Realogy, in 2020, completely revamped its agent and broker-facing education platform to help its affiliates “rule the recovery.” Now with the housing market blazing, the company is bringing that same platform directly to agents’ phones and tablets via branded mobile apps.
Bethany Auclair | Photo credit: Realogy
“With agents, we find that phones, tablets, those are their main devices,” Bethany Auclair, Realogy’s senior director of brand product development, told Inman. “Especially with COVID, everyone is home on a device.”
The company built the branded apps for each of Realogy’s properties, to be seamlessly integrated with the existing platform, so agents can access all of the learning platform’s features on the go.
Within the app, agents can access Realogy’s on-demand course library, course calendar and activity tracker, among other functions. It even will send push notifications when agents are nearing their goals and need a little help to reach the finish line.
Bonnie Sue Lovelace | Photo credit: Realogy
“It goes beyond, ‘hey your class is coming up,” Bonnie Sue Lovelace, the senior director of learning solutions told Inman. “It’s really, ‘hey, you’re this close to hitting your goal, you just have two more contacts today, come on, you’re almost there.'”
Having all the courses and content directly at your fingertips can take many forms, according to Lovelace, whether it’s a podcast on your way to a listing appointment, or looking through a script library, or watching a video on your phone right before a pitch.
“It’s not just a course that you have to be sitting down taking,” Lovelace said.
Since the company’s April 2020 pivot at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic-fueled lockdown orders, the learning platform has seen a boom in users. The platform saw a 59 percent increase in new users in January and a 71 percent increase in returning users in January versus the same month in 2020.
The company’s goal in the early days of the pandemic was to help agents “rule the recovery,” which meant lead generation and listing challenges and really actionable steps agents could take. That’s continuing now, with the housing market hot and extremely competitive.
“We’re saying, let’s really kickstart your productivity,” Lovelace said. “Let’s take advantage of the market right now and have that friendly competition.”
On a brand level, Realogy has found that agents that use the platform get 11 percent more listings, see 14 percent more closed units and have a 20 percent higher sales volume. One agent that recently tried the company’s 21-lead challenge got her first million-dollar listing as a result of the training program.
The next part of the learning platform’s roadmap includes incorporating all of the data that Realogy has at its disposal and surfacing that data directly to agents, so they can see the impact the programs have on their business.
“At Realogy, we have all this data, we have an open ecosystem, and we really want to share that and pull in different data points,” Auclair said. “From this perspective, really understand, if you’re taking a course and you’re tracking all these activities and you’re really investing in yourself and your business, is it paying off?”
