Andrew Flachner is co-founder and CEO of RealScout. RealScout combines revolutionary buyer data-driven listings tools and industry-best home search experiences to help you win and sell more listings.
To date, RealScout has powered billions of dollars in transactions for thousands of agents and the industry’s leading brokerages.
Flachner has found a way to combine his knowledge and passion for both real estate and technology to create a technology-driven platform for real estate agents. As a result, he was recently honored as Forbes 30 Under 30 and Silicon Valley Business Journal’s Top 40 Under 40.
Kudos to you, Andrew!
Flachner will take the Inman stage at Indie Broker Summit on Monday, August 7, to share his insights on how to grow and defend a brokerage like a tech company.
We caught up with Andrew to hear his best tips and tricks for indie brokers and why he and his team love serving independent brokerages.
What do you see as the biggest benefit to being an independent broker?
As a real estate agent-turned-tech entrepreneur, I’ve noticed many parallels between leading successful software startups and independent brokerages — both equally crowded and competitive industries.
Independent brokerages have the ability to create a focused brand that differentiates them from the one-size-fits-all positioning of the big brands and better meets the unique needs of their customer base.
This allows independent brokerages to attract, recruit and retain the best agents who share the same values and vision, therefore providing the best service to customers.
Equally important, independent brokerages have independent decision-making abilities, making them nimble, agile and quickly able to adopt new technologies and provide the best services to address changing market needs and conditions.
What are your best tips and tricks for building your client base?
If you’re only focused on getting lots of eyeballs to your website and buying leads from third party sources — just to send those leads back to the portals — you’re missing out on a huge opportunity. The key to success is to convert these clients and keep them engaged and sticky with your brokerage-branded platform and agents.
To be successful, your agents need to keep a close eye on clients and react quickly to both their stated requirements and what they are really searching for and desiring. The trick is to equip your agents and consumers with technology that is user-friendly and visually appealing.
What do you see as the most important trends (good or bad) that independent brokers should be keeping an eye on in the coming year?
Leveraging broker data to grow GCI (gross commissionable income) is a massive opportunity for independent brokerages.
There is a gaping black hole where brokers are losing out every time consumers search on third party websites. Seizing and leveraging this information arms your agents with insights into current local market information and real data to help your brokerage win more listings and close more deals.
The race is on to capture and capitalize on your buyer data. Will you win the race?