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Losing Top Agents and Teams to Disruptors?Learn how Daniel Gale Sotheby’s International Realtyuses data to fight back!

Are you tired of reading about the billions of dollars being invested to convert many of the real

estate industry’s brokerages and franchises? Are you wondering how you are going to compete to

recruit and retain agents and without killing your own bottomline? This case study highlights a

meaningful way that Daniel Gale Sotheby’s International Realty is leveraging their own historical

data to do just that.

REALOGY recently placed Bryson Koehler, CTO of Equifax, one of the most well-respected data

companies in the world, on its Board of Directors. Robert Reffkin, CEO of Compass told the

industry’s 75 largest brokers at the NAR Fall 2018 Conference in Orlando that insights derived from

analyzing listing data are key to his company’s recruiting success and technology superiority. Zillow

now has a team of more than 100 data scientists and hiring 46 more as we speak! Zillow goes so far

on their AI blog to say that Zillow IS data! So, what do all of these companies know that most

brokerages don’t? All of these well-financed, progressive organizations recognize the recruiting,

marketing and profitability-driving power that real estate data can deliver. Effective methods for

dissecting real estate information can help unlock previously unrecognized business secrets and

marketing advantages.

Make betterdecisions

1

According to a Forbes article, Dresner Advisory Services’ 9th Annual Wisdom of Crowds® Business

Intelligence Study credits the use of Business Intelligence as contributing in significant ways to help

organizations:

Improveoperationalefficiencies

2

Growrevenues

3 Increasedcompetitive advantage

4

2Losing Top Agents and Teams to Disruptors?

So, what is the value of real estate data in practical terms? How can brokers gain insights

about their business and help their agents more effectively target customers to prospect?

Bottomline, how can a brokerage leverage its data to increase profitability by reducing

agent attrition, improving agent productivity and driving operational efficiencies?

Business Intelligence Objectives (Copyright 2018 - Dresner Advisory Services)

Better Decision Making

Improved Operational Efficiency/Cost Saving

Growth in Revenues

Increased Competitive Advantage

Enhanced Customer Service

Compliance/Risk Managment

0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

Critical Very Important Important Somewhat Important Unimportant

3 5Losing Top Agents and Teams to Disruptors?

Historically, True Business Analytics Were Just NotPossible

Brokers, especially those with mortgage, title,insurance and other affiliate businesses,understand they are sitting on a treasure trove of customer information, sales history, marketanalytics and agent performance information. Historically, though, this data has been housed in data silos within each business unit. Brokers could be working with the same clientselling them a home and providing them a mortgage without even knowing it.


David Gumpper, President of WAV Group Business

Intelligence andTechnology says in his article entitled

Today’s Online Business Intelligence tells us:

“Several of my latest projects had me sitting in C-level meetings discussing marketing activities. Questions asked by the CEO or President of the company were:

if our digital strategies are meeting the

business objectives and goals?

How do we know

coming from and are they satisfied?

Where are consumers

what efforts are NOT contributing or delivering profits to

the company?”

Do we know

are the digital assets in meeting the business objectives and goals?

Howprofitable


With emerging Business Intelligence tools, brokers can gain actionable insights about the ways to

increase the “lifetime value” of their customer base by managing customer records across business

units. If a brokerage can effectively cross-promote all of their services to increase the depth of

engagement with their clients, they can significantly improve their mortgage and title conversion

rates. If a brokerage can help an agent secure referrals from the extended family of a former client,

for example, agents will increase their repeat and referral business and increase their productivity.

Business Intelligence tools can help brokers deliver guidance to help their agents generate

profitable new business without the need to buy expensive leads from third party sites. Brokers

supporting their agent’s business success in meaningful and measurable ways will have a better

chance of retaining their top producers.

What if a brokerage could analyze 20 years of transactions and help their agents target which past

clients to go after and when? How about if a brokerage found an easy way for an agent to keep

track of the important details about clients – home purchase date, number/age of children, wed-

ding anniversaries, birthdays, financing approach and even simple things like the client’s interests.

What if a brokerage could host events and invite ONLY the clients that have demonstrated

interest in that activity, for example? What if your in-house lender could identify likely

refinancers / movers and work the relationship with the client together with the Realtor®?

The smarter, targeted and more effective sales advice a brokerage can provide, the more likely

they are to retain an agent. Agents SAY they move brokerages because of a change in

commission split, but we know intuitively that there is more to agent retention than simply

providing them a larger split. They have to feel like the brokerage really cares about them and

wants to see them succeed. Brokerages need to drive home their value proposition in meaningful

and tangible ways. Business Intelligence is really a way to deliver meaningful value to agents.

These questions can be answered now.


Business Intelligence to Maximize Brokerage ProfitabilityAs discussed above, brokers, especially those with multiple business units including mortgage, title,

insurance and others have millions of records about historical client behavior, market performance

and company performance. The problem is brokers struggle to harness the power of this data to

help them run a more profitable business. Daniel Gale Sotheby’s International Realty created their

own data warehouse to help them leverage all of this important data history. They quickly realized

that the company did not have the depth of resources or expertise in Business Intelligence to

effectively leverage the depth of data they collected for the past 20 years. They sought a technology

partner to help them deploy a property-centric effort to help their agents be THE most prepared to

prospect the RIGHT clients and to consistently win listing presentations by providing the most

insightful market analysis possible.

Susan and Jason of Daniel Gale Sotheby’s International Realty turned to TRIBUS to help the company build a new Data Center of Excellence.

Here’s what they told us about their path to compete effectively with Disruptors and large brokerages’ data efforts.

We were looking to improve the way we handle our own data. We spoke to Eric Stegemann, Chief

Strategist and Katie Ragusa, Vice President Product Development from TRIBUS who are fantastic and

we realized right from the beginning that they understood our needs. If we were going to build a

new data analysis center of excellence, we had to partner with TRIBUS. They understood our busi-

ness model, and had a very good grasp of the technology involved.

Susan Poli, Chief Information

Officer

Jason Miller, VP of Information

Technology

We want to be able to look at our inventory of properties and find potential matches in our

customer database. We also want to examine our customer database and predict when they might

need us again as an example. Once we have a multitude of datasets combined in an easy to access

way, we can pose all kinds of questions to help our agents be more efficient and effective at

generating new business.


We are sitting on a ton of data and we don’t know how to sift through and analyze and make good

use of it. That’s why we’re building a relational database that helps us turn our property history and

customer data into workable intelligence our agents can use.

An agent has a client they haven’t kept up with them that well. With the tools we’re building, they will

be able to they see all their past conversations with the client and pull up all the listings they have

looked like, almost like a call center, before they even a conversation. They will be able see that they

worked with them 8 years ago. The system can include notes about the children, property history,

financing history etc. It will give our agents a very clear picture of the situation so their conversations

will be much more personal and targeted.

Here’s a typical scenario:

Business Intelligence Applied to BrokerageBusiness Intelligence tools are now emerging that will help brokers get a much more strategic look

at their success triggers as well. Daniel Gale Sotheby’s International Realty explains their vision

about how they are going to use Business Intelligence to increase profitability.

“We anticipate that our Business Intelligence tools will also be able to help us better understand

how to maximize the profitability of each of our offices by sharing best practices.

If we can create historical data about how long it takes our agents to earn a decent wage, the

relationship of training to business success, usage of technology tools related to closing deals and

company compensation and incentive systems relative to agent transaction volume, we can create a

much more effective method for creating productive, satisfied agents. A system that will help us

accomplish that is worth its weight in gold.”

Anybody can hire a real estate agent. We want to be the company that is the best at creating

productive and profitable agents.”


Leveraging the Power of Business Intelligence without Spending Millions Daniel Gale Sotheby's International Realty was looking for a company that had a depth of proven

expertise in ingesting huge data sets and finding simple and actionable ways for Brokers to ask the

data “questions.” For example, “Is there any correlation between the number of training classes an

agent attends and their productivity increases? “If so, what training courses seeming to be the most

effective in helping agents to succeed?” With the right technology partner, brokers can ask their

data endless questions to find out the best ways to drive up productivity and ultimately profitability.

According to a Forbes article from Bernard Marr,The role of Business Intelligence in recruiting is

burgeoning as well.

Here’s another example. “Why is my Main Street office more profitable than my Ventura Blvd

office? The data can examine the profile of agents, average price points, use of the company Client

Relationship Management system, training sessions offered, usage of company’s business planning

tools, and paint a picture of the best ways to improve profitability in each office.

Daniel Gale Sotheby’s International Realty chose TRIBUS as their Business Intelligence partner

because of its depth of strengths managing and housing MLS data, consumer, transaction and roster

data in a data warehouse. They believe that TRIBUS is a data management company that delivers

websites, not a website provider that dabbles in data management. While data management is not

a very sexy topic, in our view, expertise in merging data from several MLSs, evaluating 20 years or

more of historical data or rolling up historical data when a brokerage purchases another brokerage is

a critical skill.

Here’s what Jason and Susan said:

“We looked inside and outside of the industry for a data management partner that could help us live the

dream of helping our agents be more successful by leveraging our 20 years of transaction history. TRIBUS’

depth of character as it relates to data management puts them in a league of their own. They really don’t

have any significant competitors that can rival their ability to manage real estate data for us. These

strengths translate to really fast launches of the tools we want to provide to our agents to help them be

more successful.”


Finding the RIGHT partner to deliver actionable Business Intelligence

Finding the right partner to deliver on the promise of actionable greatness of Business Intelligence

can be very difficult. Many companies talk a good game but don’t have the data management skills

to pull it off.

Daniel Gale Sotheby's International Realty chose TRIBUS as their Business Intelligence partner

because of its depth of strengths managing not just MLS data but all of the brokerage’s data and

houses it in a data warehouse. TRIBUS’ Source product is a full data warehouse that tracks MLS,

internal listing data (such as buyer / seller names, phone number, email address, loan information and

more), roster information (including information on agents that have yet left as well as

prospective recruits), agent productivity, lead information, and more.

WAV Group is highly engaged with the Real Estate Standards Organization. We know which tech

companies have immersed themselves in RESO with the sole purpose of making it easier for brokers

to expand into new markets more quickly and get websites up and running in days, not weeks or

months. You can look here to check if your technology supplier has taken the time to immerse

themselves in RESO and become certified so that you can fully leverage standardized data in your

business.

You can also read case stories from selected tech companies like Homes.com, TRIBUS, and MyTheo

to see how the smart companies are helping you to innovate with standardized information.

If you need help defining your business intelligence strategy or would like to

better understand the ways that effective historical data analysis can improve

profitability in your brokerage, David Gumpper, WAV Group’s President of

Business Intelligence and Technology is here to help at david@-

wavgroup.com.

If you would like to learn more about TRIBUS’ Business Intelligence solutions

you can reach out to Jeff Harris, their VP of Business

Development, at [email protected] or call 312.957.8846 x1


Additional Resources

If you would like to learn more about the power of Business Intelligence

in brokers, here are some additional resources you can turn to.

https://tribus.com/products/core-products/tribus-source/

Today’s Online Business Intelligence by David Gumpper, President WAV Group

Business Intelligence & TechnologyWAV Group

https://www.wavgroup.com/2018/12/31/business-intelligence-tools-investment-for-2019/

https://www.wavgroup.com/2018/11/26/telling-your-data-story-easy-access-to-resos-organization-unique-identifier-with-microsoft-power-bi/

https://www.wavgroup.com/2018/02/20/are-brokerages-using-bi-visualization-tools/

https://tribus.com/resources/free-white-paper-increase-agent-productivity-profitability/

RESO/TRIBUS Case Study: How RESO is Sparking BrokerSuccess: Supporting Broker Expansion, Efficiency and Productivity

by Marilyn Wilson, Managing Partner, WAV Group


TRIBUS Source -Data Warehouse and API for Real

Estate Brokerages

https://www.wavgroup.com/2019/01/14/todays-online-business-intelligence/

Telling Your Data Story – Easy Access to RESO’s Organization Unique Identifier

with Microsoft Power BI by DavidGumpper, President WAV Group

Business Intelligence and Technology

Business Intelligence Tools –Investment for 2019 by David

Gumpper President WAV Group Business Intelligence and Technology

Are Brokerages using BI Visualization Tools? by David Gumpper, President WAV Group Business Intelligence and

Technology

TRIBUS Increase Agent Productivity and Profitability White Paper

https://www.reso.org/download/tribus-case-study/

About the AuthorMarilyn Wilson is Managing Partner at WAV Group Consulting. She is

passionate about helping the real estate industry continue to evolve and

grow by taking advantage of the latest technologies and tools, including all

of the opportunities provided by the Real Estate Standards Organization.

WAV Group is a trusted strategic advisor to the industry’s largest and most

progressive brokerages, MLSs, and technology companies.

She can be reached at [email protected].

WAV Group is the leading consulting firm for residential real estate,

helping each of their clients create positive waves of change in their

business with strategic insights and support delivered via strategic

planning, research, technology advisory, recruiting, organizational

development and marketing and branding consulting.

www.wavgroup.com


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