Much like every other industry that existed before the rise of digital, Real Estate has relied mostly on traditional methods to make a profit. Whilst this has never been an issue, the next progression points to digital as a means to expand the industry, its sales and even its day to day processes. But which avenues are feasible in this realm and how can they be tailored to fit the needs of Real Estate business owners?
Enter The Virtual Agent
They say it takes someone in the game to completely reinvent it. That’s exactly what we did. When ex-estate agent Debbie Blake started pairing ideas with Howard Blake, the founder of the Blake group of companies, The Virtual Agent was born.
In only a matter of months, the dynamic duo behind The Virtual Agent had conceptualised a host of solutions to revolutionize the Real Estate world. With a goal to disrupt the Industry in South Africa, TVA brought new school technology to an old school industry. In less than 2 years, we’ve done just that and then some.
Knowledge and Real Estate Data
With The Blake Group owning a database of over 55 million records The Virtual Agent seemed like the perfect fit as an additional offering. Alongside our capable software development team, data scientists and business analysts, we knew that it would become a formidable combination. Debbie also added vital knowledge of the Real Estate industry. This meant key insights and access to individual and company data that would boost a realtor’s sales dramatically.
“Build it and they will come”
A few short months after taking The Virtual Agent to market, we launched our user-friendly CRM. This soon became the #1 Data & CRM Tool for estate agents in South Africa. We then hit a record of revenue growth of 20% every month, surpassing all of our expectations. At present, we have over 2000 estate agents using our powerful tool, something we are exceptionally proud of.
It was never about us…
Disrupting an industry is never easy or guaranteed. So what was the blueprint for our success? We stand by the fact that we developed this solution first and foremost for our clients. Secondary to that was we understood our product and believed in its true value. With those factors working together, success was always sure to follow.
The Virtual Agent was created to assist our clients in creating a seamless workflow process and providing business intelligence to enhance their lives. This was so important to us, that when we designed the tool, we first looked closely at how our target market (a 60-year-old woman) would interact with and navigate our system. As a result, many agree that our application and interface is fresh, clean and exceptionally user-friendly.
Taking out the hard work
We identified that canvassing had to be one of the most time-consuming and mundane tasks for Real Estate agents. Why target 100 leads if only 1 of them is in the market to buy or sell a property? So, we decided to put our team of data scientists to work. As a result, we launched scorecards and integrated them into The Virtual Agent. At a glance, these can show the likelihood of an individual to buy or sell a property. Now that is mind blowing!
We also understand that living in a digital world requires real-time productivity. It’s why we embedded a complete CRM solution into the system. This allows a realtor to drive past a property, access the current owner’s contact information and pop them an email. All of this within a matter of seconds, from their mobile device. We also made sure that we added a few more cool features that any great CRM requires: birthday reminders, email functionality, file imports and much more.
Most importantly, we encourage our agents to use our CRM for its main purpose: to build and create relationships with their most important assets, their clients. To us, there’s no purpose in building a huge database if there’s no personal interaction. This notion is also found in our support team and we happily assist our agents with constant training or anything else they may need.
THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING…
With our sights set to build and guide the Real Estate market in South Africa through the digital sphere, we’ve got no intention of stopping. With a passionate team driving this goal and cutting-edge technology helping achieve our objectives, the future is looking bright. Are you with us? You should be.
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Other services that the Blake Group offer include Debt Collection, Call Centre BPO, Wi-Fi Marketing and Data Solutions.
