How COVID Changed Open Houses and Real Estate Marketing with HomeSpotter CEO

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At the nexus of brokerage mobile apps, real estate marketing, and open houses sits HomeSpotter’s CEO. The company offers branded apps for brokerages and agents, automated listing marketing, and the number one open house registration app, Spacio.

Aaron had a front row seat to what would go from the shut down of the real estate industry, to it’s holding up the rest of the economy. We ask him about this and he provides some tricks that brokerages can use for their apps and marketing.

TRANSCRIPT

Hi everybody. And welcome to Brokerage Insider the podcast where we interview the leaders in real estate and technology. I’m your host, Eric Stegemann and I’m the CEO of TRIBUS. We’re one of the largest independent prop tech companies in real estate and provider of custom brokerage technology to medium and large sized brokerages in the United States and Canada.

Today on the show, I’m looking to have my friend Aaron Kardell. Aaron is the founder and CEO of HomeSpotter. HomeSpotter started out. As the premier provider of branded apps for brokerages and agents, but the company has recently branched out over the past few years into other options as well. And we’ll dive into some of those when we talk to Aaron today.

So Aaron, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me, Eric. Great to be here. Good to talk to you. In fact, right before we started recording here, we were talking about how it’s the, as we’re recording this today on March the ninth, 2021, I think it’s the oneumyear anniversary of the last time we all saw each other at the leading area conference in Las Vegas, right?

It’s a, it’s been quite a year. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And, and, with what you guys do, it’ll be interesting to hear some of the data, that you have of what you’ve seen over the past year. Cause you’re kind of a leading edge. in some regards for, for that data. So I’m excited to dig in. but before we do that, I just want to understand a little bit about your background.

let’s start out by, you know, you’re obviously a technical founder, so what got you started to doing software development and then later starting your own company. Yeah, thanks, Eric. well, real simply, I grew up in a rural community in Nebraska. and this was, back in the days when, computers were still.

Lunchables as they called them at the time they were briefcases. and, my parents were entrepreneurs and my mom, happened to be an accountant at the firm that they had founded. And so she would. Drag this, briefcase home, with her each evening. And, at a very young age, I picked up a book about, basic, programming and, learned, programming at a very early age that way.

And just, you know, I think was really excited by the concept of. you know, you put in a program and, minutes later, what, what you wrote is, is working and, you know, over time, There was kind of that personal joy in, in learning programming, but having parents who were entrepreneurs as well, led me down a path where, you know, as soon I started exploring, what does it look like to combine these two things to, potentially start a business, that, that was also within the, the rental of software.

And so by, Time. I was in high school. I, started my first, mini little software company that was selling, what, was referred to it at. The time has shareware, over the internet. it was a windows program. And, you know, as I say, sometimes it was, you know, not a ton of money as far as, tech startups go nowadays.

But, compared to, working at the local dairy queen. It was a pretty good, pretty good living for a, high school kid. No, I have not heard the term shareware in a very long time, but it brought lots of memories back of the software of the month club discs that I used to get. Yeah, I have to ask you, what was the, what was the shareware app that you built?

It’s so random. I got to tell you, the name of the, windows app was called easy zip self extractor pro. and there was only a pro edition of course, but, you know, the idea was, and this sounds, almost insane in retrospect is a lot of people didn’t know how to open a zip file, back in the day.

And so. These, programs like the one I created allowed you to convert a zip file into a exe file, you know, something you’d run. And so people could transform their zip file into a program that they could send to somebody else. And at the time people would just, Trust that and run what they were sent.

but, yeah, so it was a, it was a good little business in, a certain niche. So WinZip was your big competitor then, right? They were, yeah, WinZip was a, you know, more kind of the full suite of, being able to manage those zip files. And they, they did have their own little, self extractor program.

but yeah, they were, they were our big competitors. That’s so funny. I think some people listening into this, that’s gonna, it’s going to bring back a lot of memories thinking about both shareware and WinZip, and, and the old ways of zipping files where it wasn’t just a right click. Like it is today.

There was a lot more complicated, 20 something years ago, folks. so, but that begs the question. How do we go from zipping files, to real estate software development. Yeah, well, between that and, founding, what’s now HomeSpotter, I had a few, other startups along the way, spent a fair amount of time in Kum12 education.

had, Company that had a student information system that was sold to a Pearson education. And I worked there for awhile. and, it was a lot, a lot of great time. and, then, you know, right around 2009 after I had left Pearson, I had just gotten into iPhone development personally and, was something I was personally excited with.

And I had an experience where my wife and I were looking for the next house, where we wanted to live. And driving around on the weekends, just felt like a very empty experience on an iPhone at the time. couldn’t figure out, you know, why can’t I see what open houses are open right now. and you know, I certainly had the experience on some brokerage websites prior to that of a good experience on the desktop.

but there just wasn’t. A good moral equivalent of that on, on the phone and yeah, and even in 2009, at least when this idea really got started, this was before, realtor.com or Zillow or others like it, even had an iPhone app yet. And so really just, you know, out of a personal experience, a need, that’s what led to starting what was at the time, mobile Realty apps and is now rebranded HomeSpotter.

And I. Real quick. very, very quickly learned that, kind of the way into the industry was through, IDs rules, which I learned about and partnering with brokerage firms. And that’s what led us down a path of a white labeled app business for, brokerage firms, that they could basically have a mobile app to compliment their, their website.

Well, yeah. And, it’s now. I think the number one provider of those, after, another company that was out there got acquired a couple of years ago. You’re you’re the, you’re the big dog now, right? Yeah, we, we are now in the market leading position in, in that, space. Yes, that’s great. but the, you know, obviously there’s the concern that, that brokers have.

And, and I take calls like this from concerned brokers, saying, you know, Oh, well just everybody uses Redfin or everybody uses Zillow. Why do I need. an app they might say, or, or in the calls that I take it’s why do I need IDX on my website? you know, everybody just goes to Redfin. Anyways, what would you say to, to brokers that, that are having those thoughts?

You know, I think the big thing I would say Eric is, there can be different tools for different stages of the transaction. And, one of the, one of the biggest things that we found is that, our apps have been a great way for agents to really, nurture many of the relationships that they have and, convert maybe some of the ones that are only.

passively looking into more of an actively buying mode. And we do find a number of scenarios even where agents might be, buying leads from the likes of Zillow, where ultimately they get, one of our apps in there. now client’s hands. It, it’s a great means for, collaboration, during the transaction.

And it’s also a kind of a great way to stay in touch even in those times where. that a potential buyer isn’t yet in an actively buying mode. we’ve also found that, brokerages that have a lot of traffic on their IDX websites, are. Really in the best position, if they want to use our apps as a primary means of lead generation, not just for that nurturing that they can, use their, mobile web traffic, which they’ve already got a great presence with, to, to push downloads of the app as well.

And that makes a lot of sense. It’s, it’s almost like the, the positioning, isn’t the discovery, it’s the connection side of it with, with the, with the agent. Right. so you know, something that I’ve been really interested in and paying a lot more attention to recently is, is push notifications. And, you know, for the brokers out there that are listening, if you’re not aware of what TCPA is.

You should probably look into the telephone consumer protection act because there’s all sorts of rules around your agents and your responsibilities with regard to sending text messages to folks, particularly when it comes to marketing text messages, if they haven’t opted in, but, but push notifications are kind of the wild West.

there’s no restrictions behind the, because it’s a sheer data connection. It’s not going over the telephone network. how important have you seen. Those push notifications be to create a engagement with your apps. Yeah, I can, I can say that it’s an area we’ve done a lot more in over the last, year or so and building in, prompts to, deliver push notifications around things like, listing alerts, say when you’ve saved a property, if the price changes or, if you’ve got to save search, letting the consumer know that there are matching properties.

or, you know, another way we’ve used push notifications for a long time is really with this built in messaging and collaboration component to, foster communication. And when somebody sends someone else a message to, send a push notification to get them back into the app. And it’s a, it’s a huge driver.

we’ve seen, Over the last year, really a 25% year over year increase in, something that we track called the Dow Mau ratio and Damo is a daily active users to, monthly active users. And, you know, we’ve seen a 25% lift over the last year in that down mal ratio. too. Very high levels.

And a lot of that is really driven by these push notifications. That’s phenomenal. I mean, in the app world, Dow and Mao is, is, is everything. it’s out. If you’re a mobile app developer, it’s how your entire app gets valued is based upon daily active users and monthly active users. And, obviously from a brokerage perspective, being able to push those numbers up to their apps, with little things like this that may not even have costs associated with them from the broker standpoint.

it, it seems like it’s everything. It’s, what’s going to connect them with their agent versus going over and using that Redfin app, that they don’t have a personalized connection with. Right. Indeed indeed to yeah. Great way to continue that engagement over time. Yeah, for sure. For sure. You constantly stay on their phone.

I mean, I mean, I know a broker who has an app and they’re not only pushing out through push notifications, you know, updates to their, to the listings that somebody may be subscribed to, but also general information about, buying a home, selling a home, almost using it like a, Like a, a drip message.

That’s in a push notification and they’re seeing great engagement with that. also their mortgage division is using the app to push out notifications saying, Hey, now, you know, you, you bought a home from us last year. and your rate was 3.125. We can now refi you and do a courtesy refi because you’re a client of.

Of this brokerage for 2.75, you know, we act now before rates go up and that inumhouse mortgage operation is, is printing money, from being able to leverage those text messages. Right? Absolutely. And that’s a, that’s a great point, Eric. We’ve seen, you know, that’s another way we’ve, we’ve seen, I’m sure you see it across the board too, is, Those those brokerages that have those, affiliated or inumhouse, mortgage businesses, the, the opportunities, whether it’s with the apps that we power or otherwise for coumbranding and really driving opportunities across the business is, pretty, pretty deep and pretty important.

For sure. For sure. so let’s, you know, let’s dig into the general app space inside of real estate a little bit more. Obviously we talked about Redfin and Zillow being the two kind of primary apps and maybe realtor.com is right there. with them considering how much money they spend on trying to get people to download their app, too.

But in the brokerage app space, there’s been, you know, some things that have changed with it over the past few years. And obviously, like you said, you’re the dominant player, but before then, you know, 10 years ago, everybody kind of knew of this other company, smarter agent, who I’m going to guess you consider to be your closest competitor for a long time.

And that company was bought by KW. And just shut down. you know, if you, if you don’t, if you’re not a KW person, you can’t use, the, the smarter agent app anymore. And I know there was franchises and, and relegate had much of their entire app strategy built around smarter agent. So what have you seen brands, brokerages franchises.

Do have they been moving over to you? Have they been abandoning app strategies? What’s what’s the look going forward now that KW is shutting us all down. You know, it’s, it’s really a mixed bag. Eric, and, also I just gotta say, you know, Brad and, and Eric at smarter agent were absolutely, pioneers in the space.

And so it was, glad to see that they had a good outcome at a Keller Williams. but in terms of what brands and brokerages are doing and in light of, the decision to, stop offering the service to other brokerages. we we’ve seen, parties take, a few different paths. you know, some, are, taking this as an opportunity to revisit their strategy and determine, do we want to keep, and app, moving forward?

others are, you know, the particularly. Big brokerages. I think there are, or especially at the franchise level, those are, some parties that are looking to bring some of those efforts in house. although I gotta say, having done this for 10 years, it’s, certainly a lot of work in a big lift.

we do see a few parties doing that. And, you know, you mentioned, Realty is one example. They, have a firm that they partnered with, that, you know, helps them out in that capacity. But, you know, we are seeing a number of brokerages that, are choosing to, move to companies like ours and also in, in, so doing, maybe revisiting their app strategy and seeing, do we want to take this from maybe more of a, Hey, we’re checking the box that we’ve got a mobile app.

And we can tell our agents, we have an app, but we’re really not going to think about it a whole lot to one where they, they really want to have it as an integral part of their business. And, those are a number of the conversations that we’re having right now. And they’re, they’re exciting. We’ve, I think over the last quarter, signed a more, more new, brokerage app deals than we have in, in some time.

And it’s, good to see the, Continued excitement and the space. That’s great. Cause it’s, you know, I, I’m a, I, I hate that concept. The brokers, have sneaking around in their brain right now that they’ve lost the, the search or, to Zillow, Redfin, realtor, comics, cetera. You know, I, I think that having those types of apps or having an IDX, website, having that capability there, you know, w while it may not be the number one item on Google, when somebody does a search for their website or, or, you know, they may not be their broker jet may not be the number one thing when somebody searches real estate inside of the app store.

but it’s there and it serves a major purpose. And so it’s good to hear that. that you’re not seeing them abandon it, regardless of whether they build it inumhouse or not. It’s probably good for HomeSpotter that people are still seeing a reason to invest in this space. Right. Definitely definitely.

And, and, three quick tips, I’ll give you, regardless of whether you work with us, build your own work with somebody else. you know, the best ways to drive app downloads really are threefold. you want to make sure that you’ve got a banner or similar on your website that, pushes, your, your mobile traffic and then encourages, that mobile traffic to, download the app.

really want to make sure you train your agents well, and that, the app that you adopt has a. Agent branding component to it so that when agents, give out their app agents, you know, have some certitude that they’re giving out their version of the app and that weeds are going to come back to them.

we see that some of the more successful brokerages, have really engaged their agents really well at, distributing the app. and then the third thing is while it’s, it’s certainly hard to compete. On a national level, on search, if, if you buy ads in the, search ads interface for Apple, for example, you can still buy, keywords and do it only limited to specific, geography.

So, You can, certainly advertise and promote, your, your real estate app as kind of the primary app that people will see when they search in the app store and just limit that to the, MSA or, or the state or, area that you’re in. And he can drive a lot of success that way as well. I had no idea that you could advertise in the app store to, or to a particular, locality.

I thought it was just country specific. So you’re saying if you’re in Minneapolis, like you are, you, you can run an ad for your app downloads just in Minneapolis. Absolutely. Oh, that’s great. I had, I had no idea. , let’s talk about your ad program now for a second. in 2018, Homespotter, we launched, a division called boost, and that’s an easy way to automate listing advertising.

And there’s been, it seems like just a, a, an avalanche, of push in this space recently. but 2018 was probably on their early tail, of that. So what, what made you go in that direction back in 2018? Yeah. You know, it was, kind of a confluence of factors, Eric. You know, first, first things first, you know, we had had a tremendous growth in our first, five years at, what was then, um HomeSpotter but, but we also knew that, You know, if, if we really wanted to continue to grow as a business, we were going to need to give some serious thought to, is there a, a second, product, that we want to bring to market?

And so, as we, went through that exercise, we really looked at, where did we see the current gaps, within residential real estate tech. And, in interviewing different customers, were there opportunities where we could match up, gaps in the industry to actual customer needs? And so in the, fall of 2016, I believe it was, we, started to, You know, really do a lot of these customer interviews, which led to, early pilot programs.

And, we, we did test out a number of different, potential approaches in the ad space. but the, you know, some of the concepts that really, came to the forefront as part of those, tests was while there certainly were others in the industry that. Had focused, on, agents being able to individually buy ads.

And while there were others who had, you know, built up great, consultancies or extensions to their platform of how to do PPC marketing on Google, for example, there, there seemed to be a real lack of, an approach where, brokerages could automate. Listing or open house ads at scale, particularly on social platforms.

and, as, as we explored that, you know, we, had some early successful pilots and, really. Kind of found, an early need. And it was something where, you know, we, we brought a minimum viable product to market for some of those early customers and early 2017. And we just kept iterating from there and got a lot of traction from it.

But, you know, it was really just being willing to take a step back and know that, you know, at, at the forefront. It, maybe didn’t immediately connect to the app business that we had already built. but we were able to, you know, really deliver strong for some of our existing brokerage partners and also use a fair amount of the tech in terms of, you know, there’s just a lot of, knowledge that, you know, kind of develops over time around managing listing data, agent roster data, Managing integrations with great third parties like TRIBUS and, ma making sure that it all hooks together well.

So that’s, that’s really what led us into the space. Yeah. And obviously you’ve extended that business out, over the past few years. you know, obviously the past year has been interesting, in, in two ways. Number one is last year, you know, everybody was worried that the bottom was going to fall out from the real estate industry.

And, of course it didn’t. and so let’s first start talking about 2020, You know, what, what were you seeing that agents were doing very effectively or brokerages were doing very effectively with their ad spends, with boosts last year, th that, you know, was it listing ads that were generating the best return on investment for them or, or what were they doing and what would you say that an average broker looks at spending, per listing, for marketing that listing online through you.

Yeah. I mean, we, we do often for a number of different, programs based on, You know, volume thresholds and performance considerations and those kinds of things. but you know, typically, I’ll just say, you know, a mediumumsized, brokerage, you know, they, might be typically looking to spend, in, in the neighborhood of say a minimum of $40 per a new listing ad for a one week, promotion.

And, you know, we also have with our automation, some opportunities where, you know, maybe they decide for their luxury properties. They want to run it for a longer period of time or with the different ad creative or those kinds of things. And, we have, ways to help them scale their spend based on, the, the profile of the property.

but, you know, in terms of things we’ve, seen over the last year, certainly, listing ads at large have been, the most, productive, and, The we we’ve also seen, those that are really focusing on it, just because inventory is so constrained as I think we all feel in the industry. moving beyond just the, say new listing ad or the open house ad to, you know, also promote recently sold and, on the surface while it might seem counterintuitive to.

Counterintuitive to some, why am I promoting this property? I already sold? it’s kind of the best way to communicate the neighbors. Like I’m here to sell your property. And I was successful at this one and it’s, you know, same tactic that I think has been successfully used in, direct marketing, through the postal service for, for years.

And, and this is a way of doing it digitally. Yeah. I recently spoke with somebody at Redfin and, that person mentioned to me that the single best dollar spend a return on investment spend of literally anything they do at the entire company was, listing catalog ads, that they targeted to, to people.

would you say that you’ve talked to brokers? Would you, would you say that you’ve heard the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, and there there’s a balance too, of, you know, we, we really like to. Work through with a brokerage, what are the goals that they’re trying to accomplish? And, you know, I think the better vendors in this space will, really try to meet the brokerage where they’re at in terms of, what they’re trying to accomplish.

and, and whether that’s, driving leads or whether that’s driving, Clicks to your own website, because you want the traffic or, or maybe you’re trying to drive brand awareness, you know, making sure that your partner is aligned with accomplishing the goals that you want to accomplish is, pretty important.

but, but I say that to say like, you know, if, if your goal is to, drive clicks to your website, right? there, there can actually be a little bit of art and science to not disclosing too many details on the ad, creative in a way that compels people to, to click through and, want to learn more and hopefully in a way that transforms to a meaningfully, a year, obviously that’s the, the, the differentiator.

but I know lots of people I’ve spoken with have mentioned that. they’re generating Facebook lead ad leads, which, you know, aren’t necessarily the best quality of lead, but I’ve heard metrics from some burgers that they’re able to in mass generate a Facebook lead ad leads for sub $2 a week. Would you say you’ve seen the same thing and do you guys do anything with Facebook lead ads?

Yeah, we support, Facebook lead ads. we also have, you know, something that’s a little bit unique to us where. we, optionally provide, property landing pages along with the, ads. And, we have, a special kind of gated property lead page where, basically if a consumer wants to get, The address or additional photos or things like that, they can, click and unlock with Facebook and get the information that way.

And that, that way it’s kind of a little further in the qualification process that, Hey, we know this person is level deeper and interested in the property. It’s still still an early stage lead. but it’s a little further along than gating. In a way that, that a Facebook lead form, is, but there are pros and cons to both approaches and, and that’s why we, support both.

And, and it’s, we’ve, we believe important to, you know, have a partner that gives you the options and can coach you through. about what the better options are. Let’s talk about partners or just a second. so, you know, there’s, let’s call it an open secret. that one of the partners in this space keeps a very high percentage of the total ad spend in the numbers that I’ve heard.

some people tell me is, is North of 70% between 70 and 80%, depending on, how much the spend was for that particular campaign on that listing. How do you guys think about ad spend and performance? Yeah. you know, that’s, that’s something we’ve noticed too, Eric, and that, that was also a thing that, You know, compelled us to want to get into this, space early on to really provide, what we believe is more of a, a fair deal to our, our brokerage partners.

I guess the way that we look at it is, we, we believe that, you know, it’s, it’s important to do apples to apples comparisons when you’re looking at partners and, to, you know, actually look at performance metrics, and we’ve, we’ve been afforded the opportunity in some cases where, you know, brokerage, at a national scale and a brokerage at, you know, say a statewide scale, I’ve done sideumbyumside tests with us against, you know, some of these, these other vendors and.

they, they came back to us after those tests and said, we don’t understand where we’re getting, 10 to 20 times the number of clicks from your ads. What’s, what’s different here. and, you know, it’s a, it’s a little bit of an awkward conversation, but you know, they kind of quickly realize like, Oh, I.

I see there’s a poor, I mean, it’s difference here. And you know, that $1 spending here is not the same as $1 spent, over here. For sure. and, and that’s where performance matters. whether it’s in, in, in almost impressions is the bare bones. Like if you just compare impressions, if you spend $1 and with one company, you get, you know, a thousand impressions and with the other company, you get 2000 impressions and not like that’s an accurate number or anything like that.

But. But, knowing that obviously your spend is being better utilized from one to the next, and then you can also can compare the leads and the clickumthroughs, beyond just the traditional impressions and see a lift, between them. I think that’s just so important, for burgers to think about that this space can yield.

You leads, it can yield business, it can yield clicks back through to your website. It’s not just about branding you on Facebook, or on any other sites. you know, you should pay attention to metrics, that’s on there. And I think it’s an important conversation that, that you should have with your partner.

So I, cheers to you, at boost for. For making sure the brokers are getting looked out for, and that they’re getting, getting better spend, or getting better value for their spend. I want to move on because we don’t have a whole lot of time left, but I wanted to talk about, you know, your acquisition of space CEO two and, and.

Species. So for those that don’t know, space geo is the number one open house registration app. So for example, when somebody goes to an open house, you’d have an iPad sitting out, or a laptop or something like that. And the person could go on there and register, and, and say, you know, here’s my name and my information for them walking into the open house, what made made HomeSpotter of say, Hey, look, this is a, this is a good acquisition opportunity for us.

Yeah. You know, it was a number of things, Eric, You know, first off, dating back to even, I’d say 2013, we had had some internal conversations at HomeSpotter about, Hey, maybe we should consider building, open house registration app. And I think it was, you know, somewhat a combination of, we already had the mobile experience and, Also, just from a workflow perspective, like one of the, one of the best ways to distribute our search apps is direct from agents.

And one of the great places to make that connection is at an open house. And so the thought was there, we can, send open house visitors out the door, with one of our, mobile apps, that, that would make a lot of sense. And that was a thought we had had for a number of years. as we continue to expand with, with boosts, you know, prior to last year anyway, with COVID, rather large percent of re rather large percentage of, boost spend has been on open house promotions.

And so we, we also saw some, some opportunities if we’re going to be, working to get people, to open houses with our boost ads that, it would be great to also be capturing those registrations, with a solution. And also as ad tech continues to evolve, we’ve seen, just a lot of, the importance over time and how important it is to have first party data and having some of that, first party, foot traffic, visitor data can be a great way to, improve ad targeting on behalf of our, our brokerage partners over time.

So those are a lot of the reasons that we were generally interested, in the category. and I would say just combined with that, I had known, one of the coumfounders of space CEO, Melissa Kwan for, pretty much since, she and Tang had, founded the business. and, you know, joke later that, I floated the idea of acquiring space CEO much early, and it sure would have been a lot less expensive, in those early days, but it also probably wouldn’t have been as good of a value, because while we certainly had the chops to, to build any of this tech inumhouse, I think.

being able to acquire a company that had been so laser focused on the category for, as, as long as they were, there’s both a lot of expertise that came with that and a lot of deep, brokerage relationships. And so, you know, they they’d built a good business and, it just made sense to pursue an acquisition.

Yeah. And, and for sure, and with, Melissa is now moved on to, to do her own thing. And, and frankly, I’ve had a couple of friends tell me that I should, I should look into her to hurt her new project, with selling a technology, using an automated webinar process. It sounds like she’s, she’s being the next, Greg Robertson with lightening, twice of creating two tech companies and, and selling them off.

So, you know, cheers to you, Melissa, for, for creating space CEO and, and now moving onto this next product. That sounds great too. but I wanted to definitely want to ask you Aaron about a little bit about open houses. So obviously with COVID last year, and I know you kind of mentioned this, but I’d like to dig in a little bit if you’ve got the date on it, is, you know, obviously open houses in some places were illegal.

in other places were severely restricted, in another places were wide open. And so what have you seen registrations do? over the past year and are they starting to tick back up again now that in most places you can get back to holding an open house again? Yeah. We’re, you know, we, we definitely saw a street.

Steep dropumoff in, 2020. but fortunately we are seeing them tick back up in a very meaningful way. and just as a one anecdote, I was looking at our data a little bit earlier today and just in the first weekend of March 20, 21 alone, we had, Three times the number of open houses hosted on, on space CEO as compared to all of April, 2020.

so it’s, it’s still, you know, to be fair, it’s not, quite, it’s still below historical norms, but, you know, we, we are seeing them tick back up in a beautiful way. Yeah. It’s like the showing time data. One of the very first interviews we ever did on the Burbridge insider podcast was, the showing, Michael Lane from showing time.

if you remember last year, they had that, all of that data on showings. you know, like with that, and with what you had, it’s, it’s kind of that leading indicator of where we’re going next. but frankly, right now it seems like the biggest problem isn’t people wanting to buy. it’s, it’s being able to have inventory.

So any, any tips that you could give to brokers and agents using any of the products that you have really about, you know, what they can do today to try to go get more inventory? Yeah. so in terms of trying to go get, more inventory, like, like I mentioned earlier, I think, you know, making sure that like, if you’re doing listing marketing, focusing, not just on the new listing, like you need to care a little bit more about getting the next seller, then you maybe need to care right now about getting a buyer.

because fortunately inventory is constrained and many properties are gonna sell pretty quickly. And so, you know, whether it’s focusing on things like, Recently sold ads or whether it’s thinking about, well, we’ve captured some of these open house visitors over time. We’re going to make sure that we really nurture those leads well, and whether you’re doing that with, a great CRM system that you have, or some of the, email, followumup tools we have built in to space CEO or, or, or maybe it’s a, you know, reaching out to those, buyers and trying to get a home search app in their hands.

I think the, the key is to stay top of mind. you know, you don’t know when that next seller is, is gonna decide to list, but you want to make sure that you’re. Top of mind when they, decided to, and, you know, I think it’s, sometimes you gotta gotta play the long game. And I think when properties are selling so quickly, you can kind of, begin to think, well, I don’t need to spend on marketing right now because it’s just going to sell quickly anyway.

but when, when you kind of shift that mindset from, you know, it’s not just about selling this property, it’s about getting that next listing. I think that’s pretty important. For sure for sure. Okay. Well, we’re out of time, but I always ask all my guests, this one last question, and that is Aaron, you know, knowing what you’ve known coming from the past that you’ve had, starting with building shareware, going into the education industry.

And now with years of experience in the real estate tech industry, if you could change one thing about the real estate industry, what would that one thing be? I’m going to go with the somewhat controversial statement here. but I think, if MLS dues were considerably higher, I, I think, it, it might be good for the industry as a whole.

you know, I was, one of the things I heard early on when I, entered the industry was, was hearing some agents. actually suggests that, like, I wouldn’t mind paying more if it, you know, meant that we had, people that were a little bit more, focused on this as their, their only job. And, while, you know, I certainly, respect anyone that does, real estate, any, any part of their.

time or any part of that profession? I do think there’s kind of a higher level of service that, you know, the fullumtime professional can give and, you know, I honestly, with all the dynamics in the industry, I’m not sure, how that happens until, you know, the, perhaps the fee to enter is a little bit higher.

For sure. And we’ve actually had a few guests kind of allude to the same thing. and of course, Rob Hahn talks about, you know, NAR 300,000 or something like that. That they’re really all the same. The deals that are done in this space could be done by a million, less, less members. but of course, NPR doesn’t want that.

And, you know, just, but as a good example of exactly what you’re talking about, one of our mutual clients between Travis and O spotter is of course Remax results. And, you know, there, if you can go back and listen to the interview that we did on this show with Brenda Tous house, the CEO there, and she talked about.

how, you know, they have a mandate that essentially says, if you don’t sell at least 12 homes a year, you, you, you probably should move your license to a different brokerage. And frankly, their average agent does over 24 transactions per year with, 1300 sales associates. And, and, so they’re just, you know, kicking butt.

And, selling more with 1400 folks than other competitors in that market that have three, 4,000, agents are doing, because they’re focused on that full time, serious professional. So, well, Aaron, thank you very much for joining us today. I really appreciate you giving the time and, and, the particulars, of things that brokers can think about.

And, why don’t you, why don’t you leave everybody with where they can get in touch with HomeSpotter if they want to learn more about what you do. Yeah, certainly, you can check us out at, homespotter.com or, you know, feel free to reach out to me personally. aaron@homespotter.com. Well, thanks again, Aaron, you’ve been listening to Aaron Kardell.

He’s the founder and CEO of HomeSpotter the number one provider of apps to the brokerage industry along with providing the number one open house app to the industry and providing boosts, an option for. 📍 Marketing your listings and your brokerage and your agents. You’ve been listening to brokerage insider the podcast where we interview the leaders in real estate and technology.

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