Renaissance Catches Fire! New REW Website, Leads & CRM platform dominates broker space.

Actual Estate Webmasters’ (REW) new Renaissance system has rapidly gained dominance in the marketplace, in particular at the company degree. But what lots of don’t know is that it almost did not occur. Here’s the tale of REW’s journey from significant crossroads to activity-transforming innovation.

It all started with a ‘castaway’

It was early March 2020 and Tom Hanks arrived down with COVID-19. Real Estate Webmasters was attending the Major Authentic Estate Businesses of the World® meeting at the Wynn in Las Vegas, and they ended up informed they need to pack up and depart early—there may perhaps have been exposure to the virus at the function.

Until eventually then, folks experienced been observing the information and have been setting up to acknowledge that the coronavirus was going to have a major impression in some way, but it was not right up until this second that the REW staff realized just how impactful COVID was heading to be on their business enterprise.

“Everyone was freaking out. Flights ended up remaining canceled and my team was really panicked about acquiring property. I recall sitting down in the lobby with my very good friend J.B. Goodwin, and he reported he’d booked a Suburban ‘just in case’ so that he could drive house (from Vegas to Austin) with his team if they needed to. It really was a outrageous time,” says REW CEO Morgan Carey.

Fortuitously, the entire REW team built it dwelling to Vancouver Island and began their necessary 14-working day quarantine. It was throughout this interval that Carey started to assess the damage from a enterprise viewpoint.

“It seemed like every single hour I would get extra emails, and not a one one particular was superior news. Our customers have been afraid—not just of the international wellness influence the coronavirus would have, but of what this pandemic would mean to their organization,” Carey shares.

Shoppers terminate in droves

As COVID spread and uncertainty increased, brokerages began to panic and seem for any techniques to lower charges and climate the storm. The first point they looked at was discretionary spending, and factors like tailor made projects (aka, bets on the potential) have been no lengthier a quick term priority.

A terrific energy becomes a great risk

“Real Estate Website owners had become a powerhouse in the proptech space dependent on the exceptional power of our personalized company,” describes Carey. “We are the only large custom made style, branding, engineering and Web optimization company at scale in the serious estate space. When COVID strike, we were delivering about 4,000 hrs of company operate, approximately all of which was wholly discretionary to our buyers. For 16 many years straight we had been sold out and had hardly ever experienced to fear about contracting our company expert services long expression, and honestly, we normally imagined if we consistently bring amazing returns to our customers, then we will constantly be fine. How could we not be good?

“We had been fantastic right up until we weren’t.”

Agency revenue is devastated

Almost right away, what experienced been a $5M annual income stream for the company was long gone. Still the team value, infrastructure and buildings, administration, computer software, gains and all other fees remained.

“We did not blame clients for canceling their agency services—we have been looking for techniques to cut charges, much too,” says Carey. “But regretably, mainly because we made available that ‘secret sauce’ that no one else had, when instances acquired tricky, we took the strike the worst. I consider the impact to REW was far much more significant than to our competitors who really don’t supply personalized agency services.”

Decisions have to be made—fast

Most other firms (and brokerages) slash prices, which includes laying off a huge share of their valued workforce. But REW did anything else. What REW realized down to its main was that its persons have been the genuine top secret to the company’s achievements, and that they ended up not replaceable. REW experienced to occur collectively to obtain a answer to preserve all those jobs…and the corporation. That alternative was Renaissance.

Surviving COVID

Luckily, Actual Estate Webmasters had an amazingly loyal shopper base. Even with the decimation of their qualified expert services, the main portion of the enterprise (website, CRM, direct generation) stayed robust with quite very little churn or cancellation.

“Even although instances were hard, our consumers stuck with us, and we all adopted the mentality that we are more powerful together,” shares Carey.

Directing talent toward Renaissance

Rather of terminating the firm’s incredible staff (a thing many other corporations chose to do), REW doubled down on investigate and advancement.

“We made a decision that if we were going to be sluggish, and have this a lot expertise, we necessary to set them to work in their highest and ideal use,” claims Carey. “And so we reorganized and started reinventing the most effective authentic estate platform on the planet.”

Vital options direct to outstanding results 

In get for Renaissance to be the Hail Mary that REW felt was necessary, Carey and his team required to make remarkable alternatives when it arrived to wherever to emphasis the new platform.

“Choose right, and if you regulate to endure by means of this financial catastrophe, you have the prospect to get better and potentially become the dominant player in the market place,” claims Carey.

“Choose completely wrong, and even if you handle to survive the economic downturn, you may perhaps by no means recover.”

So exactly where did Actual Estate Site owners make a decision to concentration? Carey and his staff honed in on three essential regions:

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1. Research motor optimization. “SEO—it’s always been our bread and butter,” claims Carey. “We had been now known as the very best Web optimization business in actual estate, on the other hand, considerably of what we did in our custom made Search engine optimization agency experienced not been productized. This gave us the chance to develop in many of the research motor optimization functions that previously had been only readily available from customization. On major of that, we created many new dynamic Search engine optimisation features into the framework, as well as new equipment that gave much more electrical power to our consumers in conditions of executing really state-of-the-art Search engine optimization augmentation to their site and IDX.”

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2. Webpage speed. “During COVID, almost 100% of all search and conversation in real estate experienced moved on-line,” claims Carey “This intended that having a extremely performant system was a lot more important than ever…especially on cellular. Through a course of action called internet efficiency optimization (WPO), which is a different specialty of True Estate Site owners, we had been ready to wonderful-tune Renaissance to wherever it achieves the maximum scores among all real estate platforms making use of Google Page Velocity, the de facto common on web page speed efficiency.

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“Having a lightning-quick website usually means our brokerage consumers are capable to capture users’ interest a lot quicker, have elevated conversion charges, much better lookup motor rankings and drop less clients to slow loading, non-responsive world wide web platforms.”

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3. ADA compliance. As if brokerages did not have more than enough on their plates to fret about, in 2020, Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance experienced develop into a huge challenge in the brokerage space following some unscrupulous lawyers figured out that if you mixed an ADA class-action lawsuit with the menace of truthful housing violations, you could extort brokerages into having to pay you to settle lawsuits for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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In response to this, REW fully commited to getting to be the most ADA-compliant actual estate system.

“We begun by selecting Kris Rivenburgh, an attorney, founder of available.org and the foremost skilled on ADA compliance,” says Carey. “Kris did a total audit of our framework and furnished us with the opinions and education we necessary in purchase to achieve our objectives. Soon after our engagement, we continued to build our ADA ability set, which includes cross-training our staff members, several of whom became ADA qualified. At existing, REW has far more ADA-accredited crew customers than any other world-wide-web progress corporation in actual estate.

“After numerous months of audits, training and application, we were capable to obtain our goal—a best score on our homepage from our accessibility applications for the out-of-the-box Renaissance install. We continued to integrate ADA optimization into the remaining regions of our framework and now have a entirely ADA-compliant entrance finish for our customers—the only these types of system on the marketplace.

“We have also created this ability established in our company with ADA-licensed builders, and now offer ADA audits and compliance products and services for our customers who have older products and solutions or need ADA do the job finished on custom made jobs.”

Award-successful design and style a continuous all over

Of system, no Authentic Estate Website owners internet site would be comprehensive if it was not also the most fantastically made web page available, points out Carey.

“Our inventive company and engineering teams expended countless numbers of hours perfecting every single side of our new design,” suggests Carey. “It is stylish and has a luxury come to feel, even though at the exact time is flexible plenty of to be deployed in any marketplace. Its pre-designed structure modules—and the overall flexibility and configuration of the REW material administration system—allow it to be deployed as efficiently for use by best groups, brokerages and enterprise buyers.”

An explosion of organization customers 

The first migrations occurred at the enterprise degree. Companies like Daniel Gale Sotheby’s Worldwide Realty, a 1,000-additionally agent brokerage in New York, and Smith & Associates True Estate, a 400-additionally agent brokerage in Tampa, had been between the first to phase up and engage with the Renaissance platform soon after observing the big strategic worth Renaissance introduced to their on line marketing and advertising efforts.

“Throughout 2021, and continuing into 2022, there has been a constant stream of significant, progressive brokerages searching to capitalize on Renaissance performance and blend it with our exceptional ability to customise to their brand name. In addition to the truly substantial business brokerages who have joined us, several of the significant-effectiveness, advertising-centered indies have moved to Renaissance, and prime teams from significant franchises have decided on Renaissance as properly. The No. 1 crew in the world/U.S., and the No. 1 crew in Canada for RE/MAX, have equally migrated platforms to Renaissance,” shares Carey.

At the time of this post, about 50% of all of Authentic Estate Webmasters’ buyers had now migrated to Renaissance, reporting sizeable improvement in web-site effectiveness, as well as expansion in their corporations.

Bringing dwelling the gold

In 2022, Serious Estate Webmasters swept the MUSE Style Awards authentic estate classification with five customized websites built on the Renaissance platform, which includes 4 Gold and just one Platinum rating. The MUSE Design Awards are a prestigious worldwide levels of competition run by the International Awards Affiliation. Other models represented in winning groups include things like Billie Eilish, Disney and Mercedes-Benz.

Ongoing innovation: Renaissance + CRM

Considering the fact that launching in January 2021, REW has constantly unveiled important quarterly updates to the two the Renaissance system and REW CRM.

“Innovation is a Main benefit at REW,” states Carey. “We know that we simply cannot rest obtaining the greatest real estate web page and CRM on the market place we ought to continue to thrust the envelope so that our brokerage and business prospects are so far forward of the opposition, they can conveniently recruit and retain new brokers and gain marketshare by way of elevated effectiveness and advertising and marketing superiority.”

Some of Carey’s beloved improvements in CRM are:

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• Adoption motor: Visual gamification that lets brokers to effortlessly recognize and action the most important tasks in order to ebook appointments and shut bargains.

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• Clever lists: Dynamically updating workflows that can be personalized by each agent to their certain choices.

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• Intelligent automobile-generated saved queries: Make certain all engaged prospects are on saved queries that match their target parts.

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• Dynamic motion programs: Combine agent accountability with CRM-assisted automated options this kind of as texting and email.

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• Campaigns: Combine incremental, day-primarily based and custom field-dependent e-mail strategies for maximum achieve.

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“With these and many far more attributes in the CRM, we really feel we now have the ideal plan all the way via the buyer journey, from the initially time they go to Google to discover their REALTOR® all the way by to closing on their dream household,” states Carey.

“We are definitely thrilled that so a lot of top teams, brokerages and organization organizations are deciding upon Renaissance as well as REW CRM, and even additional fired up when we assessment their success and obtain amazing opinions on how significantly they are loving their knowledge with this new platform from Actual Estate Site owners,” he adds.