Author Interview

So, when I got my MBA, I was talking with a local real estate agent that we’d been working with in buying a house, and she told me how hard it was to use the software that was available at that time for real estate agents.

She (Davette Everly) said it was really hard to use, and she felt like it would be great if there was something that was sort of like America Online, which made it really easy to get on the internet.

I thought that it was an interesting idea. So, Davette and I worked out some ideas and we realized that a lot of the software up to that point really was focused on the needs of top producing agents, so agents who had an assistant or were highly technical.

But the average agent’s needs were not addressed. And that was what the original concept was for the software for RealtyJuggler.

I think that’s a natural tendency for a lot of software.

They start out with a really basic original idea but then over time they add more features to cater to the power users, the people that are really dedicated to the software.

And as those new features are added, the product gets more and more complicated, and before you know it a product that was originally designed to be used by just an average agent can easily get overly complicated.

We’ve been very careful. We’re not afraid to add new features, but we want to make sure that when we do, those new features are consistent with the user interface that we already have in place, so that you can use these new features without having to learn new techniques along the way.

One thing that makes us more aware of our product complexity is that we answer the phones when agents call, and we’ll spend time on the phone walking agents through how to use the software.

So the harder RealtyJuggler is to use, the more time we’ll spend on the phone in technical support.

And that really does make it clear to us when we add a feature that is tricky or complicated to use or easily misunderstood, because we’re on the phone with somebody and we spend a lot of time with them trying to work them through a feature.

It’s just as much of a pain point for us as it is for our clients.

And that keeps us aware at all times of how easy the software is to use.

Often times our clients will say, you know, “Why is it so hard to do this thing? I just want to do something really simple.”

And they will come up with suggestions. The features we add and the improvements we make are typically based upon customer feedback.

And a lot of times, our customers’ primary goal is just to get the job done quickly.

They’re not interested in sitting in front of their computer all day long.

SCOTT SCHMITZ

They want to spend time with their clients all day long, and they just want to spend a few minutes a day in front of a computer.

So when we started the company, the internet was around but most agents had dial-up internet, so they weren’t able to access the internet at all times.

There was no easy way to access the internet while you were on the road.

The smartphone really was in its infancy at that time, it predated the iPhone and Android.

It was called the Palm Treo, and that’s what we designed the original RealtyJuggler to run on.

The advantage of that approach was that the agents could have the information at all times because it was just there with their phone.

It didn’t require the internet, the information resided on the phone.

Over time, when the iPhone and Android phones came out, it became clear that the internet and mobile access, what we called the cloud, was really the best way to go.

So we switched fairly quickly. We started out with the Palm product and just a few years later we switched over to the cloud-based product, with mobile access so you could access it on Android or iPhone, synchronize it with contacts and calendar, and also access it from a Mac or PC.

Yeah, I think so. It’s kind of funny, if you take a look at the original Palm application that ran on the Treo, the user interface isn’t all that different from what we have today.

Starting out looking at it from mobile access first means that you can pretty much do most of the activities you want to do from your phone.

And for a real estate agent, that can be very beneficial.

I think agents ask us all the time, “Which CRM is better?”

And while we like to think we make the best CRM, really the best CRM is the one that you use regularly.

If you’re signing into your CRM and using it every day, no matter which one you use, you’re going to get the most benefit.

Because a CRM really helps you structure your day, it helps you organize who you need to call back, keep track of your contacts and calendar.

It’s the hub of your communications activity. So over a span of time, you can remember all the details about everybody that you know in your day-to-day life.

Most real estate agents start out relatively small and can handle a few clients easily, just with their phone and computer, without any additional organizational tools.

But as they gain more clients, and as they have more past clients that they want to maintain relationships with, that’s when it gets harder.

If they just keep being reactive, if somebody calls them and asks for help, they react, they may miss the person they met at an open house who’s thinking about buying in three months.

With a CRM, an agent can keep track of these long-lead opportunities and follow up.

Whereas if the agent was trying to do that on their own, they might make a single follow-up call, but it’s really difficult to track multiple prospects over multiple months without an organizational tool.

That’s a tough question. I think most real estate agents are outgoing, and for them talking on the phone or meeting people in person is their ideal form of communication.

However, not all agents are extroverts, and with social media, email, and text messaging, there are a lot of opportunities for agents who may not be as extroverted to still thrive.

Any CRM really needs to work with multiple personality types.

I think you can think of it like a number two pencil, it’s a tool with a lot of capabilities that an agent can take advantage of.

Some capabilities an extrovert would prefer; others an introvert might prefer.

For example, an introvert prospecting short sales or probate listings might send printed letters.

An extrovert might use their CRM while walking a neighborhood, collecting information on an iPad during door knocking.

I think each agent has their own approach. My recommendation is to keep your contact list fairly fresh.

If you’ve got somebody in your database you haven’t talked to in years, that’s a good candidate to mark as old and archive.

As far as a hard count, I like to recommend keeping your contacts to a manageable number that doesn’t clutter your phone.

If you’ve got a bunch of Johns in there from years ago that you maybe met once at an open house, that’s really not going to provide a lot of value.

So while a lot of agents like to collect as many contacts as possible, there’s something to be said for also reviewing older contacts, calling them up to see what’s going on, or archiving them if they’re no longer relevant.

My recommendation is to take a good hard look at the software that the broker provides.

If it’s not sufficient for your needs, you should feel free to select a CRM outside of what the broker provides.

Real estate agents act on a commission basis and should use whatever tools are best suited for their own personal needs.

Broker tools sometimes have limited features, and they typically have very little technical support, calling somebody up and having them walk you through how to use the software is often not available.

For those reasons, some agents prefer to select a CRM they’ve paid for themselves, so that the CRM vendor is answerable to them.

When they call, they’ve paid the vendor, and they’re going to get the support they need.

The industry has changed enormously, one of the largest changes is that software like Zillow means buyers and even sellers will look at listings before they ever call a real estate agent.

That changes the relationship agents have with prospects. In some ways it’s a healthy thing, buyers and sellers are more educated about what’s for sale and what prices are going for.

But it also means agents need to educate their potential clients about the inaccuracies that might appear online.

I think that was originally what Zillow thought they were going to do, disintermediate real estate agents, but they ended up recognizing that agents provide a valuable role.

They’ve since changed their approach; they consider agents their partners now and are trying to help them.

As for whether agents will go the way of travel agents over time, it’s hard to tell.

But it’s a lot different getting a flight to Hawaii than buying a house.

There are a lot of unknowns in purchasing a house, the costs are quite a bit higher, and there’s always going to be a need for an educated agent who can be on the client’s side and make sure the deal goes through efficiently and at the right price.

AI is very popular nowadays. My recommendation for agents is to use AI as an enhancement tool, to help them build marketing materials or flyers, put together newsletters, help with listing descriptions, open houses, staging, and things like that.

In every one of those examples, I think the agent still needs to remain in control of the situation.

The AI is not mature enough to handle activities all by itself.

The last thing we want is an AI automatically sending something out on your behalf without you first proofing it and making sure it’s accurate.

AI sometimes hallucinates, sometimes exaggerates, sometimes doesn’t tell the truth.

In real estate, where there are legal liabilities, the agent needs to be in control of even basic information placed on the MLS.

I think the AI features we’re seeing now are just in their infancy.

Some of the more common ones are chatbots on agent websites that collect contact information.

You certainly could use a chatbot for that, and that’s fine.

But you could probably just as easily create a contact form, get notified through RealtyJuggler via text message, and then have a genuine conversation with the prospect.

Most prospects are looking to get specific questions answered. The problem with chatbots is they tend to be a bit of a generalist, if somebody asks what the HOA fees are for a specific condo, they’re asking a specific question and should get a specific answer, not a definition of what condo fees are.

I think a lot of agents are looking for the CRM to tell them what to do.

But I’d recommend looking at it another way, pull up your CRM and take a look at your contacts list organized by categories.

If you don’t have categories yet, look at those contacts and figure out how you met them and what your relationship with these people is.

Adding two or three categories to each contact in your database is really a good first step.

I recommend identifying a top 100 list in your contacts database, the people you feel you should stay in regular contact with.

Friends, family, past clients, people who might refer you. In that case, you may want to give them a call every few months just to say hi.

I think you probably want to start with your follow-up calls.

That’s your first priority, look at the hard points in your day, the appointments you needed to make or meet, and then your task list.

Once you’ve taken care of those high-priority items, you can start thinking about outreach activities.

Maybe calling people on their birthday, contacting them on the anniversary of their home closing.

One of my favorite activities around Christmas is cleaning up your database, building a Christmas list, printing mailing labels, and sending a Christmas card.

Another good thing once or twice a year is sending an e-card to your sphere of influence, it reminds them you’re there, but it also helps you identify which email addresses are still valid.

In the course of a year, you should probably send at least one physical letter, a Christmas card is a good example, and at least one email to pretty much everybody in your database that you intend to stay in regular contact with.

That helps you keep a clean, well-organized database.

With RealtyJuggler, you can keep track of your deal pipeline, your listings, your closings, and your income.

One advantage of doing this tracking inside a CRM is you can track your leads from the lead source all the way through closing, and identify which lead sources are providing the best quality leads.

Year over year, you can take a look at seasonal patterns and compare your progress against prior months.

Your CRM can do this in a way that a simple spreadsheet can’t, because the CRM tracks at multiple dimensional levels, it tracks lead source, it tracks over time, and it tracks the pipeline: how many prospects it takes to get a listing, how many listings you need to close.

That sales funnel is something your real estate CRM is going to be able to show you, so you know the odds at each stage in your pipeline.

It’s interesting you say that. I don’t think there are a lot of agents that spend too much time inside their CRM, we probably see the opposite.

We’ll talk to agents on the phone and they might spend an hour or two a week using their CRM and recognize they probably should spend a little more time.

But obviously the key to any CRM is leads and data.

If you don’t have new leads coming in, worrying over your existing database only gets you so far.

You need to do a little bit of both, gather contacts and prospects and follow through.

Hopefully agents find a balance between the two.

One common thing we’ve found is that as agents become more experienced they start preferring listings over buyers.

The advantage of listings for an experienced agent is that they can have several active at a single time and increase their revenue.

With buyers, they can only be driving around one at a time, it limits them.

As they reach that point, they’ll recognize they need to become more efficient. And that’s a natural growth strategy.

Book One, “Real Estate CRM Secrets,” is perfect for the solo agent who’s just starting out, probably preferring buyers.

Then as the agent becomes more experienced and recognizes the benefits of listings, Book Two kicks in, now they’re working with past clients and their sphere of influence, working with multiple clients at the same time.

RealtyJuggler has a unique approach to what we call sharing, the ability for multiple people to work together.

There are really two ways to approach it. The first is where you have a tight-knit team all working on the same database, using categories to assign leads to specific people.

So if a new buyer prospect comes in, you might assign a category that’s the name of the buy-side agent who’s going to handle that client.

The second way is to have separate databases. That works great for a broker who might have several agents, each working independently.

The broker can divvy out leads without each agent seeing the others’ leads, they focus only on what they’ve been assigned, without getting distracted.

That’s one of the dilemmas a lot of brokers have, they’re paying for leads and want to assign them to agents, but they need to make sure agents are following through.

With RealtyJuggler, the broker can supervise each individual agent’s database by viewing that agent’s data, checking the notes, seeing what follow-ups they’re doing, and making sure the agent is responding in a timely manner.

In a team environment, the team lead can easily review what the other team members are up to.

And if a team member is on vacation, another can sub in and do that work instead.

So it not only allows people to work together, it also allows them to take over each other’s work seamlessly.

One advantage of RealtyJuggler is you can connect SMS text messaging and get notified when new leads arrive within just a few seconds.

My advice is to respond to any new lead within just a few minutes, even if it’s just a quick text saying, “Hey, I just saw that you’re interested in Main Street and I’m going to pull that information and get back to you.”

That gives the lead a heads up that you’re on the ball.

Chances are high that if that person is on the internet and they filled out a contact form that brought the lead to you, they’re going to fill out that same form on another website.

Another agent is going to have that same opportunity. You’re competing, and you really need to help that prospect as quickly as possible.

I think one tendency people have is to try to “automate out” the human element, especially when working with the initial contact of a lead.

For example, they might create an autoresponder saying something like, “I’m too busy to handle your call right now but I’ll get back to you.”

My advice is not to use an autoresponder, but instead respond personally and in a customized way.

If a prospect gets the impression you’re too busy for them, they’re probably going to look for an agent who’s not so busy.

Instead, with text messaging, the prospect would be much more amenable to just a quick message saying, “I’ll take a look at this information and get back to you” with a specific time.

That would be a much more responsive way to handle a lead.

I think the first thing is to recognize there are really two kinds of people in your database, in RealtyJuggler, we call those contacts and prospects.

Contacts are past clients, people in your sphere of influence, relatives, friends. These are people you’ll probably know for life.

My advice is to send them a Christmas card. If you feel they’re not worth the stamp, then you probably want to purge them, because if you don’t want to send them a Christmas card, they may not be a strong possibility for new business.

For the prospects database, people you maybe met at an open house, or leads from an internet source, when the lead is first loaded, they’re going to be much more valuable than a couple of years later.

Hit the ground hard, contact them as quickly as possible, work out a follow-up plan, and then over time, contact them seasonally.

If they never panned out and you feel they’re not worth a follow-up call, mark them as purgeable and archive them.

At that point, they’re about as powerful a lead as meeting a complete stranger in a grocery store.

I think again, you have to look at the two kinds of people in your database.

For friends and family in your contacts database, the last thing you want to do is put them on a drip sequence where they get an email from you every week.

That’s just going to be too much, even your own mother is going to opt out.

For your prospects database, if you’ve got a fresh lead, putting them on a drip sequence is probably not a bad idea, but only if you have a good idea of what kind of drip they’re going to want.

Just sending generic drip emails is not the best approach.

But if you know they’re a buyer looking to upgrade or downsize, you could apply a drip sequence specific to that particular life circumstance.

One of the challenges a lot of agents have is once leads go stale, say it’s been six months, they’re not sure what to do with those leads.

Applying a drip sequence is probably not the best approach there, because you’re going to need a little context.

You can’t just start emailing them once a week out of the blue.

Your best bet is to give them a call and say, “Hey, we spoke a year ago at an open house about buying a house on Main Street. I noticed the house across the street is now for sale. Would you be interested in taking a look?”

That’s a very targeted, specific communication that allows them to refresh their memory of how they met you.

With a drip sequence, it’s really difficult to be targeted enough, if it’s an old lead, it’s just going to look like spam out of the blue.

Most agents should probably find a geographic farm. Picking one will take a little time, you want to find an area with houses that go up for sale periodically and at a price point that’s worth your time.

Once you’ve identified the geographic farm, your next step should be to find some listings in that area.

Because once you have a listing, you can walk the neighborhood and hand out open house flyers, it gives you a pretext for basically walking the neighborhood and introducing yourself.

That’s probably the easiest way to meet everybody in a neighborhood.

Keeping track of the anniversary of their closing provides a great pretext for contacting them annually, just saying, “Hey, I noticed you’ve planted some new trees in the backyard. Looks like you’ve made the place your own. I’d love to take a look sometime.”

It doesn’t hurt to change the relationship from a business one to a friendship.

Eventually they’re going to need to sell, and you want them to think of you as a trusted real estate advisor, someone they’d at the very least talk to and get advice from before listing.

Another example is contacting that person on their birthday. Everybody likes to be wished a happy birthday.

A third point of contact is a Christmas card, that’s one of my favorite mechanisms, because everybody loves to get one.

And if you have open houses in that neighborhood, dropping by to let them know and seeing how they’re doing doesn’t hurt either.

The main thing is you just want to stay in contact with past clients in a way where you’re acting as a friend, not an intruder.

A lot of times over the years we’ve talked to agents who will say, “My broker told me I need to use a CRM, but I don’t even know what I should use it for.”

The book really is a great way to learn about the potential benefits of using a CRM.

You can think of it like benefits versus features. The benefit is staying in contact with clients and your sphere of influence.

The features are exactly how you would do that, through text messaging, printed letters, and bulk emails.

The combination of those two together is really the perfect combination.

As far as which CRM you use, you could use any CRM.

Like I said, the best CRM is the one you use regularly.

Each one has slightly different features, so you’re not going to get the exact same experience regardless.

But from a benefit standpoint, all of the real estate CRMs out there do offer the same basic benefits: follow-up and the ability to stay in contact with your sphere and your prospects.

So when we started writing the book it was during the pandemic, and it started out as one big volume.

Then we realized pretty quickly that there are really two kinds of agents: the agent who’s just starting out, and the experienced agent.

And we recognized those two kinds of agents act differently and their preferences are different in regards to how they use a CRM.

An agent who’s just starting out has very few people in their database, they’re looking to collect as many contacts as possible, meet as many new people as possible.

They’re going to be working with friends and relatives and don’t have a lot of past clients.

The more experienced agents focus on their sphere of influence, people they worked with in the past, other agents recommending them, community relationships.

They’re not looking to collect fresh prospects. They’re mining their existing database and working on repeat and referral business.

A lot of agents we talk to recognize they need a CRM but don’t want to get bogged down learning how to use one, so they’ll limp along using a spreadsheet or just their phone.

That can only take them so far. A lot of times we’ll talk to agents once they get to the point where they need to hire an assistant, or they start missing appointments, or they’re not doing the follow-up they need to, then they recognize they do need a CRM.

I think a CRM is useful for any agent, even an inexperienced one.

But there comes a point where it would be nearly impossible for an agent to increase their income beyond a certain level without an organizational tool.

For example, if an agent were to work on a team or with a partner or an assistant, a lack of a CRM would make it nearly impossible to work in a collaborative environment.

I think it’s probably worth mentioning that the real estate field and real estate market are constantly changing, and they’re also local in nature.

Something that might work for somebody in New York City may not work well for somebody in Des Moines, Iowa.

Similarly, when the economy is hot, certain marketing techniques and strategies are going to make a lot of sense, whereas when the market is slow, you’re going to have to change your strategies.

The advantage of using a real estate CRM is that it’s a tool that allows you a variety of mechanisms and you can experiment and change over time.

One thing we’ve noticed is when the economy changes, some agents don’t adapt their strategies, they don’t know what hit them and end up going out of business.

The key in the real estate business is to be adaptable, be flexible, try new things: new marketing techniques, new follow-up techniques, new ways of approaching open houses, maybe using call capture instead of printed flyers.

Take advantage of new technologies.

That’s where a real estate CRM can really help you, because it provides a central clearing house where you can plug in a variety of tools.

Maybe one year you’re going to try a website. The next year, third-party lead sources.

The year after that, leads from Zillow. The ability to plug in and play a variety of different approaches means you’re not stuck in a single one.

And that’s one flaw of some of the more integrated broker solutions that are supposedly free, they’re not as flexible and don’t have as many capabilities as a full-featured CRM like RealtyJuggler.