Realogy recently announced a company-wide technology partnership with MoxiWorks to support the brokerage’s members and franchisees through an open ecosystem model.
According to the company, the partnership decision was made amid a “tremendous amount of demand” in the industry to seek an end-to-end tech solution. However, what Realogy is after goes deeper than that.
According to Simon Chen, executive vice president, Product and Innovation at Realogy Holdings Corp., the brand understands there are multiple solutions out there. Rather than a one-size-fits-all, they landed on open architecture that would allow Realogy to offer the best of the best when it comes to technology, even if that means bringing on competing products.
“We can’t build everything for everybody,” says Chen of closed ecosystems, which wouldn’t fare well in a company with approximately 187,500 agents in the United States across six brands. “The whole benefit of MoxiWorks is the interconnectivity of the best-of-breed solutions.”
Chen says it was a big pivotal moment for the company to realize that a partnership was the key rather than building out a proprietary system.
“Why would we create commoditized functionality? Why would we reinvent the wheel when someone has already done it?” asks Chen.
Ease of use and a stress-free onboarding process were among the factors considered, according to Chen.
“MoxiWorks is a robust commercial product that has already been adopted by tens of thousands of customers,” says Chen, who emphasizes that due to the sheer size of the brand, any tech rollout would be, by default, one of the company’s largest deployments. “We found that we can quickly partner with (MoxiWorks) and get them the data they need for our open ecosystem through published APIs. Because they have their own ecosystem in the MoxiCloud, we can connect just one time…the deployment of it is shockingly easy so far.”
In fact, Chen says that’s not where the challenges lie; the logistics of getting the MLS data licensing from each agent will be much more time consuming than integrating Realogy’s systems with MoxiWorks’ solutions.
That aside, Chen is very optimistic that this partnership will help productivity skyrocket and provide an added value for all Realogy members and franchisees.
“The key thing about the open ecosystem is the interconnectivity,” says Chen. “We embrace even competing solutions to provide choice. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
MoxiWorks’ cloud-based marketing and business software will be available to Realogy members and franchisees at no additional cost.
Liz Dominguez is RISMedia’s senior online editor. Email her your real estate news ideas to lizd@rismedia.com.
