October - 20238 By John Currie, SVP of Operations, Weichert, RealtorsFor well-established brokerages, one of the biggest challenges they face is building a unified technology platform offering an integrated and seamless experience for their agents and customers. Transitioning legacy systems into scalable, less-costly platforms is a problem most large, well-established brokerages are dealing with. Build IT or Buy IT?When implementing a project to build a solid tech stack, brokerages can take one of two paths to solving this problem ­ build your own internally or outsource to vendors who specialize in each area. Of those that chose the DIY path, only one has been completed with partial success. The others have abandoned their projects in favour of the vendor-driven approach. Ultimately, real estate companies shouldn't be software developers. That is why several years ago when Weichert embarked on a journey to modernize and streamline our technology,we opted for an integrated third-party model, with limited proprietary Weichert process and technology, except our selling system.With 53 years of history accumulating technical debt across a family of 19 companies, a phased approach made the most sense. The goal was to immediately improve our agent and customer experience while replacing legacy systems with solutions that delivered more scale and ongoing innovation, without the cost burden of a large development team. Our Weichert Tools platform will integrate our partner platforms into an integrated and cost-efficient environment. This way we can provide a low-cost backend that works with the full-service capabilities of a traditional brokerage.For Phase One, we focused on the agents' needs and changed the front-end with a digital storefront and connected CRM, and lead generation tools. Working with Inside Real Estate,kvCORE is customized with an integrated Weichert app store, Weichert Tools, Weichert company generated leads, and other key systems. Dubbed myWeichert, the app is a wonderful CHALLENGES FOR ESTABLISHED BROKERAGES ­ THE TECH STACKcloud-based digital marketing tool with integrated social media capabilities. In addition to the technology investment, having a human resource that can train and support the agents is a critical component that can be an advantage for large brokerages. When deploying myWeichert, we also created a team of Marketing& Technology Specialists. Their mission was to integrate my Weichert into Weichert's selling system through training, then provide ongoing support to leverage the stream of new marketing content that is constantly being created. That veritable army of support resulted in an extremely high utilization rate for the platform.As we moved to Phase Two, the idea was to add incrementally to the Weichert technology platform. Keeping to our agent-centric focus, the new phase will introduce SkySlope and give agents an integrated forms, electronic signature, and transaction management platform. Phase Three will add the final, broker-centric layer to the stack, cloud-based commissions, and processing with Core Back Office. John Currie
< Page 7 | Page 9 >