What a difference a single platform makes for commercial brokers
Keller Williams, the world’s largest real estate franchise by agent count, is arming its commercial brokers with bolstered solutions to better capitalize on the marketplace. To that end, the Austin, Texas-based firm this month entered into a partnership with RealNex, an enterprise technology solutions provider for commercial real estate.
It’s about achieving economies of scale, suggested Justin Shamp, commercial operations manager for KW Commercial, which is the commercial division of Keller Williams.
“Historically our company partnered with three different big tools for our agents out in the field,” he said during a telephone interview with Mortgage Professional America. “If you look at what a commercial real estate broker needs, they need CRM software to record relationships and tie that back to properties to really make that side of their business function; they need a marketing tool to take all that and put it in a way that’s going to be digestible by people out in the field and dump that out and get it to people; and they need a data tool to pull in different pieces of ownership data and put all the rest of it together.”
Learn how to choose best CRM software for mortgage brokers in this article.
It was during an internal assessment that the disparate functions used by brokers piecemeal became clear, Shamp recalled. “When we were trying to figure out which companies we needed to partner with, we realized we had three fragmented solutions and people were having to jump from one system to another to check those boxes. As we were interviewing people, we realized RealNex was the one solution that really brought all three of those elements together under one common platform.”
While the alliance is nascent, Shamp said the fortified tools now at the company’s disposal will not only help commercial brokers domestically but represents a springboard for international expansion as well.
“We interviewed tons of vendors that were potential candidates, but RealNex was the one that really took their platform and rebuilt it in a way that filled all of our needs and it’s continuing to grow,” Shamp said. “It gives us opportunities to collaborate across the US as well as potentially expanding into international markets soon as well.”
The high-value acquisitions brokered by the firm hint at the need for efficiency and a more streamlined approach. In January, the company announced Florida-based Imperium Blue’s acquisition of the Chateau and Zalanta retail centers in South Lake Tahoe for $33 million from Ready Capital. Tony Wood of KW Commercial represented the seller in the transaction. The sold properties are part of a 20-acre development that includes 400 residential condominiums and 100,000 square feet of retail space.
Through the partnership, KW Commercial brokers and agents gain access to RealNex Navigator™, a CRM-plus solution adapted to serve KW Commercial real estate brokers and agents globally. Features include software for languages, currency and footage-to-meters conversion features. “That’s going to give us a value proposition that will allow us to expand internationally pretty rapidly,” Shamp said.
While Keller Williams overall is in some 52 countries, KW Commercial has a presence in the US and Canada only, he added. “KW Commercial is just US and Canada, but we’re really hoping to follow that path with some international expansion.”
While the quest in partnering with RealNex was primarily to unify various needed elements into a single platform for commercial brokers, the development adds KW Commercial to a growing list of firms bolstering their tech solutions. In many ways, the trend is an offshoot of the pandemic that yielded tech twists to function amid a stilled landscape.
“That’s definitely a fact,” Shamp agreed. “The pandemic made everybody get a little more creative about how to approach people when it was less acceptable to sit across the table. Through that process, technology jumped by leaps and bounds to help us do a lot while sitting at home.”
In a prepared statement, RealNex executive chairman Mark Kingston also touted the deal. “We are pleased that KW Commercial recognizes the tremendous capabilities and value proposition of RealNex Navigator™,” Kingston said. “KW and RealNex share a common mission of providing technology and tools that enable commercial real estate professionals to achieve the highest levels of success while delivering world-class service to their clients.”
He offered a timeline for the launch of additional products: “In the coming months, we will further expand the value of our offering to the KW Commercial team with the introduction of our International Version, Auction Platform, Virtual Reality Platform and RealNex Data Solutions,” Kingston said. “Bringing superior advantage to KW Commercial and RealNex clients worldwide is what we are all about. We succeed when our clients succeed.”
