March 2016 $6.95

Transcription

1 March 2016 $6.95

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3 by Nick Renda Realogy s Launch of Integrated Technology Platform Set to Propel its Brands Forward In August 2014, Realogy prevailed in its bold strategy to pursue Emeryville, Calif.- based ZipRealty, acquiring the innovative brokerage business and Zip s proven end-to-end technology platform for $167 million. Following fast on the heels of that move, Realogy has been rolling out ZipRealty s proprietary Zap SM technology to the brokers, agents and consumers of the CENTURY 21, Coldwell Banker, ERA and Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate franchise brands. Today, more than 500 Realogy franchise brokerages and 25,000-plus affiliated sales associates are up and running on the Zap platform. That s where the real story begins After months of casually looking at homes online, a potential homebuyer decides it s time to get serious about buying a home. She begins searching for homes in a specific area, looking for properties that have a specific number of bedrooms and bathrooms and that fit into her price range. Spotting a couple of interesting possibilities, she saves those homes with the intention of coming back to them later, maybe visiting them if they re open this weekend. Later that same day, a real estate agent with knowledge of the consumer s search area gets an alert on her mobile device about the woman s search activity and is advised that it s time to reach out to this potential buyer. Before the consumer even thinks to call an agent about getting into those houses, the agent is contacting the potential buyer, armed with a sneak-peek window into the early stages of the consumer s homesearch process. That s the power of Zap. It s not as dramatic as Clark Kent emerging from a phone booth as Superman, but Zap does give mild-mannered real estate agents and brokers real superpowers when it comes to identifying potential customers and accurately anticipating their service needs. There are many real estate agent-technology platforms out there, but none operates quite like Zap. According to Lanny Baker, chief executive officer of ZipRealty, Zap is a fully integrated system that gives brokers and agents the ability to understand, anticipate and serve their clients needs. The power of Zap is that it provides the agent the ability to know who needs help, what help they need, and how to deliver that help even before they reach out for it, Baker says. The Realogy-Zap story began in early During a meeting of Realogy s franchise brand senior leadership, a strategic recommendation was made to improve the company s value proposition for its affiliated brokers by offering a turnkey technology solution. We identified what we wanted before it existed, says Alex Perriello, president and chief executive officer, Realogy Franchise Group. It was a grand idea, but the technology didn t exist at the time. So the question was, Do we build it, do we license it, or do we buy it? There was a lot of conversation and analysis surrounding those options, until we previewed the Zap platform several months later. ENTER ZIPREALTY Enter ZipRealty and its new Zap platform. A system 15 years in the making, it offered everything that Perriello and his team were looking for. After doing their due diligence, it was determined that buying the company and its technology was the best way to go. In August 2014, Realogy acquired ZipRealty for $167 million, including its owned brokerage offices that were subsequently integrated into NRT, Realogy s owned brokerage segment. We decided we needed to own the company if it was going to be core to our franchisees future success, Perriello explains. You can have great technology, but without the talent in place to keep it cutting-edge, you will disappoint rather than amaze, and we always look to amaze. A big part of what made the Zap platform attractive to Realogy is that it was built and refined by a real estate brokerage company. The Zap technology was fine-tuned by real estate operators with first-hand knowledge of the day-to-day business, says Perriello. You can see that in every aspect of the platform customer relationship management (CRM), websites, mobile apps. This was not technology for technology s sake. It was designed to sell houses.

4 The next decision Realogy made was to make Zap an integral part of its brands value propositions for their franchisees by providing it free of charge. Our franchisees told us they were investing in technology on the local level but not getting the results they wanted. So each year they invested more, but they felt like they were in danger of falling behind, Perriello explains. We decided it would be a great investment on our part to provide the Zap platform to them at no additional cost, because at the end of the day, our job is to make our franchisees more successful. When they win, we win. ZAP IS INTERCONNECTED In addition to being created by a company with a firsthand understanding of how the real estate brokerage business works, the Zap platform stands out because of the way in which it is completely interconnected. How does it all work? Simply put, Zap captivates, predicts, informs and connects. With Zap, each participating brokerage receives a custom-branded website and mobile app that displays complete, accurate and up-to-date MLS listings surrounded by all kinds of relevant data, such as school information, lot lines, neighborhood profiles, price trends and transaction histories. The Zap platform allows consumers to create their own searches, dig deep into local market data, and save and share the results they find. Meanwhile, Zap sends automated notifications to agents, keeping them up-to-date on each individual consumer s research activity. Configurable agent websites and agent-specific mobile app experiences provide marketing support that promotes the agent s local expertise and service track record with other consumers. Having a highly sophisticated CRM component integrated with the consumer-facing Zap experience is the genius behind the whole platform. Without that kind of connectivity, leads are just leads and we re not in the lead business. We re in the business of helping our franchisees and their affiliated agents sell more houses. ALEX PERRIELLO President & CEO Realogy Franchise Group Zap-powered agents gain tremendous insight about consumers behavior and interests, while the agent s daily activities touring homes, listing homes, showing properties, closing deals are simultaneously cataloged and communicated to consumers through the same interconnected Zap system. Everything is thoroughly connected, creating an ecosystem that conveys valuable customer insight to agents while showcasing relevant agent knowledge for highly interested consumers, says Jamie Wilson, ZipRealty s senior vice president of technology. There s no development that we do on the consumer mobile or Web experience that is not being thought about and incorporated by our data acquisition team, our CRM team, our broker tools team, and vice versa. ZAP PREDICTS Most importantly, Zap predicts. The ZapScore is the key component to the entire system, a predictive numerical rating for each consumer in the database scored by an algorithm 1 to 99 that rates how likely potential clients are to buy or sell a home in the next 60 to 120 days. Zap tracks consumer activity and each night, every single consumer in the database gets a new score, Wilson says. Based on 15 years of consumer behavior data, consumers are ranked against every other consumer in the database. Effectively, what it does is sort everybody according to our highly accurate prediction, from who s the most likely person to buy a house to who s the least likely to do so at a given point of time. This is a huge win for the agents, according to Perriello, because it takes the guesswork out of customer follow-up. Now the agent knows more about each lead, what their preferences are, what homes they have been looking at, how likely they are to transact business, and, most importantly, it gives them a systemized way to respond to those potential customers, says Perriello. Having a highly sophisticated CRM component integrated with the consumer-facing Zap experience is the genius behind the whole platform. Without that kind of connectivity, leads are just leads and we re not in the lead business. We re in the business of helping our franchisees and their affiliated agents sell more houses. ZAP INFORMS Zap informs by capturing important details about the consumer interactions on the website and mobile app, as well as those between consumer and agent, and makes all of that accessible to the consumer, the agent and the broker. As Wilson explains, this improves productivity for the agent who can focus their personal attention on the clients most likely to buy or sell. And the broker can easily review which agents are bringing in the most business and best utilizing the Zap tools to build business opportunities. John Fox, broker, CENTURY 21 Unlimited Real Estate in Tannersville, Pa., notes the strength of Zap s customer relationship tool.

5 The ZapScore is a predictive numerical rating for each consumer in the database scored by an algorithm 1 to 99 that rates how likely potential clients are to buy or sell a home in the next 60 to 120 days. Managing customer relationships is the cornerstone of our business, he says. Efficiently managing those relationships is the goal. Integrate a great CRM with features for the consumer and throw in state-of-the-art lead scoring and you have a game changer. The Zap program does all that and more. ZAP CONNECTS Lastly, the system connects the entire business the consumer to the agent, the agent to the consumer and the broker to both consumers and agents. A broker may go to an industry event and pick different technologies they like, but when they get back home and try to run them all together, few, if any, will connect in an easy or seamless fashion. With Zap, we have a product that meets each of those different wants and needs, and they re all built to work together, says Wilson. Once we solve a broker s technology issue, they can go back to the business of being visibly present experts in their community, marketing locally and recruiting agents. ZAP ROLLOUT So far, the Zap rollout is exceeding expectations for Realogy. Launched to Realogy franchise affiliates in 2015, the initial goal was to implement the system in 300 companies in the first year, but that goal was well surpassed by year-end. The introduction to brokers began at brand conferences and events in the beginning of the year, and the response to the product has been overwhelmingly positive, according to Perriello. I had a lead that I had not spoken to in over a year, says Ben Burnside of ERA Cornerstone Realty in Denton, Texas. When we implemented Zap, the lead was ported over. Zap sent my lead an , which I would not have done on my own. It turns out she had the highest Zap- Score in my queue of leads, so I connected with her and we are looking at houses. That s how powerful Zap and the lead scoring tool can be for your business. In addition to promoting more sales, Zap has proven to be a compelling recruiting draw for agents, according to Perriello. We felt that Zap would be a material enhancement to our brand value propositions by helping our brokers attract agents who were looking for a technology solution as part of affiliating with a leading brand, he explains. Greg Armstrong, broker/owner of Coldwell Banker F.I. Grey & Son Residential, Inc., in New Port Richie, Fla., has seen an influx of new agents due to Zap. Since we launched Zap in 2015, our recruiting has gone wild, says Armstrong. We have grown our company by more than 30 percent in six months. Zap shows agents that we are unquestionably the leaders of our industry today and in the future. This is the best recruiting weapon that we have ever had. According to Perriello, brokers using Zap say that the agents they recruit come for the leads, but stay for the technology.

6 ZapStore: Supermarket for the Super Agent Even in the comics, superheroes sometimes require outside help. Just like Batman has his utility belt, Realogy brand-affiliated brokers and agents on the Zap platform will have the ZapStore, an online marketplace where they can access innovative third-party applications, products and services that will seamlessly integrate with the Zap platform. There are a lot of innovators working across the globe on technology solutions for the real estate industry, but they all face the same challenge how to integrate with myriad broker and agent platforms. The ZapStore will be the next big thing in our industry, says Alex Perriello, president and chief executive officer of the Realogy Franchise Group. We are taking the dysfunction out of innovation. With the ZapStore, the advantage for innovators is that they only need to integrate their application once with the Zap platform and their product will be instantly accessible to and ready to implement for all of the brokers and agents on the platform. ZapStore will help us attract innovators and increase the value of the Zap platform to brokers and agents, says Lanny Baker, chief executive officer of ZipRealty. These third-party products will fill in the gaps between big bricks that ZipRealty is building, and make the whole Zap platform stronger and more compelling. Once a product is in the ZapStore, brokers can access the product, and with one click it will be available for their use seamlessly within the Zap platform, rather than having to operate separately. Currently ZapStore is only available to brokers. The ZipRealty team is working on simplifying the integration process for third-party vendors, which will expedite the number of available products and services once the agent version of the ZapStore opens later in As more vendors place products in the ZapStore, it will create more excitement and enthusiasm for the Zap product as we go forward, says Perriello. I like to think of it as the supermarket for the super agent. THE FUTURE OF ZAP The goal in 2016 is to continue expanding the number of Realogy franchised companies on the Zap platform and to help agents leverage the system s full capabilities, giving more and more franchises and agents their own superpowers. As more brokers talk to each other and hear the success stories, the interest and appetite for Zap will continue to grow, Perriello says. We believe we have addressed the leading concern for every broker in the country as it relates to technology how to keep pace and remain relevant with the online consumer. David Winans, broker/owner of Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate David Winans & Associates in Dallas, Texas, is anticipating the implementation of the Zap platform at his brokerage. We believe Zap will enable us to drive lead conversion rates higher than they ve ever been in our 32-year history thanks to its unique ZapScore algorithm. Realogy s leadership and innovation have yet again added tremendous value to our company, recruiting and retention efforts, and bottom line, says Winans will also see the launch of the ZapStore, which allows seamless integration of third-party applications into the Zap system. (See sidebar above). The vision of the ZapStore is to solve the technology integration challenges for the brokerage, Wilson explains. It makes available to brokers and agents the third-party tools that they never would have been able to integrate so easily before, and those add-ons will be one click away in the ZapStore. CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT For Baker and Wilson, the ZipRealty team s goal is to continue to improve on the Zap product and build value for Realogy-affiliated brokerages. The more brokers and agents on the platform, the better it becomes for everyone, says Baker. The Zap team uses an agile development process whereby users (brokers and agents) share feedback that helps drive new features and functionality on an ongoing and frequent basis. Zap is constantly evolving, and everyone benefits in real-time, says Wilson. Changes to the operating system are applied seamlessly to all Zap users so no one will ever be left out using last year s model. We re solving problems that the rest of the industry doesn t even know exist yet, says Perriello. We re delivering solutions that are way ahead of the competition because we have all of the pieces in place not just within the Zap product, but also within Realogy and our portfolio of iconic brands. Few others have our expertise and years of experience, and no one has our team in Emeryville. RE