Enjoying Brokerage Insider? Please Subscribe Using Your Favorite Podcast Player.
Listen as Philip Hegge, Adfenix U.S. Director, and Eric Stegemann talk about programmatic ads, marketing, and how the business of real estate differs with agents around the world.
TRANSCRIPTION
Hi, everybody. Welcome to Brokerage insider the podcast where we interviewed the leaders in real estate, brokerage and technology. I’m the host, Eric Stagenmaan. And I’m the CEO here at TRIBUS. We are the sponsors of this podcast. And today I have the pleasure of having Philip Hegge, the North American director for Adfenix with us. And today we’re going to talk a little bit more, both about Adfenix and about real estate, not only in the United States, but around the world because Philip’s company is actually based in Sweden. So Philip, thanks for joining us today. Thank you very much, Eric. It’s like to be here. So first of all, tell me a little bit about Adfenix. What is Adfenix to yeah, no, of course?
Philip Hegge So at its core, what we’re trying to do is that is to bring really world class sort of cutting edge marketing automation into the real estate industry. Something that we believe is currently missing for, for a series of reasons. One is because it’s really hard and we can probably talk more about what sort of, what we think marketing automation is, is later. But we do that by focusing on working with a very sort of custom platform to the, with the largest most, I know it’s a real estate broker just in the world. Like you mentioned, we’re originally based out of Sweden. We are operating across 13 different countries and also have offices in London, in the UK Melbourne Australia.
Eric Stegemann
Wow. Yeah. So you have a very international vision of what’s going on in that, in the industry. Let’s dig into that a little bit. How is, how are things different that a listener at a brokerage staff person, an agent, a brokerage owner, that’s listening to this podcast here in the United States.
How things are different that you see in other countries as far as brokerage is concerned versus the United States or even Canada?
Philip Hegge
Yeah, no, that’s a, that’s a great question. And obviously something that we probably can talk about for four hours but to, to keep it to keep it short, I mean I’ve been primarily focusing on sort of the Scandinavian markets early on in the lifetime of the Adfenix then, and also in Australia. And I think that’s sort of the key, the key difference sort of most, most sort of clearest difference between the us and the rest of the world is the fact that there is in most countries there was only the seller’s agents, right? Only the seller actually has by agent representation and that’s cause for a lot of different sort of the things that makes it different than I know this, this podcast is also a lot about sort of the, that, that dynamic for the Brokerage.
I won’t the other thing that I was sort of eye opening for us and also is different than the U S this is also sort of how independent the agent, this, which I think is, you know, it makes sense that American real estate agents, the wants to be an S more independent. So for example, you know, it’s in the UK, they’re very, very, non-independent right. They’re literally employees of, of the company in Sweden, they’re slightly more independent, but they’re, they’re still a sort of initially working from, from a salary. And yeah, that, that also creates a very different dynamic between the brokerage and the broker and the agents in play. I would say those are probably the big two biggest differences that I’ve experienced at least.
So Philip, do you know much about licensing or how somebody becomes an agent in other countries versus the United States?
Oh yeah. No, that’s a, that’s a good question. So I guess the biggest difference there, I guess, is that in Sweden, real estate agents asked to go to yeah, basically university or college to become a real estate agent. They need to study real estate for generally, for years in order to become an agent in the first place. And that is your entry level agents. Right. So, yeah, from that perspective, it’s obviously very, very different as well.
Yeah. And that’s been my experience, so I we’ve had a couple other guests on previously that focused on international markets. And one of the things that I’m, I always, you know have asked about in terms of everybody that’s international is I asked them from the countries they’re, they’re most knowledgeable in, what is it like to get a license there? Because typically, like I have family in Germany and they were shocked when I was 18 that I could go get a real estate license with less than 50 hours worth of work and passing a test. Cause they’re in, in Germany you essentially almost have to become like a lawyer to, to sell real estate. And it seems like a lot of other countries it’s, you know, you certainly need a lot of classes, right?
Yeah, no, exactly. But, but I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s, I would say that one, it’s pretty common also. I mean, if you’re a real estate agent in Spain or even in the UK yeah. You, you, you don’t have to become a lawyer. Let’s put it that way. Yeah. So, but yeah, definitely. That’s comparing, sorry, go ahead. No, yeah. Comparing like Germany, Sweden, and Scandinavia with the U S you’ll see those massive concert trusts in that regard.
It’s certainly pretty much everywhere. I’ve heard of, it’s always more than 50 hours’ worth, of course work. Right. No, that, that, that I can agree with. So you know, let’s talk about a little bit a dig in about brokerages and other countries. So you were mentioning that agents in most other countries are less independent than they are in the United States or Canada. So let’s talk about that. In, in other countries, when you see brokerages that are out there, what’s the average size in terms of agent count of a brokerage that you see,
Right? Yeah. So that’s, that’s another differentiating factor, right? I mean, I think that the U S the US real estate mortgage market is quite fragmented, which is something that we were quite surprised about, to be honest, looking at our partners that we have in, in Scandinavia and the UK and Australia really everywhere, except the US we have a company selling a 50,000 properties per year, and that, that they are not even the largest in that in that country, even though the country is much, much, much smaller than the US right. So I think it’s hard to talk about agent count because agent count, obviously with the difference in, and if you’re an agent in Sweden, it’s been your career for the last you’ve been studying it full time for four years. So obviously you’re the average productivity of an agent is much higher. Right. Which means that there is a lot fewer agents. And so I think a metric of makes more sense and sort of average less things, maybe. Yeah.
So what, I mean, how many listings at a time, and just to remind our viewers, something Philip has said before, is that in most other countries, there’s no concept of a buyer’s agent, you only represent color. And so how many listings do you see the average agent carrying at a time in these other countries?
Yeah, so putting, I would probably look at it sort of as the, the average agent is a fairly sort of high producing agent in, in the U S so maybe two free for not, and again, that’s pretty high high producing agent, but also there’s very few agents that sell two properties barrier right there that basically it doesn’t exist. And there’s even in some cases, in some countries where a minimum wage is, is put on, on the real estate agents, meaning that an agent has to produce in order for it to make sense for their brokerage or their meaning their employer, to keep that age in on the region.
And I, and so many times I talk to brokers when we do consulting work with our broker client. So many times I asked them for, to produce me sheets that tell me you know, what’s the average cost for running the brokerage per agent and they’re dumbfounded because they never even thought about it in terms of that concept before. And it’s why you see so much marketing in the United States and all of these reports from these other big consulting companies that come out that say, you know, Oh, they’re the biggest with a 4,000 agents, right. Well, folks like it.
No, exactly. Everyone is the biggest with some metrics.
Yeah. Yeah. There you go. I had a running joke in one of my presentations that I give a, about a million dollar agents and how for years agents had on their business cards and everything like that, that I wasn’t, that I’m a million dollar producer. Well, that means you sold about three homes right this year, maybe, or if you’re in California, you sold one home this year. So from that perspective it’s really bad because you can always say you’re number one or a million dollar producer things. But from that perspective, you can see where if you’re paying an agent, a minimum wage and you have hard expenses that aren’t just desk fees or our office fees are tech fees things like that. You can see where they’re much more vested in to making sure that that person’s going to do a good job carry listings and get them sold on a regular basis.
Whereas here in the United States, I saw a metrics that said within the past few years, even that something like 50 or 60% of all agents in California had sold two or less homes in the preview. And at one point I think that number was 60 or 70%. Hadn’t sold a home in an entire year, back around the time of the crisis, but most of those people kept their licenses. And that’s kind of the crazy part, you know, that they weren’t making any money, but they were still paying their MLS dues and still paying their realtor fees, et cetera. Yeah,
Yeah. Yeah. So he’s obviously a natural side effect of all of these things that we’re talking about now is that there is so much fewer agents in Sweden, right? Take Sweden, for example, where again, there is really high standards on dedication. I might be completely wrong about this, but I think it’s only about two to 3000 active real estate agents
And Sweden, and what’s the total population of Sweden, 10 million. So you can see how, you know, although it’s a smaller country in terms of population you, if you start doing the numbers and doing a ho how many agents there are per, you know, a hundred people it starts becoming a much smaller number in Sweden than it is in the United States.
Yeah. And I, and again, I might, I might have that number slightly off but it’s, it’s so much ridiculously fewer agents per transaction than it is in the US and we still believe, I think one of the founding sort of thesis that we had when we founded the company was that, Hey, there is too many real estate agents in Sweden. It doesn’t have to be this many agents. And then we’d come to the U S note, is that it’s a million times more.
Yeah. and by the way, if my mental math serves me, correct in the United States, it’s about one in 300 people are real estate agents in the United States. I mean, think about that for just a second one in 300 people, not one and 300 households when our, our, a realtor in the United States. And then, you know, beyond that, there’s people that have real estate licenses that don’t that aren’t realtors, of course in the United States. And so then it’s closer to like one in 200 people when you factor those people in, in in Sweden, based on the numbers that there are, it’s like one in 10,000 people are our age.
Yeah. And I actually, I actually looked it up because I knew I was, I was often it’s about twice as much as I, as I said, it’s five, six, 7,000
That’s. Yeah. So obviously very, very different. Yeah. Okay. So, you know, here’s Adfenix, you’re chugging away saying there’s too many agents in Sweden and we’re going to help make an automate it and, and help the ones that stick around and make more money. And the Brokerage make more money. Where does Adfenix wake up one day and say, Hey, let’s go across the pond and, and hit the United States because we think we can help their brokers out too.
Hmm. That’s a good, that’s a great question. I mean, obviously from, from, from one, one perspective is that if we really want to make an impact and improve the way people are buying and selling homes, we kind of need to do that in the ULS as well. If we really get, want to make a massive impact in the world, we can’t just disregard the US so I, and, and so that started about two years ago, I was sort of put on, on the job you could say, and, and without too much, or two and a half years ago, maybe too much sort of focus on it with, as a company. So we, our approach was, yes. Okay. Let’s throw Philip on it and see what happens a little bit. And so we took that sort of six months to figure that out rather than saying, Oh, that’s, that’s how it is.
So let’s, let’s, let’s, let’s focus on, on North American real estate market. And then obviously working in the US we noticed a lot of things that was happening. I think one of the reasons, again, why we have this approach of working with large real estate brokerages is that we initially worked with property portals. So like the, the sort of equivalence of Cylo or realtor.com, but over in Europe doing this at a marketing automation for their properties to get more buyers to, to, to turn into leads on, on, on seller, right. But the European equivalents and realized pretty quickly that it wasn’t Cylo that needed help finding more buyers for their properties. It was the brokerages that were sales clients. And we also know that there’s that type this dynamic. It means that, Hey, the more time that passes, the less ownership brokerage primarily have over the customer discovery journey, the sort of journey of discovering a new home is more and more owned by, by the property portals.
And obviously that’s a strong, strong dynamic in, in, in the U S where we have a very, very strong property portal that is charging, obviously one charging more and more money for leads. But, but on the other hand also is looking at the other part of the buyer and seller journey there. They’re not just contempt that okay, we own the way people purchase, find the homes. I would say low when we launched in the U S we’re just launching I buyers right there. I, I buyers Cylo offers which was sort of an indication that they they’re, they’re looking at the rest of that journey. And that’s where you could say that that’s sort of our, our mission, right? This power broker, just to retain that, that they’re part of the journey, but also become more involved in the discovery part and be part more and more part of the journey for buyers to find, find their homes as well.
You know, talking about Zillow for just a second something else, you know, we’re kind of getting into an interesting international conversation here. It’s my understanding, and please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but the way that Zillow charges is unique, pretty much in the world. Most of the other portal websites like real estate.com dot a U for Australia, and most of the, and that, by the way, they’re kind of a behemoth and owned by realtor.com. But my understanding is it’s all charging the agent for exposure on this site. And most of the portals around the world are like that. Is that what you see?
Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. I mean, that’s why it’s, it’s sort of when, when you asked about the difference between the U S and the rest of the world, I, I almost got a bit dumbfounded because there’s so many, the one aspect is the MLS, or I’ve done them. A lot of the MLS. It’s a new thing for us going into the North American markets that and without the MLS, that means that each brokerage only have their own listings on their website, right. Each agent only have their own list of things on their website. Meaning that there is value in exposure, right. People go to, or rather it’s value it to, it makes sense to charge for someone to just list their home on our website. So most other property portals charge for your, the ability for you to just list the home on their website. So realtor.com or realestate.com.au in Australia, for example,
Yeah. Seemingly very different. I mean, I think it’s a uniquely American concept that businesses start out figuring out how to monetize the consumer instead of monetizing the person, getting the value from it. Right. And I think businesses around the world are starting to pick that up. There’s that company out of Germany, that pretty much just copies, good at good technology and good software ideas from the United States and tries to put it in, in other countries, a rocket, something or another, I forget the name of it, but yeah. And, but overall, in, in, as my research as I’ve done research, I’ve seen, it’s very much an American concept of the consumer is the person to be monetized even when they’re paying nothing. But that’s where the value is because the eyeballs become increasingly valuable as you get more and more, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, exactly. And that’s the reason why we have this probably cause I’m, I’m saying that that Adfenix is this all sort of custom marketing automation platform, but really everything we do sort of originates from the listing. The reason why the, it is there is because the listing is content and it drives eyeballs. And we’re, we’re lucky that there are platforms like Facebook and Google and Instagram, et cetera, that you can pay to put that content, which is the listing in front of people that are actually extra interested in that specific listing or that specific content to drive eyeballs to get more data, et cetera.
So let’s, let’s go into that. When you know, Adfenix does does targeting, or does advertising, why don’t you talk a little bit about what the philosophy is specifically to where your ads come into play? Like, is it a vanity ad is a listing ad, you know, why don’t you talk a little bit about that and we can dig into, you know, what makes you different from some, the other companies
That are doing that too? Yeah, yeah, no, of course. So I think that it’s sort of time to cherish our philosophy a little bit, the flux marketing automation. So, so, and I think that that’s, that’s really the key because that’s what we, again believe is, is missing a little bit from, from the real estate industry. And the fact that the players that have come the furthest isn’t necessarily players owned by the real estate agents or the real estate industry itself. So if you look at the way that we look at marketing automation, it really boils down to three things. So first is obviously the automation aspects. How do we save time for real estate agents re marketing teams at brokerages to just stop doing mundane tasks to, or to learn Facebook basically. And that’s pretty straight forward, it’s in the word, right?
But the second part that is more interesting as a marketing automation is really about personalized, customized experiences for the users that you’re targeting your potential sort of client base, right. Which means that how do we cater to each user, each potential new buyer or seller and show them content that is specifically tailored for their wants and needs. So if you’re a buyer that is, or if you’re a person that’s looking to buy and you’re looking to buy in this certain price range or in this move to this certain area in another part of the country, though, it’s properties from that area. And in that price range that we want to show to you, those are the times that those sort of touch points that you should see from a partner or an agent that works with within Adfenix, which is a primarily way to use that this fruit, massive amounts of data points.
And they’re sort of all ultimate approach because it’s obviously a bit very difficult to manually sift through millions of data points. But then the third part, which is also a key to what we do. So we’ve talked about automation, we’ve talked about relevance and personalization. The third part really comes down to attribution and reporting. So sort of the, the value of your, your marketing automation platform form is only as good as the data that is in it. So a key thing is started is that we started doing very early on. This is tracking all conversions that happens on our website, that we work with our four brokers that we work with. So that basically means how do we track what the interactions, what customized touch points actually was tipping the scale and turn that stranger looking to buy this, this home into an actual buyer client, or seller your clients, and obviously report that because that’s the other difficult thing in the real estate industry is that there’s so many stakeholders, right? We have the brokerage that it was client as agent where the agent is client is the buyer seller, et cetera. And it’s all about reporting ad, everything that’s happening to all of those.
And there also maybe, maybe the, the ancillary service businesses that are helping to pay ads that are involved there too. So yeah, I mean, it’s the state’s other stack up keeps stacking up, right?
Yup, yup, yup. Yup. And that’s, and that’s another example, right? If you’re a person looking for a mortgage, that’s the content that we should be showing you. So that’s, and that’s, that’s what we’re trying to do. And a part of that, that sort of differentiation that you asked about this is taking the, this approach. Hey, we’re not just going to automate ads for you, but we’re going to take all the values that is marketing automation. And I think one of the things that really hammer this home for me was that I was just a few months ago, I was at the Facebook, had the quarters and and then low park with the real estate team. And one of the guys there, that’s working in the re Facebook real estate team. I was previously in the sort of mobile apps space the width one of the things with mobile apps is that every all purchases and all behavior is happening in side of the app and in their ecosystem. So the AMD there’s millions of millions of dollars industry. So billions of dollars, obviously. And which means that they’ve got this funnel nailed down. They have exact understanding of if they put this amount of money and marketing spam, they’ll see exactly what happens to the users that they target them. And they’ll see how much ROI it spits out on the other end. And we don’t think real estate real estate industry is there quite yet.
And obviously it’s, again, it’s hard, but that’s also why, why, why we’re taking on this challenge as well and why we’re so excited about it.
I see very few brokers that approach their website in terms of thinking about lead gen holistically. A lot of them say, I want leads, but very few of them think about the investment to make sure that if they’re putting money at the top of the funnel, if they do, how are they going to work? Those leads through, down to the bottom of the funnel, or how are they going to get them to register, or how are they going to get them to to do followup. And so I, I think, you know, I I’m 100% with you on that. And, and that’s the coming the biggest coming change. I think you’ll see in real estate brokerage technology is there will be more, more focus on lead funnels and actually working the lead through as opposed to and I’d love your take on this. Philip is, is when brokers are getting leads from you and please feel free to even compare the United States versus other countries when they’re getting these leads from you. Do you feel like they’re actually working them as a buyer client, or do you feel like it’s more of just a recruiting and retention item to give their give leads to their agents?
Yeah, I think it’s, it’s hard to, to answer. That’s a sort of broad leap because every company is so, so different. I believe that that, again, with the independence of the agents in the us it becomes more difficult because more or less in other countries you can say, Hey, work, these leads in my, in our CRM system, track everything you’re doing, or you’re, you won’t have a job in six months, which is difficult to say. Right. And, and to answer it in the US everywhere is different. I mean, we have E teams where that obviously makes it easier to track everything. But, but, but maybe also that is where it’s going to start. Right. I mean, that’s the beautiful thing about working with the vendor, doing a marketing automation. I, that we’re constantly trying all of these things. We have recently launched a, a product that helps with this a little bit, but it’s essentially a widget on the listing details page that can capture first capture, contact details, but then also present like the questionnaire to the user to qualify that lead, to understand, okay, even though you’re, you’re signing up on the listing details page, you might actually do it because you’re interested in market research and you’re selling in the next three months.
Right. Right. And one of the things we are seeing is that by, by providing that type of information to an agent, even though it’s a big learning curve, and it’s something we need to educate agents about it, it’s more likely that they are following up on those leads because they’re seeing the value from that.
Sure. that makes sense that it’s definitely a value add for your clients to be able to have something and to give you better reporting. The you know, you, weren’t talking about for just a second, you know, what makes Adfenix a little bit different in how you think about ads versus say Home Spotter boost or the Adwerx program?
Yeah.
A few things, but I guess more about the targeting, you kind of mentioned it for a second, but I, you know, in working with you guys, we’ve definitely found that your targeting is very good. And so I would love some insight into you know, without giving away any specifics or secrets, I’d love some insight on what makes your targeting as good as it is.
Yeah, no, exactly. So of course, so I think that it all comes down from this marketing approach, right? We, every time a person enters one of our websites, we create the PO profile based on that, on that person, on that, on that specific person, that we constantly track all the actions that they’re doing across the board and that and that sort of serves as the basis. We have this database of, of behavioral data, which means that generally when an agent goes into Facebook and they want to manually do a Facebook ad, they need to do a lot of guesswork. They need to think, okay, what’s the age group that the people that are interested in this, this home and for this price range is going to be at what is it where did they live? And those sort of things, right?
And generally that leads to a very broad target thing because you don’t know who the buyer is going to be. But we’re taking out that guesswork in a way, because we’re rather than guessing demographics. We are only showing each property to people that have shown this sort of behavioral active interests for this specific home. And as a result of that. And I think that this also ties into a little bit of what we talked about regarding the value of the listing, right? The reason why portals are so powerful is that, that, that, that they have those eyeballs on the list of things. But our click frequency is 13% on average, which is, I don’t want to throw around those as sort of the click through rate and other sort of marketing terms like that. But that’s remarkable. I mean, it’s,
Are you saying that the ad that you show has a 13% click through rate? Yes. Okay. So for those of you listening that don’t understand that the average ad click through rate for most ads, at least the ones that we’ve seen with some of our investments in, in this industry, it’s usually around 0.1%. So, you know, you’re getting a massive increase over that and you think it’s because the targeted, the targeting is correct. And the copy and the photo, is that targeted to that person?
Yes. I mean, it’s, it’s, the target thing is super important. Cause again, we’re not guessing we know the people that is this 3000 people that we’re showing this up to a, it’s not a lot of people, but it’s people that we know are looking for this type of a property it’s there it’s their want and need right now to look at this type of homes. But, but I also think, and I started thinking about this fairly recently, also is that it’s also because it’s listing advertising. We’ve always been focusing on advertising the listing and it’s big. And we do our primary goal is to help businesses find more business agents, find more, more deals, sell more homes and live a better life. And to do that, we were taking this approach to focus on, on data. So how do we collect as much data on people that are potential buyers as possible?
And how do we use that to serve as our, our end goal? People are really interested in clicking on less things because it’s content that they’re interested in. So yes, a 30% click for rate on a listing out is ridiculous. We have seen some benchmarks that come sort of close to half of that. So five, 6% is really, really good. But none that I’ve come to to our to where, where we are. Yeah. But again, I also think that there’s something to the fact that the list we live in the age of content, right. Content is so valuable and the listing is content. And in one can argue that it’s the best content that, that an agent could have
For sure, for sure. And that’s one of the things that I always tell all of our brokers and particularly after the virus I told, you know, we were, we were doing weekly and biweekly calls with all of our burger clients and I kept telling them make sure you have listing inventory when we come out of this thing, because I think things will be gangbusters and it’ll be very, very busy and those with the listings will win because it’s the content like you control the transaction when you have the listing. And it’s great to have, you know, do buyer site transactions. But if you have the listing, you’re in control of the inventory, you’re in control of what’s out there and you’re getting signs, you’re getting placements online where it sees your brand name. And, you know, if you, if you work with Adfenix, you’re getting ads out there that are, are hitting a 13% click through rates. So another thing I want to ask about Philip is terms of targeting and how you ads, what’s your mix of advertising. And what I mean by that is Google, Facebook, other where do you spend the most of your client’s dollars? It’s still Facebook. Is it a hundred Facebook?
No, no, it’s not. I know obviously that that’s, that’s sort of a potentially a rough top topic right now. But yeah, that, that’s where we’re seeing. We’re, like I said, in the beginning, we’re tracking everything in the philosophy of, of, of marketing automation shop. And so we know that not only is like for right 30%, but we can also see how many has been influenced or to, to become an actual lead and how many even became a lead straight when they, they, they clicked on after they clicked on the ad. And that’s where we see the highest ROI. It’s still through Facebook It’s go. It was a period where it was leaning more towards Instagram as well. The so we, we sort of another thing that our platform does is to automatically optimize everything. So if a particular property performance, while on Instagram, we’ll allocate more money on that platform. So it’s hard to say exact allocation because it’s different every market, even to every, every property where we’re spending the money.
And, and, you know, from that perspective and in terms of targeting and using various different tools that are out there, I get questions from brokers all the time about, I want to spend money on Google for advertising. And I think that’s because they were so used to it. That was the conversation for so long was I need to spend money at Google cost per click advertising. But what we found is that the average cost per click on Google is, is many, many, many times what it is on Facebook for the same click. And it’s on Facebook, you can target down much more carefully than you can on Google as far as getting people that are actually in market to buy a house. So yeah, same thing we’ve seen to Facebook is the way to go. All right, well just a couple more quick questions for you. The in terms of your ads that are out there, you know, does the, does the quality of the photo matter, w I should say what matters most is the quality of the photo matter? Is that the copy that matters most? Or is it a combination of all of those?
I I’m sure that something in the back of my mind tells me that we’ve, we had a really cool case study on this some years ago, but I can’t remember it now, but I mean, I think one thing that we won’t count forget also is the, as to what property it is, how the property was priced and if it’s an attractive neighborhood, right. I mean, because ultimately it’s not about getting clicks. Like if we could, if we could run property hours, there was only target that two 50 people the four day click and five, one, two showing that’s what we would have liked to do. Right. so it’s, it’s ultimately it’s about showing properties that people are interested in two properties that are interested, or two people that are interested in that, in that property. So yeah, I, I, I, I couldn’t tell, I know that we are definitely another thing we do is that even though everything is automated, obviously I feel like I’ve been talking, just talking about marketing automation.
This is all, but even though everything is ultimate, the, every single property that goes live have this manual quality assurance check on our end. So from the agent’s perspective, from the broker’s perspective, everything is ultimate the bot. We have a team of ad experts that manually review every hour. And I think the, one of the key things is just making sure there’s not too much texts not showing too much about the home on the ad itself. And that really cultivates a lot of, a lot of clicks on the ad as well, not showing exactly what type of property is price number of bedrooms and everything show rather show sort of the first sentence in the sort of listing description that the agent has put in, maybe make sure it’s, it’s, you know, grammatically correct and all of that stuff, and that it’s called correctly, but don’t, don’t share too much about, about the home and on your, on your property.
That’s, that’s what the listing details page is for. Right. And that’s where the user can go in. Right. So the photo is the T’s and then the, you know, get them to a listing page and then hopefully the listing page can cover.
Eric Stegemann
Right Correct. Okay. One last question for you? If you could change one thing about the real estate industry, whether that’s internationally or in the United States, Canada, et cetera. What would that be?
Philip Hegge
Two men agents. No, I’m kidding. One thing in the real estate industry, well, I mean, I think I slightly touched on this earlier but like I said, we started out working with property portals and then realized that, Hey, there is something bigger going on. There might be a positive change that we can make in the industry. And that’s really about giving back power to real estate agents to own that customer experience because, and the reason why we believe that’s where the customer share experience should be.
And the way it should be is that that’s because we believe that that’s, what’s going to create the best experience for consumers. So ultimately, what, what we see is that it’s hard moving home. Like if you’re, if you’re a normal person makes a massive, massive personal choice, or maybe it’s not even a choice, but they’re, they want to move and it’s difficult. And that was, we want to enable this for that move that switching of home is a better experience. And again, we believe that the way that we can make it, that impact is to ensure that its real estate agents that are in control over that experience. So, yeah, maybe, maybe it’s something like that where we’re one of the things I usually say is that I want to make our clients number one source of sales commission, they’re all websites. That’s, that’s, that’s one of the missions that we’re on. I guess it’s better to wish for something that you’re actually working.
Wow. I like that wish too. I wish every broker would be able to say that the number one source of businesses there is their website and their online presence. So we’ll leave it there. Thanks so much Philip for coming on today everybody please tune in, please subscribe. We’ll be adding many more episodes in the near future, and you can do that pretty much anywhere that you download podcasts. Again, this is Brokerage Insider, where we interview the leaders in real estate and brokerage and technology. Thanks so much for listening.
