follow-up feature is a game-changer, ensuring your potential recruits are consistently engaged without demanding undue attention from your team. This level of automation, tailored for recruitment, might be lacking in a more generalized platform like Seize the Market.
Interoperability and Integration
In the modern digital landscape, seamlessly integrating with other platforms is invaluable. Brokerkit is a much more mature platform that allows easy integration with tools such as Relitix, email-sending apps, domains, and social media, ensuring your recruitment process is smooth, efficient, and aligned with your other business operations.
Expert Customer Support
Lastly, given Brokerkit’s specialized nature, you can expect precise and expert customer support for issues related to recruitment software. This could be a significant advantage over more generalized platforms like Seize the Market, where customer support might not be as specialized.
In conclusion, the decision between Brokerkit and Seize the Market hinges heavily on your business needs. If you plan to focus heavily on real estate recruitment, the points discussed make Brokerkit a strong contender. However, Seize the Market might be a worthy consideration for other parts of the business requiring broader tools. As with any business decision, staying updated with recent changes and enhancements to both platforms will ensure that your choice is well-informed and beneficial for your business.
10 Tips to Seize the Market as a Real Estate Broker
Today’s real estate market is highly competitive, requiring a concerted team effort to succeed. Brokerages must be able to identify and recruit the top real estate agents in their area if they want to seize the market. They also need to retain the best agents, which is vital for attracting top talent. In addition, technology is an increasingly important factor in distinguishing the best brokerages. The following ten tips describe critical strategies for building the capabilities to become a leading brokerage.
1. Learn what agents want in a brokerage.
A clear understanding of what draws agents to your brokerage is essential for staying ahead of the competition in recruiting. Real estate agents today want to work for a brokerage or office with a sterling track record that demonstrates professionalism, expertise, and leadership. It must also provide agents with growth opportunities.
The specific motivations that drive an agent to change jobs vary considerably. Still, they typically include a desire for more income, a change in a physical office location, or friction with a coworker. Furthermore, interested prospects have particular requirements when considering a job change. These could include higher commission splits or a desire to work with companies using the latest technology to improve their productivity.
Addressing these preferences requires you to listen carefully to candidates when interviewing them. It’s essential to probe these needs to discover their underlying motivation, which can significantly increase the interview length. However, this process can give you the insights to attract the most qualified applicants. Responding to these individual needs is also essential for retaining your current real estate agents.
2. Hire agents proactively.
Many brokerages make the mistake of only recruiting agents when they already have a vacancy they need to fill. Recruiting shouldn’t be a process that you only perform as needed because agents often leave on short notice if you want to seize the market. In this scenario, a brokerage remains at a competitive disadvantage while it struggles to find a replacement quickly. This practice also limits the possible candidates to agents actively looking for a job.
It’s much better to adopt a proactive approach that continually maintains a pipeline of agents interested in the right offer, even though they may not seek a new position. Continuous lead generation is generally good practice for most businesses, but real estate mainly depends on building relationships. CRM apps and lead gen software can help connect you with other real estate professionals, even when your brokerage isn’t actively recruiting. It allows you to lay the groundwork and keep in touch when you need them, making the recruitment process much less disruptive to your daily operations. In your follow-up with candidates, using your recruiting CRM app like Brokerkit and your lead gen scripts objections will help you close the top agents.
3. Use events to your advantage.
The real estate business often involves activities outside the office that allow networking with friends and colleagues. These include professional and social events, where you can make the personal connection needed to develop your recruiting pipeline. Brokerages should hold these events regularly, whether purely social or include discussions on professional topics such as training to gain continuing education credits. The social aspect of these events can be beneficial for establishing rapport with agents and building your brand. Real estate professionals in your area will soon discuss your brokerage, especially when you consistently show them a good time.
3. Use events to your advantage.
The real estate business often involves activities outside the office that provide an opportunity to network with friends and colleagues. These include both professional and social events, where you can make the personal connection needed to develop your recruiting pipeline. Brokerages should hold these events on a regular basis, whether they’re purely social, or include discussions on professional topics such as training to gain continuing education credits. The social aspect of these events can be particularly useful for establishing rapport with agents and building your brand. Real estate professionals in your area will soon be discussing your brokerage among themselves, especially when you consistently show them a good time.
4. Recruit talent at all experience levels.
It’s always a good idea to cast the widest possible net when recruiting top talent. Still, it’s essential to ensure that you attract agents with various experience levels. Agents who have been in the business for years are among the most skilled and effective, but you shouldn’t overlook up-and-coming rock stars waiting to be discovered. The primary challenge in recruiting agents from multiple experience levels is managing their different expectations. This process requires you to adjust your pitch for each set of requirements so that you can effectively target agents with a specific experience level.
For example, you can attract new agents with incentives such as brand-building, mentorship, and formal training if you want to seize the market. Agents at this level are particularly interested in acquiring the skills they’ll need to succeed in real estate over the long term. On the other hand, experienced agents are more likely to be attracted by a technologically current working environment, such as an office with a designated network administrator to troubleshoot and solve tech issues or solve them for them and who allows them to work more efficiently. Additionally, a private office with a larger workspace also helps experienced agents. Improved their productivity and also inspired them to deliver with a sense of pride in their work.
5. Market your company culture.
Culture is an intangible quality for a brokerage, but it’s crucial for determining whether it can retain the top talent that it hires. According to Corcoran Coaching, recruitment builds a team while culture keeps it running. The best real estate companies are more than just a group of brokers and agents; they’re a complete, cohesive unit. However, this is only possible when all team members are driven by shared values to achieve a common goal.
It’s crucial to view the development of traditional culture in your brokerage as an investment rather than an expense. Culture requires significant development time, so your company founder may not have one when you need to recruit agents. However, at least you must clearly understand your brand and mission to ensure your brokerage attracts suitable agents. Once your company culture is better defined, you can promote it more strongly as part of your overall recruitment effort. As a result, the agents best suited for your company will most likely approach you for employment.
6. Support the professional growth of your agents.
Providing agents with the means to further their career growth is a highly effective method of building your brokerage’s reputation to seize the market. This practice includes committing to continuous learning for your agents, one of the best long-term investments you can make for your brokerage. Strong support for ongoing education can motivate them to distinguish between merely competent work and career-defining excellence. Furthermore, promoting career growth demonstrates your brokerage’s expertise and leadership in the real estate industry.
First-hand mentorship is a vital part of professional education when consulting with your agents, as it helps establish the role of brokers as leaders and makes customers think of them more like a CEO. Their many years of experience in the industry provide a valuable source of information to share with customers and the next generation of agents. Mentorship thus helps your voice carries throughout your company as well as the real estate industry as a whole.
7. Develop your benefits package to seize the market.
Recruiting real estate agents inevitably involves a discussion of compensation. A brokerage often has guidelines determining what it can offer candidates, but a top producer will expect some flexibility on the commission split and services provided. One option for improving compensation is to offer referral fees to employees who find new hires.
Brokerages can also offer incentives to go beyond financial compensation. If feasible, hiring half your agents as half a total number of W2 employees and offering benefits like health insurance is desirable to agents with years of experience. Unconventional ideas for sweetening the buyer’s pot include subscriptions to a homebuyer magazine and personalized gifts.
The benefits package provides an excellent opportunity for companies to devise creative ways to recruit real estate agents. However, a clear understanding of what agents want from working with your firm should always drive out-of-the-box thinking for financial benefits and other perks and services that you may offer your employees. This approach is often crucial to attracting top real estate agents.
8. Invest in technology to seize the market.
Technology is vital for virtually all transactions in all markets in the modern business world. Still, its use is particularly prominent in real estate markets for real estate brokers, even if you are a mortgage broker. Essential functions in real estate markets, such as buying and selling properties, routinely involve using online tools and resources, as do the evaluations from a real estate appraiser. Technology also plays a vital role in the internal operations of your brokerage by helping them to build, develop and maintain their agent teams.
Impressing agents with your brokerage requires an ongoing investment in relevant technology. The different systems needed to remain competitive and productive in today’s real estate industry are constantly changing, so keeping up with the latest technology should remain a priority for your brokerage. Evaluating a new tool should always focus on its potential for increasing a brokerage’s automation and results in terms of production.
Technology also plays a critical role in facilitating home sales, as traditional marketing materials, such as photographs, are no longer sufficient to catch the attention of prospective buyers. For example, video clips and apps that provide virtual tours of homes are quickly becoming the standard for presenting listings. Social media is also a common method of showing listings due to its significant influence on people buyer’s daily lives.
Both current employees and prospects will appreciate a brokerage’s investment in technology that supports home sales. They’ll feel empowered by solutions designed to make their lives easier by allowing them to work more efficiently. Technology is beautiful to young agents who have grown up surrounded by computer technology. Specific solutions of particular benefit to real estate agencies include accounting, customer relationship management (CRM), and document management software.
Accounting Solutions
Brokerages in the US often deal with annual sales worth hundreds of millions of dollars, requiring sophisticated tools to protect them from human error. Accounting software helps brokerages streamline their bookkeeping process while ensuring it remains accurate and consistent. According to top broker Christine Smith, Scalability and automation are important capabilities of accounting software, especially for rapidly growing brokerages.
CRM Solutions to Seize the Market
Sales CRM software helps agents respond quickly to the needs and concerns of their clients, especially for agents with a large client list. This software stores profiles and automates many tasks that agents would otherwise be to perform manually. CRM software thus keeps agents productive, even on their busiest days.
Recruiting & Retention CRMs help you manage all of your potential recruits including the outreach and follow-up with them. Being able to manage your communications and follow up with your own agents in a Retention CRM will also help keep your agents successful, content and stick around.
Document Management Software
Processing legal documents and other types of paperwork remain a constant challenge in the real estate industry, making document management software a requirement in any brokerage. This software is particularly beneficial to high-performing agents who routinely deal with multiple clients at the same time, even when they only have temporary access to that software.
9. Build a strong online presence.
Accounting Solutions
Brokerages in the US often deal with annual sales worth hundreds of millions of dollars, requiring sophisticated tools to protect them from human error. Accounting software helps brokerages streamline their bookkeeping process while ensuring accuracy and consistency. According to top broker Christine Smith, Scalability and automation are essential accounting software capabilities, especially for rapidly growing brokerages.
CRM Solutions to Seize the Market
Sales CRM software helps agents respond quickly to the needs and concerns of their clients, especially for agents with an extensive client list. This software stores profiles and automates many tasks that agents would otherwise be to perform manually. CRM software thus keeps agents productive, even on their busiest days.
Recruiting & Retention CRMs help you manage your potential recruits, including the outreach you send and follow-up with them. Managing your communications and following up with your agents in a Retention CRM app will also help you grow and keep your agents successful, deliver well content, and stick around.
Document Management Software
Processing legal documents, forms, and other types of paperwork remains a constant challenge in the real estate industry, making document management software a requirement in any brokerage. This software is particularly beneficial to high-performing agents who must routinely deal with multiple clients simultaneously, even when they only have temporary access to that software.
9. Build a strong online presence.
Enhancing your brand’s online public visibility can be an inexpensive method of using technology to benefit your brokerage to seize the market. Hiring prospects and customers typically makes extensive use of the internet to learn more about the real estate agencies and companies they deal with. Maintaining a web property that creates a solid and lasting impression on employees public, and clients are the first step in this process.
Making your brokerage’s app and online presence stand out is also essential for attracting new agents. You can accomplish this goal by providing each agent with their own Internet Data Exchange (IDX) app or website, which effectively boosts their careers in the the current Internet-based real estate market. Agents with their online platforms managed by the brokerage free of tech challenges like malware are thus able to lay the foundation required for building their brand as real estate professionals.
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is an effective method of driving traffic to a website. This approach allows you to gain visibility by targeting a specific real estate market. It also lets you control your marketing spend because you only pay when a prospect clicks on the ad. In addition, a brokerage’s online presence isn’t limited to its website. For example, you can increase your exposure and reach many agents by establishing user profiles on multiple social media platforms. In your social posts and ads, you might want to link to a landing page to capture your leads, such as from an agent recruiting CRM like Brokerkit.
Additional strategies for maintaining top search results include optimizing your website’s user experience for mobile devices. A streamlined user interface is essential for any business website, as is creating and maintaining quality content. Your brokerage’s website is ideal for showcasing its values and expertise. Update your content regularly to ensure it remains current with technological advances and market changes. You should also invest in search engine optimization (SEO) to confirm your company’s website has a high search ranking for relevant keywords in real estate.
10. Leverage a recruiting and retention Real Estate CRM to seize the market.
Recruiters and managing brokers in a brokerage that lacks a Candidate lead Relationship Management (CRM) solution will eventually burn out and grow out due to managing their candidate-lead relationships manually. An overload of focus on manually following up and reaching out to candidates can flatten your growth, making investing in good CRM software essential.
A CRM solution is highly effective in helping you seize the market for recruiting because it allows sourcing teams and their hiring managers to create talent pools, whether those candidates are passive or actively seeking a new position. The CRM is used to create a productive talent management platform. In this environment, the CRM maintains the recruitment workflow, assists in sourcing candidates, and automates half the recruitment process, while also serving as the leading platform for managing your candidates.
Specific functions of a CRM include the following:
- Lead management
- Contact management
- Recruiting pipeline management
- Integrations
- Outreach
- Task Management
Lead Management
Recruiters can use a CRM to manage their leads from a single location, although it isn’t the only system to do so. It lets them easily control, track and move their leads through the recruitment funnel. A recruiting team member should try out this feature of a CRM before making a purchase decision.
Contact Management
An inability to locate and message a candidate on a busy day is one of the worst things that can happen to a sales team or a recruiter, as it can also fail to hire a top agent. Contact management is one of the key features required of a CRM solution used to recruit agents. It’s, therefore, essential to ensure that the solution’s layout organization and customization of fields are helpful for recruiters.
A CRM solution should also be able to support you to help you automate how you track and save conversations with your team and prospects. Check the solution’s ability to add notes and retrieve the entire conversation history for each candidate with a single search. This feature is essential for preventing confusion, especially for recruiters who handle many prospects.
Recruiting Pipeline Management to Seize the Market
A CRM like Brokerkit that manages the recruiting pipeline is essential for recruiters with many candidates since the recruiter will otherwise spend much time working the candidates manually. These pipelines should be highly customizable, as it allows recruiters to create the system that best assists them in closing deals with candidates. Brokerages can also use this feature to create an overview of each candidate’s status as they travel through the pipeline, ensuring they don’t fall through any cracks in the workflow.
Integrations
Recruiters should be able to integrate CRM apps like Brokerkit with their existing sales tools, allowing them to schedule meetings and manage interviews more efficiently. This feature should also provide recruiters with reminders for upcoming events like webinars. This integration with other sales applications is thus vital for maintaining daily recruiting activities.
Outreach
Managing your outreach message and delivering it to candidates in the same system where you manage your contacts, pipeline, and tasks is critical. You want a system where you can call, text, email, and set appointments with your prospects, customers, and candidates in one place, like Brokerkit.
Task Management
Task management becomes more critical to brokerages and their recruiting teams as their business grows. The best CRMs allow recruiters to manage their tasks for candidate follow-up in one place. These solutions with retention CRM functionality also help brokerages manage tasks related to onboarding and ongoing management of agents. Quick and efficient onboarding with detailed task plans is critical to ramp up new agents to be productive so they are successful and stick around.
Summary of How to Seize the Market
The increasingly competitive real estate industry means that brokerages must make more significant efforts to recruit top agents. Achieving this goal requires a clear understanding of what motivates agents, which can change dramatically as they gain skills and experience. Technology is another area that brokerages need to consider carefully when developing their recruitment initiatives. The many capabilities of a real estate CRM like Brokerkit make this technology particularly useful for making recruiting efforts more successful and elevating your brokerage’s agent growth and production.