4 Essential Tools for Real Estate Brokers and Agents

The real estate industry has its unique ebb and flow throughout the year, and smart brokers know how to leverage these natural market rhythms to their advantage. As the year winds down, Q4 presents a golden opportunity to make strategic decisions to set you up for success in the coming year. Let's dive into why the final quarter of the year is the prime time for real estate brokerages to invest in a new CRM system.

In the age of data-driven decision-making, businesses, including real estate brokerages, rely on accurate reporting more than ever. Accurate, in-depth reporting isn't just a tool—it's a strategy that can set brokerages apart in a highly competitive industry like real estate. Understanding and leveraging reporting is crucial for brokerages looking to stand out and perhaps even win more awards and gain more clients.

The landscape is always evolving in an industry as complex as real estate. Real estate brokers are not just contending with fluctuating market conditions but also with managing the back office, operations, and tech stack. A disjointed, multi-software approach may seem workable but is far from ideal. This is why an all-in-one solution like TotalBrokerage can be a game-changer in terms of both cost-effectiveness and operational efficiency.

This blog post delves into the difficulties brokers and agents face and how user-friendly software can be a game-changer for their success. Offering the real estate industry the most comprehensive sales and management platform, our expert team understands how to tackle the most pressing challenges, and we’ve developed software that revolutionizes how real estate professionals work.

To take your brokerage to the next level, you must graduate from using disparate spreadsheets to track leads, accelerate deal flows, and calculate commissions. Two of the most critical, and often most expensive, functionalities your brokerage needs to remain competitive: CRM and Accounting.

Findings by T3 Sixty, the real estate brokerage industry’s leading advisory firm, reveal that the average real estate brokerage uses 12 different software solutions across 82 categories to run their businesses. Brokerages are forced to string together key software features such as CRM, Transaction Management, E-Signature, Marketing, and more. Navigating between disparate systems makes simple day-to-day tasks far more complicated than necessary.

‍The residential real estate market is hitting yet another fever pitch in recent years. Last year, the industry boomed as home prices soared with low mortgage rates. These lower, more attractive, interest rates previously offered prospective home buyers more purchasing power. Although the market conditions of 2023 so far look completely different from 2022, brokerages still have the opportunity to drive growth and maximize success. How? Through effective agent onboarding. Keep reading to learn how your brokerage can onboard newly acquired or hired agents to improve your business performance, even during turbulent times. 

How do real estate agents become more recognizable in their community? What steps do you take to ensure you're the first person clients call when they are thinking about buying or selling a home?

TotalBrokerage now has yet another first-class integration with Utility Concierge. Utility Concierge is a one-stop shop for setting up utilities and home services. They save your clients time, money, and stress while giving them access to the best rates on utility services in their area. Utility concierge has helped more than 200,000 home buyers during the moving process. Utility Concierge is a free extension of your team and calls clients on your agents’ behalf as a gift for using them as their agent.

WAVV Dialer® Integration TotalBrokerage integrates directly with WAVV, a service that provides power dialing capabilities. Prospecting has always been a numbers game. Prospecting and calling using WAVV allows brokers and agents to easily make more calls. With Wavv, you can spend your time more strategically and get the statistics to show which results are successful and which are not. No more scratching off numbers with a pen or tracking your contact through a notepad.

Is your Brokerage growing? Are you or your agents still storing important documents in your email? There are a plethora of reasons why this is a bad idea for your brokerage. Security Risks: Today more than ever, brokerages need to be careful with their data storage. Real Estate Brokerages are responsible for handling important, personal information such as: Names Addresses Emails Telephone numbers Bank and credit card details Credit Information Keeping all of this information stored in your email is a huge security risk for both your brokerage and your clients’ privacy.

Stop wasting time and money juggling multiple platforms to run your real estate brokerage’s back office. Stop overpaying for transaction management programs that only do one thing. TotalBrokerage is hands down the best Real Estate Transaction Management Software Solution. Our system allows you to view and track every transaction that occurs in your brokerage. You can create and store all necessary forms and documents in our “Smart Forms Library” that is viewable from any device.

Staying organized as a real estate broker or agent is essential for increasing efficiency and improving profitability. Keeping track of properties, clients, leads, transactions, forms, deadlines, emails, etc. can be tough especially if your brokerage’s back office platform is not set up properly. Without a robust and organized back office platform for your real estate brokerage, it is easy for you and your agents to lose track of leads, dates, etc.

An easy to use, scalable, and integrative CRM is essential for real estate brokerages and agents. Real Estate Brokerages and Agents need a powerful CRM to stay connected to customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability. CRM’s are essential for staying in touch with clients throughout the entire process and keeping track of the process from start to finish. Why should the BROKER provide the CRM for their agents? Establishing a company-wide, consistent stream of processes for a real estate brokerage is extremely important to increase efficiency, track leads, save time, and avoid losing clients.

Real Estate compliance is complex and for some, hard to understand. Real estate laws are defined differently depending on state, region and jurisdiction. With TotalBrokerage’s All-in-One software solution, maintaining compliance has never been easier for your brokerage. How TotalBrokerage Makes Compliance Simple Maintaining proper records and safely storing all documentation is very important when it comes to real estate compliance. Our software keeps your brokerage’s and clients’ data, and personal information safe and organized, avoiding any violations.

TotalBrokerage is happy to announce that we are partnered with Placester to handle all of your front office website needs. With this partnership, you can set up and manage your website through Placester while seamlessly tracking your leads in TotalBrokerage. Get the Website You’ve Always Wanted with Placester Placester allows you to create modern, professional website designs custom built for your business. Placester offers a 100% codeless website builder, on-demand services marketplace, hundreds of integrations and the ability to grant admin access to the collaborator of your choice.

Many Real Estate Brokers’ and Agents’ back office tech stack is different programs cobbled together for a CRM, Transaction Management, E-Signature, Marketing, etc. This makes simple day to day tasks more complicated than they should be. Consolidating your back office with an all-in-one back office software solution, like TotalBrokerage, can drastically increase your brokerage’s productivity while making life easier for you and your agents. Cost Piecing together multiple back office software solutions is expensive.

As a real estate broker, understanding and setting up agents’ commission plans properly is key for the overall success of your brokerage and your agents. There are multiple commission structures that are commonly used in the real estate industry that you should be aware of; however, as the industry evolves, so does the creativity of innovative new commission structures Fixed Splits Fixed splits are the most simple to understand and are the most commonly used.

As a real estate broker, the role of a transaction coordinator may not seem important in the beginning. As you establish your business, it may even be valuable to you to manage transactions yourself, as a learning tool. However, as your brokerage develops and grows its client base, transaction coordinators become a valuable and necessary form of support and process management. They can ease the workload of real estate brokers and ensure all processes run more swiftly and harmoniously.

E-signatures have transformed how many industries do business in recent years and the same goes for real estate. With so many documents to approve and various parties to liaise with, property management has become that much easier with electronic signatures. Real estate brokerages gain various benefits from using electronic signature tools for their processes. They’re convenient, immediate, and easy to use. Let’s take a look at the benefits of such tools for your brokerage and what our solution can do for you.

In an era of constant digital innovation and advancing technology, every real estate brokerage needs a reliable tech stack. There are an expensive number of real estate tools available on the market, all serving important roles. This includes platforms for CRMs, marketing, sales, transaction management, and much more. With so many options, it can be a challenge to find trustworthy and effective solutions that add value to your business. In this article, we explain what a tech stack is and why real estate brokerages need it.

Real estate technology has completely transformed how the home buying and selling process works. It has changed how buyers or renters can interact with sellers and landlords. Moreover, it has enhanced how real estate brokerages make these buyer/seller interactions and transactions a reality. How Real Estate Technology Helps Your Customers These are some of the ways that technology for real estate has improved the home buying process in a way that benefits customers:

Having a separate real estate back office from your company’s real estate website is a valuable approach to your website management and overall business organizational structure. A well-managed front end website is the consumer facing home of your real estate business. It is one of the first places buyers and sellers connect to you when considering your company for their business. Your back office is where you actually run the business.

Managing real estate transactions is lengthy, time-consuming work. It’s not as simple as just signing over the deed and writing checks. The process requires extensive document control, back-and-forth communication and negotiations, inspections, financial management and so much more. Customers don’t want to deal with snail-like service and demand everything in an expeditious manner. They want to wrap up transaction issues with minimal delays, whether they’re buying or selling. This is particularly true in a time when tech makes it possible to get most things done in no time at all.

Want to know how to ensure your real estate brokerage becomes a success story? It’s not as hard as you might think. There are a few simple things you can do today to take your brokerage to the next level. Below, we list five things to get you and your brokerage going in the right direction, upgrading you to real estate royalty in no time!

Onboarding agents can be a complicated, time consuming, inconvenient process for both brokerages and agents if the right systems are not put in place. The paperwork alone can be overwhelming! Having a digital, straight-forward, painless onboarding process for new agents is a great way to make a positive first impression on new team members and increases agent retention rates. Easy to Use Checklists & Agent Onboarding Automation With TotalBrokerage, you can automate checklists and the entire agent onboarding process to digitally request the correct information, so the agent can complete it on their time and from the convenience of their mobile device or computer, streamlining the process and ensuring nothing is missed.

Real Estate transactions can be long-drawn out processes that usually include a plethora of phone calls, emails, texts, documents, signatures, monetary exchanges, inspections, etc. Keeping track of all this can be overwhelming, especially if you do not have the proper back office systems in place. Give Your Agents an Edge The best transaction management softwares provide agents and brokers the tools they need to stay on top of every step and activity of every transaction.

4 Essential Tools for Real Estate Brokers and Agents CRMs (Client Relationship Management Systems) Keeping track of clients and all of their corresponding information can be overwhelming for many agents. A comprehensive CRM is an essential tool for Real Estate professionals to manage and grow their sphere of influence. These systems remove the stress of trying to remember “Did I call that person back?” because with most modern CRM’s, that information is logged for future reference.

Growth and Agent Retention Most Real Estate Brokers are looking to grow their agent count, volume, average sales price, and business as a whole. However, not every Real Estate Brokerage has the proper systems and procedures in place to facilitate this growth efficiently. Brokerages that offer user-friendly, convenient processes and organized systems to their agents usually have better agent retention. Focusing on agent retention is a crucial skill that top real estate brokers do to facilitate growth by keeping their current agents happy.

Ylopo Integration and Partnership Does your Real Estate Brokerage use Ylopo for lead generation, advertising, or front-facing websites? TotalBrokerage is happy to announce that we have partnered with Ylopo to easily integrate all of your leads into TotalBrokerage’s comprehensive back office solution. Ylopo’s Lead Generation Social Lead Generation: Ylopo uses unique Dynamic Ads technology to upload millions of home listings directly into Facebook and Instagram effectively showing the right homes to the right people at the right times resulting in the highest quality homebuyer and homeseller leads.

With soaring home prices being accompanied by climbing mortgage rates, the real estate market is currently in a very unique position. Many are comparing the current situation to the 2008 housing bubble, but the foundation of the current market is much more stable than 2008 with borrowers being more qualified than ever and a tremendous amount of cash buyers as well. It is hard to predict what will happen in the coming years and months; however, there are a few things that you can do as a real estate broker to prepare for this.

Most Real Estate Brokers are looking to grow their agent count, volume, average sales price, and their business as a whole. However, not every Real Estate Brokerage has the proper systems and procedures in place to facilitate this growth efficiently. What are some things you can do to ensure your brokerage is prepared for growth? Keep your current agents happy. Agents are the lifeblood of every real estate brokerage and are key to building a strong foundation for your brokerage moving forward.