If I Were To Start a Brokerage Company… Part 5: Tools & Technology

I am asked frequently “Why don’t you start your own brokerage firm?” My answer is simple – I love what I do. I own (what I believe is) the best commercial real estate coaching company in the world, and am surrounded by great people. The better question would be “If you were to start a commercial real estate brokerage company, how would you do it?”

In my last blog, I outlined how I would compensate the agents and producers. In the final part of this series, I will outline the tools I would implement to support the team and finally, how I would design the office for maximum production and leveraging our culture.

Remember, as outlined in Part 1 of this series, my team would include a support team consisting of administrators, research and salaried new to business folks (see part 4) – all to allow our producers to focus on producing.

There are quite a few great tools and technologies available today to make your brokerage efforts more efficient and more effective.

We would implement a CRM platform, and require all team members (including producers) to leverage it. There are excellent CRM platforms out there – including APTO, Clientlook, and RealNex (simply to name a few). At Massimo Group we use Infusionsoft, as this allows us to orchestrate our contacts, calendars, finances, and marketing efforts.

We would implement an information management system, this is different than a CRM. This system would share market information, facilitate commission calculation and payments – and generally be our company intranet. Realcore is one such platform.

We would need a high-end marketing platform to ensure consistency in our company brand. This would not be the responsibility of the producers, but our support team. A program such as Buildout would be one of the leading candidates for this need.

For market information, I would look first and foremost at our producers to understand their respective markets and territories. I have worked with coaching clients who do not use major information providers (such as CoStar), as their own brokerage teams consistently produced their own information.

Again, I am not starting a brokerage firm, but if I were, I would only align myself with specific team members that share our vision of roles, responsibilities, and expectations.