[Originally published on Medium]

Tech savvy Real Estate agents have leveraged existing technologies that have been around for years, sometimes for decades, to elevate their clients showing success even before our COVID-19 era.

The COVID-19 pandemic has urged agents to pivot and adjust.

Finding the most productive ways to deliver outstanding client success in Real Estate by excelling at virtual showings is no longer a must-have business skill reserved only to the top-producing 1% of all agents.

It’s become an essential way to do business for all agents and brokers.

There is a lot of education that needs to happen in the Real Estate industry.

For having interacted with thousands of agents and brokers, we hear in unison that all of them are looking to better understand and compare their options when it comes to creating virtual client showings. When it comes to the easiest ways of connecting their clients to showings. When it comes to delivering seamlessly clients showings live and/or anytime on-demand without wasting any time on anything else than closing the deal. When it comes to marketing great client showings content socially to generate home buyer leads that close faster than those coming from expensive legacy ways of finding new leads.

That’s why we share this article with you today. Our hope is that it will give you the knowledge and the actions you can take right away to take your client showings success to new heights in these challenging times.

Consumer Grade Video Chats

There are thousands of consumer video chat apps. Yes, thousands. Most are not known to the public. Simply search for “video chat” in any app store and you can scroll relentlessly for hours down a feed of thousands of such consumer grade apps designed to chat with friends and family face-to-face.

The most used ones in the Real Estate industry, albeit one of them is over two decades old and the other one is over one decade old, are Skype and Facetime.

These video chat apps allow you to connect clients to virtual showings.

Yet, they do it in a way that is totally below par for dozens of reasons that would take too long to enumerate here. A few of them are related to the complexity and technical limitations related to using them for you, the agent, and also for your clients. They require that your clients be on the same type of smartphone, they don’t allow to connect clients from any screen in their lifestyle without having to download them and to set up or log into an account with usernames and passwords to remember and share with stakeholders every time the need for a new showing comes up. They don’t respect clients privacy which is a big no-no we’ve heard from day one when we looked to understand why so few agents and clients connect this way for clients showing. And many other reasons that make their use totally inadequate to the Real Estate clients showing experience.

We’ll dive deeper into the many Real Estate pitfalls of these Consumer Video Chat apps later in this article.

Millennial Social LIVE Video

The average Instagram user’s age is around 25.

If you don’t believe it, see it for yourself in this article: “Important Instagram Stats You Need To Know For 2020” by sproutsocial.

On Facebook, the average user’s age is older, above 40 as reported in this article: “Distribution of Facebook users in the United States as of August 2020, by age group and gender” by statista.

The average age of users engaging in Facebook LIVE and Instagram LIVE skews younger, even on Facebook that has a lot of older users playing games like candy crush, when it comes to LIVE, those watching are more like 25.

They are not your home buyers.

As a result, looking to generate home buyers leads airing Facebook or Instagram LIVE is a big waste of time and efforts. You’re just missing your core target.

We discovered that early on when creating a new way to connect the right clients to client showings to close more Real Estate deals. Millennial Real Estate users we met on Instagram tried for years to sell on Instagram. The results were totally off target until they met our team @REveo.co on Insta.

It’s fun to do LIVE on Instagram and Facebook, we actually do it a lot to connect to newer agents that are up and coming. That’s actually how I met and connected with my Co-Founders Debbi DiMaggio and Kristin Frosaker!

But it is far from getting the job done when it comes to showing and selling the most expensive asset most people will purchase in their entire life — a home.

There are many other reasons why the Millennial Social LIVE Video solution is not adequate at all to delivering results for Real Estate agents and brokers.

It’s a long list here too, to keep it short before delving into further details later in this article, we can talk about the significant client privacy issues on these platforms.

When you are a professional Real Estate agent, you should make sure to respect your clients’ privacy, it’s one of the many dots you need to align carefully to deliver optimum client showing success that grows your business.

We also discovered another interesting point that we heard directly from some of our Real Estate brokerage clients. These clients initially tried to air LIVE Open Houses and LIVE Broker Opens on these social networks. Per their own words “this was a total debacle”. In other words, the Millennial LIVE Social Video experience was not at all suited to their needs. Far from being optimal to build both the agent/team and broker brands, but also totally inefficient at creating a fluid showing interaction between agents and clients.

Who wants to type questions in a chat when trying to watch a property on a virtual showing?

Very, very few people. Big opportunity loss here, too.

Corporate Team Collaboration

One magnifying aspect of COVID-19 was certainly making us, the consumers, the executives, the employees, the parents, flock to enterprise collaboration solutions to keep doing some of our social and entertaining activities while social distancing.

For example, my children are taking ballet lessons via such solutions, and as a busy startup entrepreneur, I can only be very grateful for that.

We also use some of these team collaboration solutions at REveo to share a large number of product demos with our Real Estate brokerage prospective customers. They are really useful to share our laptop screens to show numbers or even to share our smartphone screens so we can show both the dynamic agent and dynamic client showing experience that we deliver. It’s useful.

These solutions were designed by corporate executives, some of them have also worked at CISCO as I did a few years back, and come from the Webex world. The traditional enterprise collaboration world.

Brokerages who defaulted to such enterprise video collaboration tools to connect clients to open houses or private showings are now, only a few months after their initial trials, realizing they are not suited to Real Estate.

It’s a bit like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

It’s much better, much easier, much more efficient to fit a round peg into a round hole. Solutions that are designed for Real Estate showings are doing a much better job at delivering client success hence at impacting closing rates and closing speed for both agents and brokers.

These video team collaboration solutions have many other pitfalls.

As the previous category of solutions for virtual showings that we touched on — Millennial Social LIVE Video — these solutions come with invasion of data privacy both on the showing agent and on the client sides.

Their pitfalls for the Real Estate industry come in dozens. We’ll explore further what these are and why it makes total sense that we are seeing more and more Real Estate managing brokers, CEOs, COOs, CMOs, most brokerage buying decision makers, research a new way that is designed by Real Estate leaders for Real Estate leaders to show better and close more deals, faster.

360 and 3D Tours

Over the summer, I did over 3,000 business contacts by phone, text message, email, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and much easier, out-of-the-box on REveo of course in just seconds, with over 600 Real Estate brokerage executives and decision makers.

Yes, it takes a bit of work to build a new brand!

Back in 2012, three years after I discovered the idea for a new way to do virtual showings that would solve for all the pitfalls of the legacy virtual showing solutions, I interacted with hundreds of home buyers in the Silicon Valley at University Café at the time (now local union 217, I recommend it! 🙂 ), on University Avenue in Palo Alto a few steps away from Stanford University.

I would purposefully speak to home buyers who spent their entire day driving around listings with their buyer agents most of the time. Many were out-of-state executives looking for their new place for starting a new tech executive role there, many were also locals actually.

What struck me at that time is that a large portion of them vetted the properties they were going to tour for the day on an interesting form of static marketing- 360 tours. Imagine the Google Map pedestrian experience but inside a home. The 360 experience had been around already for a few years and looking to cater to several industries, including insurance among many others.

The net of their property pre-qualification, static 360 experience — no real-time communication with agent in the canned tours that make me totally dizzy personally, and I am not the only one — was once they drove miles and miles to get there, the properties didn’t look anything like the canned tours had made them envisioned. Huge disappointment. Huge waste of time, for both the agents and the clients, and huge waste of natural resources and unnecessary pollution for no reasons.

Yet, in 2020, I did speak to a few brokerage decision makers who in spite of the steep cost and complexity of creating such tours — see YouTube video above “Virtual Tour Equipment used to Make Virtual Tours” — still want to dedicate resources to a far-from-optimal way to make their agents interact with clients to sell homes.

This will definitely change. It’s just a matter of time. A matter of education.

When you lead a Real Estate brokerage you should look for ways that are “out-of-the-box” for your Real Estate agents to deliver great client success in just seconds without any cumbersome operations to set up, nor lengthy training that drains your operational profit while delivering dismal marketing results for a high cost.

Ways that are much more dynamic at taking your agent-client interactions to a whole new level of closing rates and closing speed…

The New Way: Dynamic Real Estate Showing™

There is hope for the Real Estate industry to thrive with Real Estate client showings in the months, years and decades to come.

There is a new way.

There is a way that solves for all the pitfalls of the 4 old ways we touched on before that can help you get a first stab at Real Estate virtual showings. A first stab that is far from delivering the client success any of your home buyers deserves.

You should opt for a clients showing solution that delivers client success that breeds client success and constantly grows your business and all your brands while doing so.

You should opt for a clients showing experience that any of your agents or brokers can engage your target buyers in, in just seconds, without training, without anything to set up — let agents focus on delivering completely “out-of-the-box” client success.

If you are one of the Real Estate leaders who pave the way to next-generation Real Estate technology as reported by MoxiWorks in the September 2020 edition of MILE 62 — see REveo Dynamic Real Estate Showing™ feature in the article “Our (Real Estate) World is Changing
5 tips to choose next-generation Real Estate technology” — feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or simply contact our REveo team.

In just 5 minutes, we’ll show you the 20+ different reasons why we are the only ones to deliver the agent productivity and return on marketing investment impacts of Dynamic Real Estate Showing™.