For the past four years, Technology Concepts, a veteran MLS provider, has been developing a Customer Relationship Management product for the real estate industry.  The company has leveraged their experience serving MLSs, brokers and agents to architect and build one of the industry’s most advanced enterprise level CRM solutions. 

The product, named Eventus, is operational, installed and has realized outstanding results for the first tier users.  Now that the product is ready for full deployment into the market place, the company is seeking a business partner to fuel marketing and fulfillment.  The company will consider options from company or product sale to an exclusive licensing relationship.   Interested parties should contact WAV Group, attention Mike Audet (mike@wavgroup.com, 716-839-4628) for more information. 

About the product.

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WAV Group has been tracking the adoption of online transaction processing software for several years.   In the 2005 WAV Group Transaction Management Adoption Study, we identified a number of factors that were inhibiting adoption of transaction management solutions and recommended steps to improve adoption.  We are seeing encouraging adoption increases throughout the country.

 The WAV Group 2009 Transaction Management Adoption Study surveyed over 1700 brokers and agents from 22 different MLSs.  In addition, we worked with major Transaction Management vendors to look at their product adoption trends over the last few years.  The result is a much clearer picture of where online transaction processing stands today. 

 The study found that online transaction processing has come of age. User and transaction growth is significant.  Both survey results and growth trends from each of the key online transaction processing software vendors support this finding. 

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Marilyn Wilson and Victor Lund, partners in the WAV Group, were recently selected as featured speakers by the Broker/Agent speakers bureau.  The speaker’s bureau connects interested parties to over 100 speakers in the real estate and financial services industries covering hundreds of topics and offer keynote speakers, real estate seminar speakers, workshop leaders, breakout speakers and more.  Marilyn and Victor are frequent speakers at real estate industry events and now, though the bureau, are available to speak on a wide range of broker/agent services from brand management to the effective use of social networking.  For more information go to   www.BrokerAgentSpeakers.com

There is a tremendous opportunity today for brokers and agents to differentiate themselves  and, as a result, grow their market share through better use of virttual tour technology.  According to the NAR 2008 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers report 41% of the people that bought homes in 2008 were first time buyers.  Their average age was 30 versus 47 for repeat buyers.  This growing base of home buyers and sellers, with less wrinkles,  look for visual information first in their Internet searches.  Unfortunately our sources tell us 75% to 90% of listings on MLS systems today do not have virtual tours.  This means, listings on syndicated sites like Zillow and Realtor.com will not have tours on the vast majority of listings either. 

According to the same NAR study 84% of sellers used a real estate agent to sell their home.  But, only 55% of sellers were very satisfied with the process.  Now look at the fact that only 26% of consumers use the same real estate agent they used previously and you see something very important.  This means a significant number of buyers and sellers are available to those agents and brokers that know how to differentiate themselves. 

There is probably no other industry anywhere that has this rate of customer churn.  What are the reasons for these signficant numbers and how can agents and brokers turn this to their advantage?   DOWNLOAD HERE  What follows below is an Executive Summary.

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If anyone has doubts about the power shift that is taking place as a result of Virtual Office Websites - think again.  Virtual Office Websites are putting real estate agents back into the center of the conversation between consumers and the property information in the best possible way.

Check out the fantastic article from Sundays NYT entitled “Brokers Enrich Their Web Tactics.” This is what one broker had to say about Listingbook:

Kathy Engel, an associate broker with Re/Max Shores Oceanside and the president-elect of the Long Island Board of Realtors, said that although she had been in real estate 23 years, she had seen the most drastic changes in marketing relatively recently – over the last three to five years. While the response has been weak from print ads, she said, “now I get response from my three Web sites,” among them kathy-engel.com.

“The buying public is more technology-savvy than years ago,” Ms. Engel said. “They prefer to shop online before they buy.” She has found the most success with listingbook.com, a Multiple Listing Service that allows customers to browse local homes “without pressure.”

“The best part is Im able to see what theyre looking at, what they like and dislike, and it keeps them in control,” she said. Sellers can see how the competition is priced and “what homes that compare to theirs are selling for.”