Michael Montano

Overview:

The Power of 4, Inner West Sydney, comprises a high performing team of 17 agents who have a very strong share of the region taking in Leichardt, Drummoyne and Annandale.

Since 2007 the success of The Power of 4 offices has been built on a philosophy of giving clients personal service, professional advice and support. Their clients appreciation for this approach and reputation for results have made The Power of 4 one of the most important real estate groups in Sydney. The Power of 4 personnel are chosen for their extensive knowledge, business acumen and passion for property.

The Power of 4 group has always been an early adopter of innovative marketing and technology and was one of ActivePipe’s first clients in the Raine & Horne network.

What was it that attracted you to ActivePipe?

The leadership team recognised that ActivePipe was a very advanced email marketing platform that could streamline some of our client touchpoints.

We’ve always had a significant database but marketing to our contacts wasn’t particularly professional or consistent and we had very little in the way of reporting and therefore couldn’t measure its effectiveness. The ad hoc email marketing we were doing was also enormously time consuming.

ActivePipe gave us reliability, brand consistency and control of message across all our offices and agents, and also presented an opportunity to build our presence in a highly competitive market. Importantly, everything that ActivePipe sends on our behalf can be tracked and the fine detail of client interaction monitored.

How long did it take for you to start seeing results from ActivePipe

From the very first send there were a few surprised faces among the skeptics!

We enjoyed positive client feedback that we hadn’t anticipated and we saw activity and opportunities we didn’t realise existed. It’s been a real eye opener because ActivePipe helped us exploit the potential of our database. In a sense we probably knew it was there but we’d never had a tool like ActivePipe at our disposal.

The results continue to flow to this day.

How would you describe the impact of this business tool?

The team really love it because it helps them identify prospective vendors before they’ve revealed themselves to the market and our competition. In this area we know we’re one of few agencies using ActivePipe and we can leverage this with our clients.

Some of the agents have thousands of contacts and it’s impossible to be across them all for obvious reasons, but ActivePipe will alert them to the people who are in real estate mode so that they can follow them up. They don’t waste time with people who aren’t serious buyers or sellers which makes them far more effective.

One of the great things about ActivePipe is it is ‘touching’ our database nice and regularly. Its maintaining the relationship in a soft way, it’s professional and personalised and non-invasive. When it comes time to sell we have confidence ActivePipe has influenced decision making and won us plenty of business.

How do you measure ActivePipe’s ROI?

First thing I’d say is that ActivePipe has paid for itself many, many times over. It is an inexpensive yet powerful business tool. Quite apart from the significant value of the listings generated there is also benefit in things like web traffic, brand awareness, agent productivity and so on.

Does ActivePipe help your business in any other ways?

It is a powerful listing tool because it intuitively identifies contacts as potential vendors and encourages people to formally request appraisals. These Potential vendors are impressed by ActivePipe too.

What was it like training your staff to use ActivePipe?

ActivePipe is largely set & forget and there’s not a lot of need for intervention by the agents and therefore little training required. Even the reporting is automated so the agents are supplied with lots of data by ActivePipe that they can use in their prospecting. They don’t have to do anything and our management team has confidence that ActivePipe is working away in the background.

Having said that if you ever need assistance our Marketing team think the world of ActivePipe. They have a wonderful support team.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

We were one of the first to move to ActivePipe and their product remains relevant. They’ve given us no cause to complain, only reasons to be happy that we came on board.

Would you recommend ActivePipe to another Raine & Horne office?

Let me answer the question this way – Raine & Horne would be a better performing network if all our offices were using ActivePipe!