In a fragmented industry, choosy consumers are demanding more from their REALTOR®.
For brokerages, the answer is anticipating the consumer’s needs and proactively responding—but for agents, carrying out those marching orders takes time, and away from what they do best: building relationships.
To address that challenge, booj and RE/MAX have developed a new productivity suite, centralizing CRM, lead gen, marketing, websites, and more, in one in-house platform—all built on a flexible foundation, and modifiable as needs shift.
The brand debuted the platform at R4 this week, where attendees demoed the product—almost one year to the day after acquiring booj, a Colorado-based developer. It is expected to be rolled out this summer, after a beta period this spring, and will come at no cost to its 32 company-owned regions in the U.S.
“This is just the beginning,” Adam Contos, CEO of RE/MAX, told attendees at the convention. “Our future vision is to build the foundation and leverage tech to connect consumers to RE/MAX agents and deliver the best experience possible. It’s about keeping people engaged so that your customers today remain your customers tomorrow.” (Related: ‘Delivering More’: RE/MAX Adapts Franchisee Services)
Convenience and a Customer-First Focus
With the new platform, affiliates can efficiently execute the necessary tasks in a transaction, and build their business through intelligent lead management, property search, websites, and more. Anchored by a core CRM, features include:
- Branded websites
- Lead gen/management
- Marketing
- Property search app
- Transaction management integrations
(For a preview of the suite, view this video.)
Affiliates are overwhelmingly positive about the solution—in alpha testing, 90 percent deemed it “easy to use.” With all components now streamlined, the focus is on nurturing relationships, elevating the experience for homebuyers and sellers.
“Real estate is on the cusp of a technological transformation,” says Ido Zucker, senior vice president of Development at RE/MAX, and also booj’s co-founder. “While it is permeating nearly every field in our business, at REMAX, we wanted to ensure the platform that we created met the needs of our agents first and foremost. In development, we wanted to be sure that the new suite of products transcended the technology tools agents need to run their business more efficiently and help them focus on what matters most: building the best relationships with their clients.”
Acquiring booj, which already had firm footing in the industry, was critical to developing the streamlined suite of tools—but the fold-in was key for RE/MAX in other ways, as well. With access to an in-house team, RE/MAX now has the ability to quickly pivot and integrate new offerings over time—a deliberate move away from what brands and brokers have historically invested in: retrofitting solutions from third-party vendors.
With the major overhaul, the brand has a firm hold on its technology today, and the ability to adapt down the line—additional competitive differentiators in the ongoing quest to the top.
“With this technology, we have anticipated and validated their needs, in order to remove inefficiencies and enable agents to perform at their highest level,” Zucker says. “This is only the first wave of innovation that will revolutionize the real estate industry and the players in it.”
For more information, please visit www.remax.com.
Suzanne De Vita is RISMedia’s online news editor. Email her your real estate news ideas at sdevita@rismedia.com.
