In March’s Marketing and Branding Month, we’ll go deep on agent branding and best practices for spending with Zillow, Realtor.com and more. Top CMOs of leading firms drop by to share their newest tactics, too. And to top off this theme month, Inman is debuting a brand new set of awards for branding and marketing leaders in the industry called Marketing All-Stars.
Real estate brokerage Engel & Völkers is rolling out a significant technology effort for its U.S.-based offices and agents with the help of software company Chime.
The product is called E&V CRM and was announced in a March 21 announcement exclusively sent to Inman.
Powered by Chime Enterprise Platform, the mobile-forward customer relationship management solution will enable agents to deploy a number of sophisticated, integrated marketing tactics, ranging from automated lead-generation campaigns to power dialers and direct mail, along with a range of other business products tailored to existing E&V workflows.
Katelyn Castellano is senior vice president of marketing for Engel & Völkers Americas.
“Such a product is essential for today’s agent to compete for and sustain relationships,” she said in a statement.
“In developing the E&V CRM with Chime, we’ve created a solution that’s easy to use from any device in order to help our network turn contacts into life-long clients — all backed by actionable data to help make informed business decisions on a regular basis,” Castellano said.
Agents will seamlessly transition from mobile to desktop work experiences, allowing them to respond to new leads and track marketing metrics in remote locations and complete long-form follow ups and more complex interactions on a laptop screen. While multi-environment workspaces should be common for today’s agents, they remain an implementation challenge for large brokerages aiming to scale technologies.
Engel & Völkers agents will also have tools at their disposal to create and manage social media, create and monitor website content and better assess lead quality with Chime’s lead scoring features.
“The platform also leverages AI to identify behavior trends and automate tasks enabling advisers to effortlessly foster relationships with the right clients at the right time,” the statement reads.
Chime is one of a select number of CRM and real estate software providers targeting large-scale corporate implementations or enterprise solutions. It made its stake in the space official a year ago in April 2022.
Dave Carter, vice president of marketing at Chime, said at the time that the enterprise offering was developed to appeal to complex business structures common to the real estate industry given the way offices are owned and teams are formed.
“Modern brokerage owners understand that by empowering agents with innovative technology tools, they are better positioned to attract and retain the top talent needed to accelerate business growth,” Carter said in a statement. “Our Enterprise Platform was expressly designed to support a complex organizational structure and deliver an all-in-one sales acceleration platform to consolidate costs and grow the business.”
While the individual agent is always a priority for proptechs, selling individual accounts complicates revenue models and naturally, growth. In short, enterprise software is a better business model, a better way to serve the agent and offers brokerage leaders enticing recruiting benefits. It also overlaps with the industry’s push to digitize its business.
Lone Wolf and Inside Real Estate, which acquired BoomTown in early 2023, are also competing heavily for corporate brokerage deals.
Providing the same level of technological advantage to all agents under a brand can theoretically provide a performance baseline across all offices, giving brokers a common benchmark for training, recruiting and performance measurement. It also provides messaging consistency and in some cases can embolden culture, a perpetually challenging business endeavor within the independent mindset of typical real estate businesses.
“The E&V CRM streamlines our business behind the scenes, allowing us to make smart decisions and take the right actions at key moments to best nurture leads and create client relationships,” said Curt Stinson, of Engel & Völkers Tucson, in the announcement. “We are equipped with data that allows us to better organize and prioritize opportunities, engage with leads on a regular basis with relevant content based on where they are in the homebuying or selling process and ultimately, turn leads into long-standing clients.”
Chime was founded in 2016 as a flexible, integration-ready CRM with an emphasis on digital marketing. It has continued to forge a number of technology partnerships to expand what it can offer clients and most recently added recruiting and a robust social media marketing studio. The company announced a major investment in hiring at the start of 2022, likely in anticipation of its enterprise offering.
Chime has another notable enterprise deal in place with the fast-growing Real Brokerage.
