Baird & Warner increases mortgage capture rates to 70+% with Cloze

Chicago’s Baird & Warner is a champion of smart innovation. From adopting best-of-breed technology to rethinking internal processes to reducing friction in the client buying and selling process, the company has found ways to increase brokerage profitability while simultaneously improving the client experience.

In the past couple of years, the Cloze AI Real Estate Platform has become an integral part of that strategy. By tightly integrating the Cloze AI Real Estate Platform, including Cloze CRM, Cloze Leads, and Cloze Marketing, into the company’s processes, Baird & Warner has identified a number of different ways to drive success throughout the business, enabling more effective collaboration across teams and departments, a seamless client experience, higher attach rates for both mortgage and title services, and increased agent production.

We outlined the value that Cloze CRM has brought to individual agents in a recent blog post (36% increase in production!). Here’s how the rest of the Cloze Platform is driving up profitability and performance for Baird & Warner.

In addition to Cloze CRM, the company has deployed Cloze Leads, which consolidates lead sources, including several online and third-party outlets, and integrates them seamlessly into Baird & Warner’s streamlined follow-up process. Cloze simplifies the disposition of leads and makes it significantly easier for its eBusiness team to connect with potential clients, capture critical notes and information, and share those details on to agents and mortgage partners during handoff. Clients experience a frictionless engagement, which increases capture and retention rates.

Baird & Warner is also using Cloze Marketing to increase collaboration between corporate marketing and individual agents to nurture and strengthen client relationships and engagement. The Baird & Warner marketing team uses Cloze Marketing to build robust templates for Residential Sales, Mortgage, Title, and Recruiting/Retention teams, including extensive marketing drip campaigns, set and forget newsletters, one-off email, and more. Agents can either use templates themselves or choose to enroll selected contacts into automated emails initiated by the marketing team.

By integrating the Cloze Platform into the company’s processes, Baird & Warner has improved capture and productivity rates across the organization.

Cloze has really thought through the bottlenecks and barriers within the client engagement process and smartly uses artificial intelligence and automation to address them. They’ve figured out how to balance agent autonomy and corporate collaboration, so that every step of the client process strengthens the relationship and the value we’re providing.”

Peter Papakyriacou, chief marketing officer at Baird & Warner

Mortgage & Title Capture

In addition to its residential sales arm, Baird & Warner also offers mortgage and title services. Dean points to consumer interest in a one-stop shop for real estate services as the reason. These ancillary services are being managed through the company’s eBusiness department, which Dean runs.

Prior to this initiative, capture rates for mortgages were in the single digits. As Dean took over, he turned the eBusiness department into effectively a large team that’s heavily using Cloze and other integrated products to drive capture rates for mortgage and title. The tight collaboration enabled by Cloze has dramatically improved mortgage capture rates and includes a warm handoff, inside and outside sales associates, and loan officers.

Dean Rouso, senior vice president of strategic innovation at Baird & Warner, says,

Adoption of mortgage generally runs at 18% or less throughout the nation. Ours is 70-80% with our employee agents. We’ve been working with Cloze for over a year now to develop this seamless process that doesn’t just address an agent’s need for a CRM, but the entire system’s requirements for mortgage, title, and residential sales. Cloze is a huge part of why we’ve been able to increase our capture rate so much.”

Recruitment

With the statistics on per-agent productivity in hand, Baird & Warner managers are also using their success to show potential recruits how the brokerage’s tech stack can help their own productivity.

Dean says, “Agents walk in the door, and they say, ‘I need some help. When I want to build my business, this other company doesn’t seem to be able to help me; I don’t get the support I need.’ And we sit down with them and show them our productivity numbers and demo the system, and they understand how we can help them.”

In addition, Baird & Warner has been training their managers the same way they’ve been training their agents. Not only does that allow them to better coach the agents because everyone (and the tool itself) is speaking the same language, but now managers are using Cloze as a recruiting tool using the same Ninja principles that they expect their agents to use.

Agent Teams

While solo agents make up the majority of Baird & Warner’s 2400 agents, the company also has a significant number of agent teams. Cloze CRM is the only product on the market that can work effectively for both solo agents and agent teams. Team leaders can decide whether information is shared automatically or on a case-by-case basis among team members, which enables teams to seamlessly engage with clients, assigning leads for follow-up, sharing contact information and timeline details between team members. That full visibility into a client history and record ensures that clients feel supported, no matter who they’re engaging with, rather than frustrated that conversations and history is lost.

What do I love about Cloze? I’m a recipe guy.
I believe if you just simply follow the recipe, you’ll be successful. And what Close does is it reminds you on a daily basis to follow the recipe. That’s the AI part. Do this today. Do this tomorrow. And as long as you follow the recipe, it’ll always turn out the same.”

Dean Rouso, senior vice president of strategic innovation at Baird & Warner