York Baur has been CEO of MoxiWorks since 2012, and during that time, the company has expanded to over 260 brokerage clients, as well as recently acquired Imprev, boosting the tech company’s existing toolkit with marketing automation.
Here, Baur provides insight on what it means to be an RISMedia Real Estate Newsmaker—individuals who are recognized for their positive contributions to the real estate industry—as well as what trends the industry is currently seeing, and what it takes to achieve success in real estate.
You were selected as an RISMedia Real Estate Newsmaker, in the Achiever category. What does it mean to be an achiever in the industry?
York Baur: Being an achiever takes grit. It means having perseverance and passion for achieving long-term goals. Unlike other industries, real estate isn’t a high-growth, churn-and-burn, VC-fueled industry. So, if you’re going to succeed, you have to have grit, a good plan and staying power to make that plan succeed over time.
How have you used your expertise to become a success story in real estate?
YB: Much of my career I’ve been involved in building and applying technology to help make salespeople better. The real estate industry is a great example of a selling industry that benefits from technology. And, because the industry has been relatively slow to adopt technology, there’s a lot of opportunity still ahead for the whole industry. We have a chance to dramatically improve productivity through the applications of technology throughout the sales process.
What are some of the trends you’re currently seeing in real estate?
YB: More than ever before, the consumer is demanding a higher-quality experience. This includes higher expectations around professionalism, but also immediate access to data and information without having to talk to someone at every step. Because of this, the agent needs to rely on technology to do the things for them that they can’t, in real-time, provide to a consumer. If the agent does that well, they are left with more time to up their game on professionalism and relationship-building—the pieces that are proven to generate business for them. All of this leads to the challenge of, if you don’t embrace the technology, you’re going to fall behind on consumer expectations.
How is MoxiWorks innovating around this growing challenge?
YB: MoxiWorks has been adapting and innovating around the newest trends for a decade, but always around two core principles we believe to be vital for success in the long run. First, we built tools that make an agent great with the people they already know. And, we built those tools on the MoxiCloud. The MoxiCloud is an open platform that allows our tools to work with 50 other companies’ technology so that the brokerage and their agents get the best solutions for each of their unique situations.
As we continue to move through this consolidation phase in our space, we encourage brokerages to do a better job of asking the hard questions of their vendors. The way we see it, you can’t be good at everything, so being all things to all people isn’t a recipe for success. Being a true open platform gives customers and users what they need from the experts that create those technologies.
What advice can you provide to anyone looking to become an industry expert?
YB: The thing about our industry is that it’s like no other. I came in as an outsider to this space and had to learn to be open-minded and not make assumptions that this industry was similar to others. In order to succeed, I recommended really learning the ins and outs of the industry as a whole to make the biggest impact and become an expert and leader in it.
To view Baur’s 2020 Newsmaker profile and those of all the other honorees this year, visit RISMedia.com/2020-Newsmakers.
Liz Dominguez is RISMedia’s senior editor. Email her your real estate news ideas at ldominguez@rismedia.com.
