Zeroing in on real estate’s “Biggest Challenges”
For the past decade, Cloze CRM has helped agents and real estate brokerages close more deals by strengthening client relationships, organizing action items and contacts, and providing a detailed, comprehensive view of each and every sale.
But while Cloze CRM is invaluable at increasing the effectiveness of individual agents and managers, what we’ve learned from conversations with clients and through our own data is that brokerage leadership needed a way to more programmatically address their biggest concerns, such as online competition, agent retention, and profitability.
The National Association of Realtors’ 2021 Profile of Real Estate Firms report validates what we heard anecdotally. Real estate firms with four or more offices cited their top six biggest challenges:
- Maintaining sufficient inventory (64%)
- Competition from non-traditional market participants (55%)
- Housing affordability (47%)
- Agent retention (45%)
- Keeping up with technology (40%)
- Profitability (39%)
While inventory and affordability concerns are certainly out of the control of brokerage leadership, the artificial intelligence (AI) engine that powers Cloze CRM today has the ability to help leadership meaningfully address the other four concerns, provided agents were using the Cloze app.
We had a realization: By decoupling our AI engine from our CRM app, we could put our AI in the hands of every agent and brokerage regardless of the CRM or platform they use, enabling the brokerage to take advantage of AI-driven insights that would help them address these top concerns. Today we are unveiling the first set of solutions (with many more to come).
In this blog post, we’ll cover four ways our new Cloze AI Insights product addresses big real estate’s biggest challenges — all without requiring your agents to change the way they work or the tools they use.
Drive up mortgage capture rate
As brokerages seek to increase revenue from ancillary services such as mortgage lending, there’s a significant opportunity to drive higher mortgage capture rates. While regulatory restrictions prevent cross-selling by agents, brokerages that can tell when a client is actively looking for a mortgage quote can target the client independently, capturing them at exactly the moment they might be most receptive to a mortgage lending offer.
That’s exactly what Cloze AI Insights does. By using contextual clues in email that your agents exchange with their clients, Cloze AI Insights can understand and flag clients that are currently shopping for mortgage rates or might be open to a competitive second opinion. The platform can either send contact details to the mortgage business unit for targeting or automatically remind the agent to make an introduction to a loan officer
Attribute transactions to lead sources and calculate commissions accurately
According to that National Association of Realtors report, 50% of client inquiries into and 60% of all sales at larger firms are driven through repeat business or past client referrals. So what about the rest? Larger firms spend a tremendous amount on marketing, but often have very little visibility once a lead has been passed along to an agent. Even comparing names on closing documents to incoming leads can be deceptive as the signatory might not be the person who made the initial inquiry.
Cloze AI Insights constructs a unified view of every deal, providing end-to-end analysis that highlights the origin of every sale, enabling brokerages to:
- More accurately calculate commissions to agents based on definitive lead source
- Better calculate return on investment from marketing activities so that marketing dollars can be used more effectively
Give your agents better leads and a stronger likelihood of closing a deal
In most brokerages, marketing leads are distributed to agents according to some kind of predetermined formula. The trouble is that when you route leads to arbitrary agents, conversion rates and follow-up are predictably poor. As conversion rates drop, agents don’t follow-up – compounding the problem even more. But what if your lead routing could take into account previous interactions with that contact?
Cloze AI Insights can identify which agent has a prior relationship with any incoming lead and route them to an agent they already know and trust. The agent is able to (re-)establish a personal connection much more quickly, increasing trust and the likelihood of building a long-lasting relationship not just for this sale, but as a source of referrals and repeat business in the future. In turn, agents are more likely to view incoming leads positively, leading to better agent engagement and higher conversion rates.
Improve your success recruiting high-performing agents
84% of large brokerages are actively recruiting sales agents, and it’s no wonder: 41% of employees that leave a firm move to another real estate company. Yet convincing a high-performing agent to leave their existing firm and join yours can be challenging. Production is certainly a critical component of who you recruit, however, when recruitment efforts only take into account agents’ production, your time and energy can be wasted unless you have a good way to capture their interest.
What Cloze AI Insights does is help you identify high-performing agents that already have strong connections to people within your firm so you can secure a warm introduction. That way, you spend your recruiting time more efficiently and effectively, leading to faster recruiting cycles and higher closing rates.
So, what does this all have to do with competition and technology?
In our opening, we cited the biggest concerns brokerages face. And while we’ve covered profitability and agent retention / recruitment, we haven’t directly addressed concerns around non-traditional market participants and keeping up with technology.
The reality is that these two things are interrelated. At their heart, non-traditional market participants are technology and consumer data companies, and that investment in technology and data has enabled them to disrupt the market (Zillow, for example, has an entire blog devoted to their use of technology, and a section specifically on how they use artificial intelligence). What they lack, however, are the personal relationships and connections that make a real estate brokerage successful.
In contrast, your brokerage has mountains of data that these disruptors don’t have access to: the unstructured information your agents exchange with clients — emails, texts, conversations that your agents are having every minute, every hour, every day. This is a key competitive advantage you have against the disruptors.
At Cloze, we’re using artificial intelligence to help you really make the most of the human side of real estate — the unstructured data you have and the very thing those companies don’t. For years, we’ve used artificial intelligence to lean into agents’ personal connections, reminding them who to reach out to and how often to maintain relationships and strengthening those bonds.
With Cloze AI Insights, we’re taking that same technology in a slightly different direction to help brokerages programmatically address their biggest issues, driving more sales, more efficiently.
Ready to learn more? Contact us here.
