I speak with brokerages large and small every day about their real estate brokerage websites. A common concern I hear among them is a frustration with their inability to enter data once, and have it available not only within the tools they use, but common tools their agents may use. This can include new leads getting pushed into another system, easily allowing your marketing vendors access to your listing or roster data, or getting accounting information into your reporting system from your financial vendor. Here are three common reasons why a real estate brokerage cannot get their data where and when they want it.
By Vendor Design
Some vendors offer a multitude of products and services, and if you’re a customer of one, they want you as a customer for all of them. This makes sense from a business perspective, but more the vendor’s business than yours. You may really like one of the vendor’s offered services, and it may work very well with their other services, but not with others. You now feel trapped and obligated to use the vendor’s other services, even if those other services are not the best choice for that category.
Vendor’s Technical Challenges
A vendor may have grown organically or via acquisition over a long period of time. Demand for data was not foreseen when they originally built their technology stack, making it challenging to now offer that capability. If their growth was by acquisition, it may be their current technology is a facade, hodge-podged together on the front end to provide a cohesive service to the customer, but unable to effectively aggregate the data. Therefore they cannot expose it via an API or other means of sharing.
Proprietary System
This is a variation of “By Vendor Design” above, but if a technology vendor builds their product on a proprietary system, the data coming out of it will not be of great use to you in another system. This is another form of entrapment, making leaving the vendor more painful, and creates friction when trying to get data elsewhere. I often compare this to the casinos in Las Vegas, where it’s super easy to take that motorized walkway from the boulevard into the casino, but it’s a long, sad lonely walk back to street when you leave. So you cling to that old tech, as painful, productive and liberating as it may be to move. But eventually you’re going to need to upgrade to improve the flow of data in and out of your platform.
When considering custom real estate brokerage website vendors, consider one that has APIs that share your data with your preferred vendors, allowing for many integration partners, such as those we have at TRIBUS.