A new tenor to integrated solutions for brokerage

I was in Seattle a few weeks ago, visiting a broker, when I encountered the Trulia team in the airport heading over to Market Leader. During the entire flight home, my head spun with ideas about how these two companies would blend their talents to serve consumers and the real estate community better. We have clients who leverage these companies to their fullest, and others who don't. It has never been the providence of a consultant to champion one strategy over another. Helping others execute the strategy that is right for their business to maximize their opportunity is our charge. Pick a plan and make it work.

With that in mind, brokers are challenged with absorbing leads from multiple sources. LeadRouter does the best job, which is great if you are a REALOGY Franchisee, other brokers are left to their own devices. But LeadRouter ends at lead distribution – there is no follow up campaign capabilities. This causes all sorts of data problems related to tracking, distributing, and reporting on leads by lead source, lead quality by lead source, and lead conversion by lead source. ListHub and reDataVault have done a respectable job of helping on the reporting side, but there is more ground to cover to perfect those reports and get a full picture.

Lots of broker solutions providers have engineered lead routing and lead management tools – but you often need a programmer named MacGyver to get it to work. Leads from publishers are all unique and require unique programing to capture the email lead, scrape the information, add it to the lead management database, then try to do something with it. It's hard.

Once you do have your leads being routed, you need a solution to manage those leads. Brokers who have end-to-end CRM solutions like LoneWolf's brokerWOLF, Homes.com's Homes Connect, CoreLogic's AgentAchieve, or Real Estate Digital's rDesk have these capabilities. They are all integrated. This is also true of Market Leader's broker solution.