Transform Your Leadership

Real Estate brokers, managers, and leaders have been bogged down by operations.

Recruiting and retaining great talent is all about redefining one’s value proposition beyond deal doctoring, technology, leads, or even culture. It’s about leadership and improving one’s coaching skillset.

In this conversation, Howard Chung, Vice President of John L. Scott Real Estate Affiliates and CEO of GreenOceanTV.com and ActivePipe’s Aaron Lincoff discuss strategies and tactics that real estate brokers and managers can implement to thrive in a new era of real estate leadership.

Transform from a successful agent to a successful leader:

• Recruit to your leadership skills and coaching
• Define your leadership strategy by asking, “What am I the best at?”
• Establish your value as transforming the individual by not just giving answers, but help them work through the question
• Be an active leader – semi-annual reviews, frequent individual check-ins for feedback and recognition
• Use a project management system to clearly see your progress and keep an eye on objectives and key results
• Pick one or two topics to be a leader on and the leadership thinking will develop
• Define when you’re training, and you’re coaching. They are separate. There is a need for both.
• Self-assessment – Measure how many coaching conversations you have in a week, even short ones. What worked? Outcome? Improvement?

Make BLM Part of Your Brand

You want to support black lives matter but don’t know what to say or are afraid to say the wrong thing. Don’t SAY anything…DO. Learn what you can do to make black lives matter part of your brand. Special guest Tamia Scott, Director of Marketing, Dilbeck Real Estate, and host Gabrielle Fuqua, Director of Marketing, ActivePipe discuss successful branding and what you can do to make BLM part of your brand.

In real estate, you are your brand. Your brand represents you as an individual, your core values, and beliefs. Real Estate agents aren’t just agents, they are businesses and successful branding means creating a clear public identity related to you. When it comes to BLM you can decide to have a soft touch or go all in, it’s really what makes you comfortable. It’s ok to make mistakes. If you do, apologize and move forward applying what you learn.

A few things you can do to support Black Lives Matter:

1. Be authentic – meaningful and consistent actions
2. Create and follow a set of core values
3. Education and awareness – NAR’s Sensitivity Course: “At Home with Diversity”, books, movies, follow advocates on social media
4. Build Relationships with Black People
5. Connect with your community – get involved
6. Include black businesses on your preferred vendor list and share it
7. Make space for black businesses on your marketing materials
8. Let an activist do a take over of your social media pages

3 Misconceptions about Brokerage Level Luxury Marketing Everyone Should Know

Mike Feller, CRO of ActivePipe, hosts special guest Stephanie Anton, President of Luxury Portfolio International® where she is responsible for overseeing the strategic direction of the high-end marketing division of Leading Real Estate Companies of the World, a network of locally branded real estate brokerages in 70+ countries.

Brokers: Turn Dead Leads Into Dollars

This week we’re hosting Craig McClelland, Vice President & COO – Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate Metro Brokers.

Craig discusses helping your agents down a qualifying lead path that has real ROI. All of your agents’ contacts – cold leads, online leads, open house leads, and sphere of influence will benefit from these strategies.

Recruit More Agents Right Now

In the coming months, success will be based on bridging social distance and building a strategy that’s right for you. Learn what you can put into place with top-producers from across the nation.

In this session, we’re joined by Brian Boero. Brian is the former president of Inman and current CEO of 1000watt, a creative agency focused on the real estate industry. Brian has extensive knowledge about delivering the right recruiting message with the right technology to attract the best agents for your brokerage.

Marketing 3.0: Applying Behavioral Intelligence to Real Estate

Travis Saxton of T3 Sixty talks about applying behavioral intelligence to Real Estate. Travis has 10 years of experience in residential real estate technology and has authored more than 10 reports and has spoken at nearly 100 real estate industry events.

Bring on the Bounce Post COVID 19

Verl Workman discusses four critical strategies that will put every agent, broker, and team leader in a position to take advantage of the post COVID bounce. Over the course of 20 years, Verl has delivered over 1,000 seminars, webinars, keynote addresses and motivational messages to professionals around the world.

For even more helpful tips, check out our COVID-19: Real Estate Response Plan and our white paper Digital Marketing in Real Estate: A guide to better ROI.

Register here for our next live Industry Insider Panel. We host top-producing real estate experts’ as they offer advice on building a strategy that’s right for you. Ask questions and get valuable feedback you can use.

People-Based Marketing

Tom Flanagan is Chief Innovation Officer for The Group, Inc. and oversees marketing, technology, and relocation. Tom was previously a syndicated columnist for Inman News. His column explored the best practices and trends in website design, mobile applications, and online services that real estate companies can use to grow their businesses and run them more efficiently.

Tom discusses proper marketing etiquette during a crisis, marketing automation and how to leverage data during online spikes.

For even more helpful tips, check out our COVID-19: Real Estate Response Plan and our white paper Digital Marketing in Real Estate: A guide to better ROI.

Register here for our next live Industry Insider Panel. We host top-producing real estate experts’ as they offer advice on building a strategy that’s right for you. Ask questions and get valuable feedback you can use.

How Agents Should Respond to COVID-19

In our first edition of Industry Insider, Ash chats with renowned real estate trainer Josh Phegan about the current state of the real estate industry and how best to tackle some common challenges being experienced by agents.

For even more helpful tips, check out our COVID-19: Real Estate Response Plan and our white paper Digital Marketing in Real Estate: A guide to better ROI.

Jill Nicholson

Jill is the Marketing Project Manager at Robinson Sotheby’s International Realty, they’ve recently made the switch to ActivePipe. Here is what she had to say about their experience!

“Robinson Sotheby’s International Realty switched to ActivePipe at the beginning of 2020. What initially attracted me to ActivePipe was the user-friendliness and flexibility it offered. I thought this would be a wonderful tool for our agents to use very effectively with little or no assistance from our support staff, giving them much greater control and autonomy. What I wasn’t expecting was how much I would enjoy using it myself. As a member of our company’s marketing team, I was proficient and very comfortable using our old email marketing app, but ActivePipe has proven to be even easier and faster to use. It’s actually really fun!”

“It’s been great for our recruiting drip campaign. I’ve been able to build a wide variety of emails with lots of different content including videos and animated GIFs. Using the ActivePipe analytics, I can quickly determine which features our audience is engaging with the most.”

“Several of our agents have been using ActivePipe in impressed ways. It’s been really inspiring to see how they’ve been developing their own email campaigns. One of our agents, Billy Belshaw, has created his own newsletter called “Market Watch” and it looks amazing! He really likes the Smartfeed feature and uses it in his newsletter. He also created a set of his own customized and very professional templates for Open Houses, New Listings, and more.”

“Another one of our agents, Connie Greene, loves that the ActivePipe property feed includes all of the our agents’ listings — not just hers. She uses ActivePipe to create “new listings in your neighborhood” emails that include her listings in a particular neighborhood, plus our other agents’ listings in that same neighborhood. Connie said right after she sent out the first one of these emails, she heard back immediately from a few of her contacts who told her how much they appreciated knowing about the other homes available in their target neighborhood.”

“I’m really glad we made the switch to ActivePipe. Our marketing department no longer receives calls from frustrated agents struggling to find the right template or edit the right information in an email. But most of all, I have enjoyed seeing how much creativity our agents have now that they’re using the right tool!”

Brook Browning

Brooke is the Operations Manager for Marketplace Sotheby’s International Realty.

How has your experience with ActivePipe been so far? 

My company switched over to Activepipe as our new primary email marketing tool and our experience has been truly amazing from the Support Team, weekly conference calls with ActivePipe representatives and even live webinars for our agents. We have more flexibility within the system and it provides everything our agents need in order to do business.

We are very happy with our choice to move to Activepipe and would recommend this for any company that is looking to make the switch.

Liz Hotz-Gonzalez

This case study was originally written by Keith Loria and published in RISMedia.

Wish Properties Inc., a local Sherman Oaks, Calif.-based real estate office with global connections, first opened for business in 2012 as Wish Sotheby’s International Realty.  Today, the firm is made up of four offices that span the San Fernando Valley—from Calabasas to Encino to Sherman Oaks to Toluca Lake—with 120-plus agents.

This past summer, the firm began using ActivePipe—an email marketing solution—in order to increase business and stay ahead of the competition.

“ActivePipe has by far been the best tool we have added to our business in a long time, and we are just getting started with it,” says Liz Hotz-Gonzalez, director of Operations for the firm. “The major pro for our agents is that it’s extremely user-friendly and very easy to use, which helps more agents stay interested.”

For clients, the appeasing part is that they get a beautiful email that’s interactive.

“So, if they like something they see, it automatically gives them the opportunity to click on the email and go directly to the website and see more,” says Hotz-Gonzalez, who would strongly recommend ActivePipe to others.

David Doblan, an agent with the firm who had utilized Mailchimp in the past, was excited to learn that the company partnered with ActivePipe.

“I am now able to keep in touch with my clients and see what they’re opening and clicking on so that I can send them a more personable email to follow up with my ActivePipe campaign,” says Doblan, who appreciates the clean, user-friendly interface. “My clients and potential clients appreciate being top-of-mind.”

Hotz-Gonzalez notes that implementation was easy, as the team at ActivePipe was very helpful and offered a ton of training and hand-holding to get everyone up and running. Answering everything he needed to know, Doblan remembers the initial webinar, which taught him about the system.

But the training doesn’t end there.

“One of our office gurus teaches a weekly class to provide the ones still learning new tips and tricks,” adds Hotz-Gonzalez.

“I would recommend others use ActivePipe to have one more tool in their pockets to ‘touch on’ their clients,” says Doblan. “It’s a great tool to use for drips, open houses, new listings and general email blasts.”

Hotz-Gonzalez says the whole team at ActivePipe has been “awesome to work with, from implementation to design, all the way up to general customer service and tech support. If there are any issues, the firm has a direct account liaison contact to email and/or call with any support issues.

“They have a very quick tech support team that responds right away via email to work on any issues,” says Hotz-Gonzalez. “I don’t think there has ever been a problem that was unable to be resolved within 24 hours. In my opinion, that is excellent service.”

Andy Jolls

This case study was originally written by Keith Loria and published in RISMedia.

When Andy Jolls, COO at Vista Sotheby’s International Realty, which has eight offices throughout California, first learned about ActivePipe, he was impressed that there was an email marketing solution for real estate professionals that provided the important customer insights that agents, REALTORS® and brokers were looking for.

“As a Sotheby’s affiliate, we were previously using a different supplier, their recommended email marketing platform at the time, but it had its limitations on how to develop email campaigns,” explains Jolls.

“We were also having trouble with the actual campaign falling into junk or spam filters, so we were on the lookout for a different product, and we were looking for a different CRM solution for our agents. The people we were talking to at the time recommended ActivePipe.”

The difference was noticed straight away, says Jolls. “ActivePipe has been really progressive about avoiding that type of situation. They look at why it happened, in addition to things they can change on both the domain and email level to prevent it from happening again.”

Within the first few minutes of the ActivePipe demonstration, Jolls notes that it was the best real estate marketing platform he had ever seen.

“From an administration standpoint, the ease of putting together an email that looked sharp and would get attention from the reader was a big factor,” says Jolls. “Some of the other solutions are a little more difficult in terms of putting an email together, and in real estate, it’s all about ease of use.”

Additionally, Jolls was impressed with ActivePipe’s ability to connect to the brokerage so that they could quickly and easily get announcements about listings or open houses out from the broker level.

“The reporting that ActivePipe provides on viewership and readership statistics was presented in an active format, which we weren’t getting before,” says Jolls. “There’s some sort of artificial intelligence where they rate the contact and whether they’re a likely consumer going forward.”

Vista Sotheby’s International Realty launched with ActivePipe in the beginning of August, and the company provided group and online-based training for the firm’s agents.

ActivePipe’s David Greenbaum has been the lead account manager, working closely with the firm to rectify any problems and help with training. Available whenever needed, this has created a very strong partnership that Jolls believes will continue well into the future.

“Not only are they helping us get going on the platform, but they’re very supportive on an ongoing basis in order to get the highest readership possible on all the emails going out,” adds Jolls.

In its first month with ActivePipe, the firm sent more than 1 million emails, and that number is expected to be similar in the months ahead.

One way the platform has already been used successfully? Any new listing acquired by the firm is sent out to a database of nearly 60,000 real estate agents in California. Previously, the firm was seeing a less than desirable readership rate, but by using ActivePipe, that number has improved by 400 percent.

“It’s a similar story with the open house emails we send out as a brokerage for anything scheduled for the upcoming weekend,” adds Jolls.

There’s also a monthly newsletter that Vista Sotheby’s International Realty provides for each agent’s client base, and those readership numbers are well above what they were before.

“We’re getting the most eyeballs as possible on these properties, which is helping everyone,” concludes Jolls.

Nick Thring

We recently caught up with Nick to ask him a few questions about how ActivePipe is helping his business and his future outlook for the year to come.

“With some great technology out there including the likes of ActivePipe it enables us to really concentrate on who our prospects are and then behind the scenes it discovers more people that we maybe didn’t know were going to be interacting with us, but are ready to do something.”

Check out the full video below:

Tom Flanagan

This case study was originally written by Zoe Eisenberg and published in RISMedia.

Tom Flanagan is the chief technology officer for Colorado-based brokerage The Group Inc., where he oversees marketing, technology and relocation. With over 15 years of experience in real estate innovation, Flanagan understands the vitality of smart email solutions.

“Email is a tried-and-true marketing tool, even for this day and age,” says Flanagan, noting that the majority of adults in the U.S. check their email at least once a day.

While there are many email automation services to choose from, Flanagan stresses that most of these platforms can be laborious for agents to manually load their property feeds and open houses into.

To combat this, Flanagan and his team began using ActivePipe, an email marketing solution built specifically for real estate, that focuses on easy, customizable automation, as well as access to the customer insights that agents and brokers can utilize to get ahead.

“ActivePipe marries email technology with property listings,” explains Flanagan. “They’re specialized; they’ve taken email automation to the next level.”

While Flanagan and his team began working with ActivePipe a year ago, they were immediately impressed with the user experience. “Everything is drag-and-drop, so it’s easy for any user to create these really beautiful, mobile-friendly email pieces that also come with sophisticated analytics, metrics and automation.”

Another area that impressed Flanagan? ActivePipe’s easy onboarding process.

“The company completely understands how important adoption is in real estate tech, and so onboarding was really easy,” he says. “Their team was quick to integrate the product into our tech stack, and they’re always willing to do different training sessions, both for our agents and our corporate services.”

In addition to live support, Flanagan and team also utilize ActivePipe’s training webinars, called ActivePipe Quick Starts, which allow users to access training info on-demand.

ActivePipe currently offers three product suites, all of which have property feed integration and can be integrated with a CRM. SEND allows users to easily build and send professional, mobile-responsive emails, while AUTO gives you the same functionality, but lets users build automated drip campaigns, send personalized reminders to contacts and receive intuitive data analytics to identify active buyers and sellers. Their largest suite, ENTERPRISE, automates the customer’s journey with triggered and scheduled recurring emails, while using sophisticated behavior-driven profiling to help predict the client’s next move.

Flanagan’s team is enjoying using the system and even contemplating upgrading to a higher tier. “I love the ability to easily create a rich, dynamic monthly newsletter, all drag-and-drop, that includes videos, open houses and listings.”

Another smart ActivePipe feature, according to Flanagan, is their location-based, geo-targeted technology. “Their system has the ability to cross-reference the locations of clients in an agent’s CRM, then deliver properties to them based on their location. That’s really intelligent.”

It’s this sort of intelligence that initially drew Flanagan into the world of real estate innovation. “What I love about real estate technology is that it’s so vast. Every day is different and exciting. If you’re a programmer at a tech company, you write code for 50 hours a week, and it’s nearly all the same. With real estate technology, I get to work in both art and science. It’s always fresh and new.”

Rishi Bakshi

This case study was originally written by Paige Tepping and published in RISMedia.

“Email marketing is important for any company,” says Intero Real Estate Services – East Bay Broker and General Manager Rishi Bakshi, who spent the past year creating a whole new set of technology for the firm’s technology stack from scratch.

“After changing our CRM, it was recommended that we take a look at ActivePipe’s email marketing system, as this was an area in which we were lacking,” explains Bakshi. “As soon as I saw the demo and understood just how clean, sleek and easy it was for an agent, admin or staff member to create any number of email marketing pieces, it was a no brainer,” he adds.

Built specifically for the real estate industry, one of the biggest benefits in working with ActivePipe is the fact that it’s connected to the MLS. Therefore, it already showcases each and every listing the firm has.

Better yet? There’s no cap on the number of emails that can be sent in any given month. Having sent upwards of 250,000 emails last month (at press time), Bakshi notes that this would translate to an exorbitant amount of money with any other vendor.

Simplifying the entire process, ActivePipe makes it easy to create great looking property alerts, open house announcements and newsletters. “You can create whatever you want on the spot by simply dragging and dropping listings, blog content, YouTube videos—or anything else—into any number of templates and then blast it out to a specific database,” says Bakshi.

“It simplifies everything,” adds Bakshi, who points to ActivePipe’s back-end as yet another key piece of the puzzle. While agents love the back-end because it provides a glimpse into how a particular email is performing, it goes much further than that.

In fact, in addition to open rates and interactions, the back-end also shows what part of the email the recipient is responding to. “Since most of the emails we’re sending are made up of a variety of components, we can see exactly how our customers are interacting with the content we’re sharing,” explains Bakshi. This further differentiates the firm’s agents, as they can candidly discuss the results of their email marking campaigns with buyers and sellers alike.

“If you’re looking for something that’s sleek and easy to use, consider ActivePipe,” concludes Bakshi, who has nothing but good things to say about their experience thus far.

Whether it’s basic onboarding to launch the partnership, webinars or one-on-one meetings to discuss problem areas, the team at ActivePipe consistently goes above and beyond. “David Greenbaum, ActivePipe’s director of operations, is constantly checking in and making sure we’re doing okay. The touches they make are incredible,” concludes Bakshi.

Vincent Socci

Vincent is the Chief Operating Officer of William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty.

What are your thoughts on ActivePipe so far?

In a sea of marketing automation platforms, ActivePipe stands out above the rest not just simply by enabling our brokerage to create centralised, high quality content, but by easily allowing our agents to curate bespoke content.

We are committed to equipping our agents with the most innovative technologies so they can do business more intelligently.

Shelly Joy

Shelly is the executive manager at Carvill Sotheby’s International Realty

How has your experience with ActivePipe been so far? 

From start to finish the ActivePipe Team did not disappoint. They were professional and knowledgable and one step ahead on every aspect of getting us started.

Their drive to always help and keep their clients happy really showed throughout the entire process. We have been looking for a product that is user friendly and high quality and we are excited that we finally found it.

Risa Auger

Risa is the marketing director at Vista Sotheby’s International Realty.

How has your experience with ActivePipe been so far? 

Transitioning to ActivePipe as our email distribution platform has been made much easier thanks to all the time and patience from the ActivePipe team. We are not an easy bunch to train, but they did it with a laugh in their voice. 

So far, we are loving the slick look and feel along with the many automated features that are already built-in—I know it will keep getting better and better as we move forward with it.

We look forward to seeing what surprises and features are ahead.

Alastair Strauss

Alastair Strauss is the Head of Marketing at award-winning estate agency, Martyn Gerrard.

When we caught up with him at the recent EA Masters Conference and Awards in London, he was excited to talk to us about how ActivePipe is improving business across the entire brand.

“It allows the offices to do what they do best. Make the phone calls, talk to people and be the face of the company, whilst in the background, ActivePipe allows our customers to communicate with us on a level that we almost don’t have to think about”.

Check out the full video below:

Why does Alastair love ActivePipe so much?

“The best thing about ActivePipe is that it understands what an agent needs and what an agent wants”.