The latest RISMedia webinar—“Building a Brokerage Brand: How to Stand Out in a Saturated Market”—moderator Rei Mesa, president and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Florida Realty, oversaw a discussion on brokerage branding with Max Kuhl, chief growth officer of finance firm Notable that partners with brokerages as pay it close option for home sellers; Whitney LaCosta, CEO & broker/owner of Howard Hanna | Coach Realty; and Kevin Van Eck, principal at the Maverix Advisory Group.
The webinar was sponsored by Notable, and discussed ways in which building a brand is a reciprocal top-down project. Leaders need to know what the brand they want to build is, but a big responsibility for building that brand falls to working agents, so both parties need clear communication about goals and strategies.
Key takeaways:
- A brand with a great story to tell, especially a story or theme that consumers can instantly think of at the mention of a brand, is always going to have greater sticking power.
- Having a well-defined understanding of your company culture and brand will make recruiting easier, especially in the long-run, because you’ll know the types of agents you want on your team and get agents who think they’ll fit into that team.
- The real estate industry is not B2B or B2C, but B2B2C—it’s vital that you build a brand with both agents and consumers, and which your agents can represent to those consumers, because you need both to succeed as a brokerage.
- Keep everyone in your organization, from agents to team to partner mortgage/title/insurance companies, working in sync to drive the brand you want to convey.
- Brokerage leadership knowing the specific business strategy, tools or branding they want to focus—even obsess on—is a good way to make that same focus trickle down in terms of on the ground agents adopting those tools or strategies.
- Company leadership needs to be self-accountable in terms of monitoring agent adoption rates, so as to understand if agent adoption is working, or if it isn’t, and how to address the challenges it is having.
- Be thoughtful when choosing to incorporate new tools into your business strategy—consider what the concrete benefits to the agent are, what would make the agent think on their own “I need to use this,” and if the tool aligns with the brand you’ve built or if it will detract from it.
- It can be high risk, high reward to your brand to be (one of) the first ones to adopt a new tool—you could be on the bleeding edge, but if a tool doesn’t have a proven track record, its impact on your brand and company is harder to predict.
Here’s what our esteemed panelists had to say:
- “We as an industry, I recall years back, we started referring to our mortgage, title, insurance and home warranty partners as ancillary services. Then we started moving towards calling them core services. We realized that they were core to what we’re doing. I started calling them during the pandemic, “essential services” and I still call them essential services today because I do believe that your partners, whether it’s your mortgage title, insurance, home warranty, or Notable or a third party that’s going to be assisting you and your agents achieving your goals are essential to that customer experience and they are essential to the success of your company going forward,” –Rei Mesa, President and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Florida Realty.
- “The most effective adoption strategies that we see are alignment between the leadership at the organization and the agents and what they are focusing on. When the leadership has a particular focus in some cases like an obsession with X, whatever that thing is—‘we are going to do the best listing presentations in our market, we’re going to have the most information, we are going to have this comprehensive strategy and approach that we’re going to take.’ Every seller we sit down with has this wonderful experience, knows exactly what’s going on, it’s going to be better than the four other conversations…If the brokerage is interested in spending the time and energy and investing in their agents and investing in their seller experience, we’re going to have a great alignment and we’re going to see really strong adoption,” –Max Kuhl, Chief Growth Officer of Notable.
- “If someone has a really bad experience with an agent, it affects my other 800 agents. So it has to be ingrained in the agent that what is the brand they have to believe in it so they can go out every day with and be authentic when they talk about the brand and the level of service that they’re going to deliver, it’s not just lip service, it really is true what the consumer, the B2C is going to get,” –Whitney LaCosta, CEO & Broker/Owner of Howard Hanna | Coach Realty.
- “You have to know who you are so that you can make good decisions that align with your brand. And I always say we have to take the same advice that we give to agents, which is anytime you’re about to engage with something, whether it’s tech or marketing or a service product, you have to take a step back and make sure it aligns. Otherwise it has the potential to disrupt that brand that you’ve created and the future that you were hoping to create with that brand,” –Kevin Van Eck, Principal at the Maverix Advisory Group.
To view the full webinar, click here.
