Importance of Data For Real Estate Brokerages with David Gumpper

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With the large money pouring into the real estate brokerage business, it’s more important than ever for brokerages to get their data in order. David Gumpper, CEO of the Gumpper Group, technology consultant for the WAV Group, and former CTO of Michael Saunders and Associates discusses data and business intelligence tools for brokerages.

This episode was recorded live during the Xplode Virtual Conference.

TRANSCRIPTION

Eric Stegemann

Thanks for listening to Brokerage Insider. This week’s episode was recorded live during the explode virtual conference on Thursday, September 24th. We look forward to returning to our regular scheduled program soon, but until then enjoy this session. In this episode, we interview David Gumpper, founder of the Gumpper Group, tech consultant with the WAV Group and the former CTO of Michael Saunders real estate in Tampa, Florida. Thanks everybody for joining us. We’ve got a great room going so far. I’m really excited. David, we were doing the brokerage track here and, and I think like a third or, or a little bit right at a third of the people that were in the opening session have chosen to come join us. So I’m, I’m pretty stowed. I thought we’d have people jumping into the team track and the agent track, and here we are. People actually want to pay attention to what we’re going to say today. This is great.

David Gumpper

That’s awesome. That’s awesome.

Eric Stegemann

Everybody, I am so excited if you, if you do not know David you should David Gumpper, he’s first of all, the founder of Gumpper Group which is a consultancy, a tech consultancy, but specializes in the real estate industry. And that’s because David has a whole mess of, of experience in this industry. So he used to be the CTO of a one of, if not the largest independent brokerages in the state of Florida Michael Saunders and Company. And he’s just an all-around great guy and a data nerd like me. So the first session that we’re going to talk about today is brokers and using their data. And I got to tell you, David, I had some questions lined up for us to talk about, and I literally scratched through all of them and started over yesterday because of what happened. So with, with the Zillow news. So I’m excited to talk about that part. But first of all, David, why don’t you tell me a little bit, you know, I gave everybody that, that ten second run down, but why don’t you give us the, you know, the, the minute or two minute run down of, of your experience?

David Gumpper

Yeah, thanks, Eric. And it’s my pleasure to be here and be able to speak at this at this conference. It’s, it’s really awesome. This is great. Great to see everybody’s face and, and put those videos on why not? It’s always fun, but a little bit about myself. I’ve been in technology for, geez. I had 25, 26 years, started out as somebody as a little bit of a with a CAD background, computer aid drafting back in the days for architectural mechanical civil architectural and kind of got into computers because cause of the CAD, I worked for small companies and did not have the resources to be able to get their computers fixed. And for some reason I became the guy that fixed them and kind of went down that road, ended up spending a lot of time getting my different certifications worked in the pharmaceutical field for four or five years before I joined into the real estate world 17 years ago.

So I spent the last 17 years while 14 and a half of it as CTO for Michael Saunders and company in Sarasota, Florida was a member of participated in leading R E or Leading Real Estate Companies of the World on their marketing technology advisory council for many years, as well as chaired it been a part of RESO the real estate standards organization on their board of directors. And now recently over the last two years as chairperson for the broker advisory group. And if I, if I can pitch that right now, I would. So we, we need brokers out there because the whole purpose of the broker advisory work group within the RESO organization is to get feedback is to understand the pain points that brokers are going through today. And being able to see how a standards organization can help minify them, right.

And or, or mitigate them or how standards could make your lives better our lives better, I should say. So there’s a shout out to the RESO group and, and the broker advisory group. We do have our conference coming up in at the end of October where we’re going to discuss a lot of things and we’re discussing a lot about data and streamlining the ability to obtain MLS data. So if you’re a brokerage and want to go out into a new market, or you have a new technology partner that’s coming in, that’s offering a specific product or service into your market, we need to make that whole process more streamlined and more efficient. And we’re working on that with the broker advisory group.

Eric Stegemann

And I’m also a member of that broker advisory group with David; I cannot possibly encourage people more to be involved, frankly, folks, if you’re a broker in this room, that group helps set the standards for how data works in real estate. And if, if you want to have any control over how your vendors connect up and get data from MLS or share data back and forth between each other this is the venue to do that. And it is not terribly expensive to join RESO the real estate standards organization become a member and attend their events. So I highly encourage you to be part of the conversation because otherwise it’s, it’s mostly just MLS folks talking back and forth, and it departments, a lot of times they don’t have that experience to know, you know, they haven’t been a day in life of the shoes of a, of a brokerage. They don’t have the

David Gumpper

Right, that’s what this group is for, is to give them the insight

Eric Stegemann

If they want it, they are looking for advice that they don’t always get. So, so please come and join that new Craig. I just saw your chat about that. We’ll make sure we post in the chat. It’s RESO, RESo.org is the , is the website. If you want to go become a member of RESO and then they have a monthly meeting, the broker advisory group meets, I think, monthly, and then they have their, their big sessions twice a year. So but without further ado David let’s, let’s jump into the, the nitty gritty here. So, you know, obviously I’m going to talk to you about broker data. And so, you know, yesterday was Zillow had their announcement. And I think from the text messages I got yesterday and, and the Facebook messages and that, and the, you know, every single one of our clients that try TRIBUS, I’m pretty sure most of the brokerages that drivers reached out to me and sent me some sort of message saying either what do I do?

Or Zillow’s the devil or you know, it’s to be determined yet. And I think, you know, from that perspective, the Mo the, the single unifying thing that I heard yesterday was brokers yesterday was the rallying cry. The wakeup call to brokers needs to do things with their own data. Everybody, it seemed like I spoke with yesterday, said, you know, I know you ha you know, TRIBUS, we have this data warehouse product and they know that it’s there, but, but brokers in general, I think they understood, Hey, it’s time to make sure I have all my own data. So, you know, we’re for a broker that’s sitting here listening to this, whether they’re two people, 200 people, or 2000 people, David, where do you, where do you think they should start in terms of saying, I don’t know, but I know I need to make sure I have my own data. Where do they start?

 

David Gumpper

The first place you got to start is to look at where the data is, take a look at the different systems that you have and understand what the relationships are to those systems. So you really need to kind of do a data audit at the end of the day, to see where the data is, what the domain of the data, in other words, what does it mean to you and to your business, and then kind of and then at that point, decide how and what you’re going to do with the data come up with your own use cases. But it’s really important to even just from a privacy standpoint, because even with the California consumer privacy act and the GDPR, one of the things that you’re responsible for and, and a lot of us are probably, unless you’re a very large brokerage are not really confined to having to, to comply to those privacy laws. But at the end of the day, it’s just a real good thing to do and, and to practice. So you really need to know where your data is and then how’s it being used, who’s using it. So essentially you have really got it. The first step for me is to take a T is to do a data audit, just go around through your systems and start auditing and documenting what the, what data you do have.

Eric Stegemann

Can you provide just a couple of examples of things that brokers may not be thinking about? So I think when brokers, when I’ve had these conversations with them, I think most of them know, Hey, I need to make sure that I have my, my client data and my transactional data, but is there anything else that they should be worried about collecting?

David Gumpper

Yeah. I mean, it’s your lead data, right? Where leads coming from how many leads do you have? Who’s getting those leads. It’s your CRM data. So it’s customer and client information interactions with the data. You, how many of you are using email platforms like MailChimp and constant contact and so forth. You have a lot of data in there that can be taken out. So as you can see it in any kind of SAS pro product that you are using in your business is really a source for that data. And then there’s external data that, that brokerages should also get, and that’s probably a separate topic in itself, but you know, I mean you know, social media is a, is a channel where there is some data that, that can be gleaned and, and, and stored and used from a broker standpoint. But but yeah, definitely any kind of sass product has data in it. So I don’t care what it is, even your spreadsheets. I mean, I, we work with a data that’s in CSV files that are sitting in, in your, your file system, in your was Microsoft one drive or Google drive or Dropbox, or box.net or any in those storage’s. So that’s all, that’s all data that you have, and that’s where, and it’s from any kind of different source.

Eric Stegemann

And David, we got a question from the chat room that I just saw and, you know, you and I are our data let’s step back for just a second SAS, by the way you know, that is software as a service. So if you’re a broker you know, you probably have various tools like a brokerage website, a CRM, an email marketing platform, a transaction management system and accounting system. That’s always a big one. Those types of tools, you probably use third parties for all of those tools. And so what David is talking about here is making sure you go to all of these vendors that you have reduced software as a service have vendors and communicate with them and say, Hey, I need to get my data. And I think David, I don’t want to put too many words in your mouth, but, but, you know, and I’m biased on this, but, you know, I think it collects everything and then go from there is kind of what

David Gumpper

Exactly it’s, you need to do the data audit so that you know, what data you have before, you can even start to think about what you’re going to do with it. And, and, and the easiest way to

Find out where that data is, is to take a look at your expense reports, take a, you know, a year snapshot of your expenses and just go down, gee, this is software I use. This is software I use is a software. That’s your first step. And, and, and on a note on that, that’s another way to go take a look at what are you using versus what you’re not using on a expense report and start to mitigate some of those expenses out of your bottom line.

Eric Stegemann

Well, there’s another thing that I talk about all the time is, you know, looking at tools and just figuring out adoption rates and something, you know, try this we’re we have a 44% adoption rate on average. That means eat every agent logs into our system, at least one time a week, 44% of all of our agents log in at least one time a week. And when we’ve looked at these audits with some of our broker customers, what we’ve realized is that the average adoption of most broker provided tools, depending on the tool, but most broker provide tools hovers in the sub 10% range. And so then as a broker, you know, you need to make these decisions. Do I do I need to teach you need to keep paying for this, or is this something that I should I should be worrying about or not.

And in fact, right after David’s session here, I’m going to be talking about some of those metrics and adoption rates and you, how you can use tech as a recruiting tool, but the mistakes that a lot of brokers make. So I’m going to have that session right before break. So, you know, we talked about getting the data we talked about, you know, making sure that you just figure out all the data that you have, let’s start talking about what to do with the data once you’ve collected it. So obviously first that, you know, figure out what’s their second step what do we do with the data? So let let’s David, let’s say we’ve got all of our client data, we’ve got our transaction data. We’ve even got our agent and production data. We’ve got all of that now in these CSV files, where do we go next?

David Gumpper

Yeah. there’s a lot of different tools out there that you can go next, but from a Brokerage standpoint, it’s to once you have it all when you have all that data, that from a Brokerage perspective, it’s really to look at what your objectives are at the end of the day. What’s, what’s going to be important for your business because just having the data isn’t going to do anything, you really have to outline what your use cases are. And what a use case is, is, is really what an objective is. What, what do you want to do with, what do you want to do as part of your business? Then we can go in and say, okay, how can the technology, or how can the data help you accomplish that? If it’s retention, if it’s recruiting, if it’s production, which I considered the three pillars of most brokerages, when you evaluate, you know, the success of, of, of different projects or even initiatives within a Brokerage you want to have those objectives really outlined, very clear.

So because it’s really about, it’s not take, it’s not doing it the other way. I’ve seen people try to say, Oh, let me go have though this data, now let’s go see what we can do with it. No, let’s sit down and have a heart to heart, talk and discussion on what is it that you want your business to do? Where, where do you see the deficiencies? Where are the gaps? Where do you need to be better at where, what are you, what are you the best at? Because that’s important to know, because then we want to take a look at the data. That’s helping you being the best at that. And then we find out what those objectives are. And then we map that data to look at the data and see how that data can help provide success in that, in those objects.

Eric Stegemann

And I think all too often, most brokerages, unless you’re a fairly large sized organization. A lot of times I see they don’t have those objectives in place. You know, I hear that the objective is I want more real estate. Right. And we’ll obviously, okay, well, that’s the obvious one. We want to make more money. Otherwise, why are we doing this? Right, exactly. But, but at the end of the day, you have to have the individual objective to say, what can you tackle? I mean, there’s that old saying that, which is measured, is improved, right. And if you don’t know what you’re measuring you don’t know how to tackle it. I think you get into Lala land and then you’re putting offices everywhere. This is something we saw back in Oh six and Oh seven is we put an office anywhere and recruit and, you know, have a a hundred, 200, $300,000 of expenses a year for that office. And, and have it not net paid off, but put it there just to put it there and have a presence. Right?

David Gumpper

Correct. Yep.

Eric Stegemann

Go ahead. Go ahead, David.

David Gumpper

Yeah, I was just going to just iterate on that again, is that it’s, it’s really important to sit down and have a heart to heart talk. And it’s not that I want to increase my business, but it’s, how do you want to increase your business? Where can you increase your business? What can increase your business? So you really got to go down deep into what, and it also understands what, what is, what has made your business successful as well? Cause you, you can’t build objectives around something that’s already been successful, but maybe it can be better. But the idea is to find out this is how you became successful. Where are your gaps? What are you missing? What do you need to really look at? And it’s a, it’s a deep discussion. It’s a heart to heart talk. And sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes it takes it’s a little bit over time, but you also have to have that discussion.

Not only, you know, you should have it with your leadership of your brokerage as well, too. And sometimes it’s great to have a third party in there to have that conversation. Cause they’ll hear things and listen to things and come up with a different viewpoint or different perspective. I can’t tell you how many times, you know, yesterday I sat in a, a brokerage listening to six people in a brokerage talk about training. And at the end of the day it was, I heard one thing about training and I said, why are, why are we not looking at this opportunity to do it this way? And all of a sudden, everybody just, they all, like, I don’t know, it sounds good. Let’s, let’s try it. What can we do? How do we do it? And then we went from there and created a process and, and as a strategic plan to move forward on that with tweaks naturally you know, cause nobody’s a hundred percent perfect. It’s, it’s the collaboration of, of everyone that really helps make the objectives and strategic initiatives.

Eric Stegemann

Yeah. I mean, it’s, you don’t know what you don’t know if you haven’t collected the data and that’s why the first step, and then you can start working from there. Right. So let’s say you’ve got your data. You know, what are some things you’ve seen the brokers have done in this next step? What are some specific things you’ve seen that they’ve targeted and said like maybe it’s where to put offices or where to remove offices or, or what’s the next hot,

David Gumpper

Well, there’s, there’s two, I’ll talk about two items that I, that I came up with. All right. One as w when I was CTO with Michael Saunders and company I took, I was taking, looking at MLS data, right. And I adjusted MLS data, and I used a very simple tool. That’s not real simple, but it’s one of the more business intelligence tools out there for data visualizations, which is Microsoft power BI the desktop version of that is free. You can use it, but there’s a lot, there’s a lot more features and so forth to go with, but at the time it was free to use the desktop version and still there’s actually, and I just coalesced all the MLS data and I just was starting to build some, build some data visualizations. And the one thing, one, something that always resonated with me that Michael would say is that, you know if you own the listings, you own the market and that resonated with me.

And when she said that I, I, when I was building these data visualizations, I said, well, how are we doing as a company in getting new listings on a month by month basis compared to our competitors, but more importantly, compared to the market as a whole. Right. And what I found out was we weren’t doing very well. We were, you know, if the market was gaining 5% new listings on a month by month basis, and we were gaining new listings, you know, let’s say five, the market was doing 5% of new listings on the month, but Michael and Michael’s group was doing 4.2%. That meant we were 0.8% behind what the market was doing from a performance. And it was consistent. It was consistent over a long period of time. And what did that do? I was able to take that data and go to the leadership and say, look, this is, you know, while we are still number one in that marketplace, on, on sales and volume and units when it comes to getting new listings, most of that was due to, because of our, our, our average sales price, right.

Was, was substantially more than the market. So we were always doing very well. We still did a lot of units, lot of both sides of the deal and so forth. So that, that always help, but actually getting new list. And that’s where the executive team looked at it and said, well, yeah, what can, what do we need to do? And this is getting down to it. Or the gap is what do we need to do to get new listings and to improve in the way we do listings? So one was a seller lead gen program. You know, we went out and looked at several different one in buy-side at the time was there. And we implemented by side as a lead gen Graham from the seller side. And, and then also formulated a training program around it to have these conversations, not just technical training, but also sales training about the importance of getting listings and so forth.

So that was one, one area where an example of how I was using this data the next area that I really want to take a look at, and I just wrote a blog article about it, or did a V log video log on. It was a video blog on, it was I’d like to take a look at transactions fall through or deals that are, don’t make it to the transaction table. Question is why, how come? And it was kind of of interesting, cause I, I even tell this story in the video is that I was talking to a friend of mine who is a Chris Callahan was the CSO chief information security officer for Weichert companies, right. New Jersey. And we were talking about it and he said, well, geez, Dave. He said, I would think most of them would deal because fall through because of attorney review.

And I said, okay, that might be normal for New Jersey. And I said, you might be right, but nobody can tell you how much nobody can tell you, you, what percentage of all the deals that have fallen through whether it was attorney review, was it inspection? Was it financing? Yeah. Right down the road. And he said, there’s no data. Nobody has that time. But data there’s that’s, this is a perfect example of a place where we could go and look at the data that we have. And it’s not just MLS data. It’s other data that you’re going to need to be able to build essentially right. Algorithm to take a look to say, because my feeling is, is what happens if we could take even just a, let me just put some stats behind this in my research, and this is anecdotal, there’s no, no study or anything.

Anecdote just me going around and talking with brokerages and seeing financials and so forth. I noticed that deals fall fallen through ranges from anywhere from 7% to 14% a month. And when, and looking at that, I was like, okay, well, I know how the math goes to figure out how much volume that is and sides and so forth. What does that mean in dollar volume and, and lost volume company dollar to the brokerage, as well as lost revenue to the agent? Because while it’s might not be lost revenue, cause the buyer might go on and still use the same agent, but that means more time, more effort, more energy has to be put in. It’s better to, you know, it’s better to eat your ice cream while you have it versus waiting awhile. You know? So but it’s, that’s an area where data, it’s going to be MLS data.

It’s going to be CRM data, your customer data. It’s going to be external data, social media data. It’s going to be email data, you know, looking at email to see, to find using AI and natural language processing, to be able to look at key word phrases that might trigger an event that says that raises the yellow flag, the caution flag on the racetrack and says, Hey, you’re about to, if you don’t slow down here or do something, you’re going to have an accident. All right, are you going to become part of an accident? And that’s where I think in looking at the financials, even if we save just 10% of those of those deals, it’s significant amount of company dollar. And not only that just the look at the customer experience that goes along with that that could be gained that could be solved, that could be taken care of.

And, and you’ll see another we actually just finished a, another video blog. We just taped it the other day with a branch manager from Michael Saunders. Who’s always looked at that stat and has come up with some ideas to how to combat it from, from from from a manager’s perspective and what can be done to help that. But to me, it says, well, she needs a lot of help just to realize that there are deals that are, that might fall through and if, what can we give heads up to it? So those are two instances where there’s a lot of data out there that we could pull together and using builds, build products and services are really to help the business be more efficient, more effective.

Eric Stegemann

Yeah, the I mean, so funny and David and I, and part of this got brought up cause Dave and I have been talking about this and the resale work group, the burger work group and you know, it was, this was a stat that I tracked for my brokerage back 20 years ago or 18 years ago now that I was tracking because one of the things that I wanted to know was you know, especially on new agents, what was their percentage of deal kills? And it’s, it’s definitely higher. And so what that allowed me to do is to focus training on to these new agents, particularly about how to counter problems that come up in deals all too often, I think you’ll find agents just kill a deal because it’s easier than it is to try to work, to solve the problems that are going on in the deal.

And that’s not to say, when you find the house that you, you get to an inspection, you find out the house is falling down. You know, that that’s a different story, but, but there’s a lot of times where the person gets in and they get an inspection report. And instead of calming the buyer and working through the problems and the concerns with them, they’ll just say, Oh yeah, there’s a lot wrong here. We’ll just go find the next one. Or what I found the biggest two things for me was that was number one. Number two was the lender was messing things up and causing problems and not willing to go the extra mile to get a buyer, you know, through the final approval steps. And so we identified lenders that were better at keeping deals together. So it wasn’t even necessarily just our agency.

It was the partners that we worked with, the, the mortgage companies, et cetera. We’re out there killing these deals. So definitely a stat, but the problem is if you don’t collect the data, you don’t know. And I have yet to meet a brokerage that before we started working with them, started collecting that data. David, other than, you know, in, in, in, at Michael Saunders or, or, you know, wherever, have you heard of any brokerages that actually keep track of, of that kind of data right now? Not really. Yeah. That was my experience too. So we do have a question from Craig. Craig said Eric and David virtual offices have become much more prevalent in the last couple of years. Would you discuss your views on the future of, of these offices? And, and let’s try to keep it a little bit to the data perspective since that’s the topic here. But you know, David, have you seen data on virtual companies like exp that are out there versus companies that have offices and the data and the agents that they’re recruiting? Have you, have you looked at anything like that?

David Gumpper

No, I’m not. I haven’t looked at anything like that. I mean, but I think we’re seeing, I think it’s going to be evident that we’re going to have virtual offices pretty soon. I actually kind of was a proponent of this many, many years ago and it got shut down real quick because it it’s always, you know, because this business is relationship based business. Right and it’s about staying connected with people and so forth, but now we’re going to need to stay connected with people in a whole different manner. And, and it’s, it’s just an augmentation of, of how we, how we’re going to do this in the future. I definitely think if you’re as a brokerage looking to get into new markets and seeing how that works, virtual is a great way today to, to do that. And if I was to take a look at some numbers, I would take a look at what my technology costs would be versus the facility costs that I have.

So I definitely would look at the financials and put together a proforma around what that model would look like and see what the difference is. And, and then from that point of that data is it’s, you know, who is going to be able to safely and securely be able to do the virtual office type of environment. But I think we’re starting to all get used to having meetings like this. I know a lot of brokerages today still are doing their sales meetings in the mornings on Tuesday or Wednesday mornings or whatever with their, with their agents are still virtual. It’s just, it’s just needs, it’s going to go down that pathway. So it’s, we are going to have a virtual office environment. I think it’s going to be part of, I don’t think it’s going to be holistic in the sense of a hundred percent migration to that, but it’s going to augment our ability to create relationships, cause you’re still going to need a place even with all the technology for virtual title and escrow and, and there’s a, some other new products that are coming out on the market, that’s really taken hold of of the, of the pandemic and the fact of social distancing.

And I call it social spacing and to be able to still close deals in different locations. So

Eric Stegemann

you know, from, from that perspective, one of the things that I have been an advocate for that I, when I ran my brokerage, that we did, that is what I’ll call now the hybrid model, which is we didn’t have, you know, a lot of brokerages have these 10,000 square foot offices, right? And it’s, it’s all about class, a office space and cram a bunch of people in there, et cetera. And what we did at my brokerage is and we did this under our marketing budget is we put lots of offices, but got one Bay offices and strip centers and things like that, where it was 700, 800 square feet. And we put in long tables for agents to sit down and work at. And there were some rooms in the back deck, private meetings, but there was no staff necessarily in the office you got in and out via a key card.

Every a wildfire in all of the offices was the same. So you opt in your computer, just work, the printer just worked. And that way we had a presence in the market for the consumer to feel like, Hey, they’re here, we’ve seen them. I, I really it’s what I was following was the Edward Jones approach where it’s small office has been in lots of different places instead of big offices with a thousand, a thousand people in them. So I think, you know, consumers are looking for something with an office. I think the completely virtual environment you’re going to have to overcome that challenge for the next 10 years or so. But at the same point, I was listening to something from McKinsey and company, which is one of the most, if not the most well-known and respected business consultancy companies all over the world, they work with huge fortune 50 companies.

And they came out and said that the adoption of digital technology in the past five months, six months has been Mo accelerated as past where we would have been in five years from now. So I think the needle swings more to the virtual environment, but maybe with some offices to be there and be solid and show, you know, it’s like a bank, how many people want to bank where there’s no, it’s all digital banking. They want to be able to go in when they need to, to a bank of America or a local regional bank where they can sit down and shake a hand with somebody. But at the same time, 90% maybe of their banking, they do completely on the website, but when they need that person or when they want to talk to the person, they really want to go somewhere and meet with them. Right. Yeah.

David Gumpper

And that, and Craig, to your question about the quality of data would improve with virtual because of being forced to use online platforms versus paper and I’ll find data. Yeah. I mean, I agree with that statement because of the virtual will push more technology and it’s really, I think really has entice more agents to become more, to use that technology right. Where it was so much easier before there was no, there was no reason why to use technology. When I, as a broker I’ve always been, or an as an agent been going out and signing contracts and doing handwriting and, you know, I’m, I’m, you know, I got gray hair. So, you know, I don’t, you know, I, I, this is how I’ve done my business and this is how I’m going to continue to do it. But the, but this the pandemic and the fact of going virtual really makes people have to use the technology to be able to perform all the tasks that they need to do or to sign contracts.

So the, the improvement in data quality is definitely there. Because of these online platforms that are out there and there’s a new one coming out called every offer to deal with the multitude of offers, especially in markets that are very, very hot in so yeah, the quality of data is definitely going to be a hundred times better, but also you also have a huge risk mitigation to deal with, and that’s the security and the privacy of that data. Cause now before someone would have to break into an office and where to go look for that paperwork to steal that information today, when it’s digital, it’s all available.

Eric Stegemann

That’s absolutely right. Okay. So we only have about six or seven minutes left here, David, but I want to talk to you about what’s next and tech and broker tech. And so the first question I had for you is as far as you know, is it, is it, are we going to a world of best of breed tech or are we in a world of all in one tech and, and for people listening in, what I mean by that is there’s been kind of a debate previously. The only options out there for broker tech for the most part up until a few years ago was really, it was an all in one approach. You had to go to one vendor and they were your CRM, your email marketing, et cetera. And then a few years ago, the concept of integrations came out and, you know, try this is, and was a big believer in the concept of, of integrations. And then you could work with the best of breed where you said, Hey, I’m going to use TRIBUS for my website and my CRM, but I’m going to maybe use active pipe for my email marketing platform. Right. And so we swung that way, but now I’m starting to see it swing back because the promise of integrations didn’t meet the expectations. So where do you see it at currently David? And where do you think we’re going to be in a couple of years from now?

David Gumpper

Well, the first of all, I don’t think there’s any right or wrong answer. I mean, I know there’s books been written about all the different tech vendors and platforms that are out there and the different types for the different purposes and so forth. It’s, it’s really dependent upon the brokerage itself. It’s the culture of the brokerage. It’s, it’s the size of your brokerage. It’s how do you want to run your brokerage? It’s who is in your brokerage, who is your CIO, who is your marketing person even for smaller brokerages, who are, who, who are your, your tech vendors that you’re used to helps solve your technology problems that you use? It’s really dependent on those teams and the culture of the company and what you feel best is it’s really sitting down and I don’t like it. I don’t call it a SWOT analysis.

It’s really sitting down and have a true in depth analysis of your company and where you want to go. And then go out and try to find the vendors that, that solidify or is going, going to make that promise. That’s going to make it help. Now, the reason I believe integrations has failed there’s actually the, the, the best of breed method has failed is because the strength of leadership was not there to help prevent it from not working to not make it successful. There’s a lot, there’s a lot of insight into how data works, how data has to transform between two different systems to make it work properly. And lot of times the teams that are not strong enough to handle that. And that’s where the best of breed approach was not successful. I’ve seen best of breed approach to be very, very successful in brokerages, but the strength of the team to sit down and get their hands dirty and understand, it’s not just taking a one from this system and putting that one in here, there’s use there’s business rules, there’s business cases.

It’s going to be well, who is the, a simple question is who is going to be considered the authoritative source of that data, because you want to have an authoritative source. You want to have this, you want to have a source of where that data resides that you know, is a hundred percent correct. And everybody else who’s getting that data. They have to get it their way, and they have to make sure that they’re a hundred percent compliant to that to that authoritative source. So just even things like that, that’s where I see best of breeds. I like best of breeds personally. That’s what I used to do at Michael Saunders, even, even to the point of creating my own best of breed application, which I had to do 10, 10, 12 years ago, because there was not a lot of these technologies out there or available, but and since have transitioned them to different, best of breeds, but it’s because you know, myself and my team, we had the capability of ensuring those integrations happen, not just by moving ones and zeros, but understanding the business rules and why, and how’s it going to make certain tools more efficient, more effective for the agent, because if it doesn’t do that at the end of the day, or for the brokerage, if it doesn’t do that at the end of the day, then you kind of fail.

Eric Stegemann

That. Yeah, I overall agree, but I think you hit the nail on the head of, you got to be as a broker, you got to be willing to get your hands dirty, best of breed work. But it’s going to be a nightmare. And you, you just need to recognize that it’s going to be an idea. There’s a comedian that I love Brian Regan. And he does this whole bit about getting phone service at his house, turned on as you know, obviously from 20 years ago. But, but and he said, well, why can’t you turn it on now, if it’s just clicking a button and they said, Oh, well, it’s just, it’s going to be a nightmare. That’s just our policy. And so you know, I think you have to go into it, recognizing integrations are difficult. And there is always because every company that integrates with a broker platform vendor, every other company is going to make it sound like it’s, it’s rainbows and unicorns, and you just flick that switch and everything is magically going to start working.

And what we’ve discovered is no matter how much as a broker platform vendor, we work with the other vendor to try to make that a seamless experience for the brokers and for their agents. It rarely turns out to be that way. And that’s why I actually think we’re swinging back towards the all in one approach, because I think a lot of brokers identified that that, you know, it’s better to at least have all their data and all their users in one place and not have to create a user in 17 different places. When they start up at the company at least it’s all in one place from support perspective, rather than having to worry about turning on an account with this company and this company and this company. So I do have a couple more questions that I want to go over with you, David. And I’m going to shorten my session down a little bit, cause I think we’re, we’re in a, we’re having some good back and forth here. So I’m going to shorten my next session, our recruiting a little bit to make sure we’re hitting our time. Or if anybody wants to stick on past the break, I can stick on a little bit. But I did want to ask you about AI and machine learning. So, you know, this is something I think you hear a lot in the industry as these terms that are bandied about as as like just fluff words, to get you to sign up for things. I hear it all the time from our competitors saying, Oh, well we have AI and machine learning. And I doubt that the sales people generally even know what they’re talking about when they mentioned these things.

So from that perspective, well, first of all, let’s say AI and machine learning theoretically have been around for a very long time. It’s just a new marketing spin that we put on the concept of it. And the fact that computers have gotten much better at building the models around these things. So, you know, is there, is there a AI or machine learning entree to brokers? Is there something that brokers can do right now or that they should be looking for currently, or is this is this something that they should let vendors think about or not worry about for another couple of,

David Gumpper

Yeah, I mean, I think there’s, there’s several different things out there. One being your images, your photography for your, for your properties. I think there’s some decent AI out there companies that are doing AI that are able to classify and tag, you know, different styles of homes what’s inside the home, you know, the living room in in what type of appliances and if it’s a bedroom or so forth. And where that becomes very beneficial is when we look at being compliant to the WCA G, which is the website Oh, what is the content and website content accessibility group, which is through the worldwide web consortium, which is another standards organization, but which is for ADA compliance, right? How many all your images on your website should have some type of what it’s called an alt tag, or it should have a description of what that picture is. A lot of us don’t do that and that’s where AI today is probably the most prevalent in some place that if you’re looking to do something a little better is to talk to your vendors about AI and, and, and your photography, and how can you make sure that that photography is compliant to ADA rules.

Eric Stegemann

And I actually just posted I did a great interview with the CEO and head of legal counsel for leading a really real estate company to the world where I discussed this exact issue. And we go through in depth what you should do or what you should be thinking about as a broker. So I highly encourage everybody to take a peek and listen to that podcast if you have a second, because if you haven’t been sued or looked at by one of these organizations that are trying to sue people for not being a compliant, you probably will be in the very near future.

David Gumpper

But you know Recipe is doing great work with that, with the image tagging recipe that is doing excellent work with that. It’s really when you take a look at AIG is what it’s supposed to be able to take data and create or craft new data from it at the end of the day or results or events. So don’t get the fluff part of AIG. It’s used a lot, but there’s really not a lot of it being used in our industry at this time because it’s very expensive. And not only that, it’s hard to get the data because you’ve got to get the right data points for in order to be able to be to train a model to start learning on how that data, what’s in that data. And once then you have to test that that train model. You have to test it to verify, validate what’s the propensity of it being accurate and what that accuracy rate is. So but there’s not a lot of AI there’s still the bits and pieces of it out there. And some of our tech vendors are using recipe being one of them for photography. I know a few others that are going to come out soon that have some AI in them in how their algorithms are written. But it’s really it’s it really hasn’t really gotten into our industry at a deeper level.

Eric Stegemann

That’s right. All right. A couple of last ones for you here. Coaching platforms this is kind of the new Brokerage Insider. And Tribus has been in this space for a while. But it’s now it seems like it’s starting to catch on a little bit, that brokers want to provide a platform that is able to tell their agents kind of where they’re at their numbers. Some of these data points that we were talking about before, voting platforms, catching on, or do you still think that coaching is a one to one?

You need to get on the phone and talk to a coach or somebody in your brokerage or something like that? Or do you think it can be at least mostly set up in a system to kind of keep track of what the agent is doing?

David Gumpper

Yeah, I mean, I think there’s several different items out there. And when we talk about coaching and part of it is just it’s giving the brokers or the their leadership team at the at the branch office level the ability to have better insights into the financials of how agents are doing. And it’s not just financials, it’s how they are doing with the leads that they’re getting, whether they’re internal leads, their sphere of influence. Are they growing their sphere of influence? Those are metrics that are their KPIs key performance indicators for each one. It’s still a one to one relationship. I’m I firmly believe when it comes to the actual coaching pieces, but the data that’s needed to support that is becoming more prevalent out there in the different platforms.

And as part of those platforms or as a solution, you’re always looking at and agents really are to they kind of like to know where they’re at today and why not, you know, jeez, I set a goal for myself to, you know, do you know, four million in sales this year? And, you know, here it is, September and I’m only at one point two. I better be I better be starting to kick butt, hear a little bit to make that goal, because I anticipated making a certain amount of revenue from that.

Eric Stegemann

Right.

David Gumpper

For myself. So that’s I think that’s where it’s coming as far as a reporting metric to keep myself informed during the whole year where I am and what I’m doing, but also to provide insights to the managers that they can go in and then have that one on one conversation and figure out what the agent needs to do.

Eric Stegemann

Yeah, exactly. All right. Last question for you, David. OK, advertising. So we’re into you know, and I know tech is your is your thing, but we’re in a world where brokers Zillow was a way of generating leads, et cetera, for brokerages in the past. Are we do you think brokers start using tech and data to start doing their own ads going forward, or do you think they still sub it out to various vendors that are out there?

David Gumpper

I think it’s I think. The short term, it’s going to be subbed out to the various vendors that are out there only because they’ve already gotten proven processes and success stories and it’s easy to do. Do I think it should be something we brokerage’s should dive into deeper?

Absolutely. There’s a platform. It’s called Consumer Data Platform or CDPR. All the major retailers use this. Sales force just recently announced that they’re launching their consumer data platform. What a consumer data platform does is literally it captures everything about a consumer from there, not only just their data about them, but also their interactions with the with the customer’s website to reading emails to I mean, it captures a lot of information. And the purpose of the CDPR is to be able to target the right advertising to the right consumer in real time.

So you they found that using CDPR really helps in that area. And we’re seeing Sales force just recently launched theirs or and are going to be, I think, in the next month or two. Adobe has one as well. Two problem is, is that a lot of a lot of these tools that would be more that a broker would use. There are probably outside of our. They are I know, because I’ve done the research already. They’re outside of our price range from a broker standpoint. But it doesn’t mean that we couldn’t get a collection of brokers together and do something on that end. But I would love to see that in the future. But I think today, short term, we’re going to continue to use the the mechanisms that we have available to us to do our marketing and advertising.

Eric Stegemann

Great. Well, thanks so much for joining us here, David. I really appreciate you giving your time and some great answers. Hopefully everybody that’s listening in here learn something. David is the founder of the Gumpper group tech consultant with the WAV group and the former CTO of Michael Saunders real estate in Tampa, Florida. Thank you very much David.

David Gumpper

You can find me as I partner with WAV Group too.

Eric Stegemann

That’s right. You can find excellent podcast on WAV Group. Thank you for joining us David. Perfect.

CEO | Director of Strategy
With more than 17 years experience in the real estate industry, including being a Realtor and Broker / Owner, Stegemann brings a wealth of knowledge to this job as CEO of TRIBUS. He focuses his time on helping brokers enhance and expand their business and working with the TRIBUS labs team to consider what's next in real estate.
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