Automated Dreams Use Case

Real Estate Digital Transformation

No longer is it just about buying and selling properties—it’s about creating experiences and meeting your clients’ needs.

The online first, app-for-everything world we now live in has caused a shift in the Real Estate Industry. No longer is it just about buying and selling properties—it’s about creating experiences and meeting your clients’ needs.

Creating these experiences includes taking a systematic digital approach, but it also depends heavily on people, specifically, real estate agents. In fact, although 50% of today’s homebuyers are using apps like Zillow, Trulia and HotPads to find their perfect homes, over 87% of homebuyers will connect with a real estate agent for the actual process.

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50% of today’s homebuyers are using apps, but 87% of homebuyers will connect with a real estate agent for the actual process.

from "Quick Real Estate Statistics "

Source: www.nar.realtor

So, what does that mean? Even with a loss of many jobs during the pandemic, one industry actually grew. In 2021, there were a record number of real estate agents in the United States, according to the National Association of Realtors. More than 156,000 people joined their ranks in 2021 and 2020 combined — nearly 60 percent more than did in the two years prior.

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More than 156,000 estate agents in the United States joined The National Association of Realtors in 2021 and 2020 combined.

from "Why So Many People Became Real Estate Agents in the Pandemic"

Source: www.nytimes.com

This hyper growth of the industry brought challenges for brokerage and real estate firms. The need for fast onboarding of these new agents and the need to fulfill higher expectations of their clients became a necessity to get ahead.

However, many of these businesses weren’t ready to handle such rapid demand. The ability to quickly pivot, try new system structures, roll out strategic campaigns, work with many more agents across many locations, along with a full digital transformation, is a lot to ask when real estate is such a complex business in itself.

This hyper growth of the industry brought challenges for brokerage and real estate firms.

That’s why a client recently came to us.

They had grown significantly, but didn’t have the proper tech stack, system infrastructure, and automations implemented to handle the best possible business problem, growth.

We worked together to find the right solution for them that fixed today’s headaches and left room for modifications in the future.

In this use case, we discuss the pain points, goals, solutions and what’s next for this client.

The Problem

The company was using different CRMs, email automation, prospecting, leasing and accounting systems across their 49 locations. They didn’t have standardized onboarding and the team had so many hats to wear that internal projects had been put on the backburner for years while they continued using outdated, disjointed systems and processes.

This presented daily headaches like…

No single source of truth
No insight into what was working or not
No ability to run a marketing campaign across all locations
No easy lead intake routing
Inability to innovate new solutions
Tireless hours of manual work to put together reports
Hours of rework to add data into all of the different systems
Regular data input errors
Contracts were being lost because of the time it took to go through processes

Sound familiar?

The Opportunity and Goals

The owners of the company recognized that the niche softwares their teams were using didn’t help progress the company as a whole forward. They wanted to streamline not online their internal processes and communication but also take ownership of the team processes as a whole, that way they come up with new ideas and roll them out to their team easily.

After discussing the main goals and pain points, we came up with 5 initial goals:

Implement one system for internal processes management that could be used by all locations
Implement a way to connect with their agents regularly with hot lead opportunities
Implement an onboarding process that was streamlined and allowed team members to use the system within weeks of signing on
Implement a way for their team to run a company marketing campaign out to every location
Implement a streamlined process for assigning website leads to the appropriate agents

How We Got There

We started with evaluating each tool. We found many of the niche softwares that each location used lacked the best practices of sales, didn’t allow for full customization, and the integrations were very limited. It was clear that the best solution for this growing company would be to move them to an enterprise solution that would enable them to handle their processes under one roof, while also allowing them to customize it to their needs.

That’s when we decided to set up custom objects within HubSpot to implement the 5 systems we’d outlined.

Here’s what we built:

Custom Structure

Objects

Email Automations

Workflows

Sales Systems

Custom Task Flows and Forms

Integrations

Custom API development

What's Next

They had imagined a system that would bring agents on quickly, improve their onboarding experience, allow them to run centralized marketing campaigns, give them one source of truth for business optimizations and empowered them to communicate with their different team members and clients in a personalized way.

What they got was simply that–a system that is flexible enough to roll out to their entire team, while also allowing them to effectively run their business.

And this is just the beginning.

There are so many more opportunities that we could envision implementing with the custom infrastructure backed by the HubSpot platform. We are now taking a look at the experience of the lead at every stage, the relationship management of past clients, the partnership with referral companies like designers and contractors, and sales document integration.

Here’s a look at future projects we will be implementing to put them ahead of their competition:

Lead Capture from In-person Events
Omni-channel Communication Automation
Multi-contract Task Management
Virtual Meeting Automation
Segmented Marketing Campaigns
Client Referral Thank You Automation
Integration of E-signature Documentation Process

Conclusion

As technology increases, there is less of a boundary on what you can imagine or create. However, niche software do not take the digital marketing and sales industry learnings, experience and trends into account and are thus behind the ball and siloed. Meaning, real estate firms with aggressive sales goals are unable to come up with creative solutions that help them stand out from the over 106 thousand brokerages in the United States.

For those companies wanting to do serious business, they need a serious digital platform like HubSpot.

To learn more about Automated Dreams services and discuss solutions for your current headaches, reach out to us here.