Broker seeks out the 'good life'

Krisstina Wise, broker for the GoodLife team Inc., an Austin, Texas-based real estate company, says real estate agents and brokers must be "customer obsessed" to survive in this changed market.

Wise, who in 1998 launched Agent Elf, a real estate systems management and customer relationship management tool, and in 2005 co-founded agent referral company OnePoint Refferal, is speaking at the Real Estate Connect conference in New York City, which runs form Jan. 13-15, 2010.

She responded to a set of questions posed by Inman News:

1. What do you see happening in the real estate market in 2010?

The simultaneous shift in the market, along with the emergence of social media and new technologies, has changed the real estate game. I see the revenues and incomes of traditional brokerages and traditional agents continuing to decline unless they can innovate and adopt new technologies and systems to deal with these changes.

Buyers and sellers will demand more from their agents to compensate for the value they are paying for. Agents will demand more from their brokerages to get more value for what they are paying for.

2. What advice do you have to help real estate agents and brokers get through this market?

Real estate is not immune to the fundamental shift in consumer behaviors and expectations. If real estate agents and brokers are going to thrive in this new market, they must be technology-centric and customer-obsessed. Brokers must offer leading technologies, fundamental and specific marketing strategies and execution, back-end support, quality control and performance measurement, all in the name of providing value to the tech-savvy consumer and the real estate agent.

Agents must be experts at social media marketing. In the early 2000s it was about building a seductive Web site that would engage consumers and cause them to act. This is still essential, but it is no longer enough.

The Web and social media have changed the game of marketing. Today's consumer expects you to go to them and they demand that you see them as a person, not a sale. Agents can no longer sell and tell. Today's consumer will no longer tolerate that behavior.

3. What made you join your current company?

I left what I call the "big-box broker" in 2007 in order to turn the GoodLife team from a small-time team into a niche broker with the vision of ultimately becoming the real estate brokerage of the future. I assessed that the big-box brokers would not be able to innovate rapidly enough to provide me and my team with the resources needed to compete in the changing market.

In addition, I had spent the previous 10 years building a trusted identity in the marketplace. I realized that no matter how good I was, my identity would always be at risk at a traditional brokerage.

Let's face it, not all real estate agents are the same. As long as I was at a big-box broker, I was being evaluated by consumers not only on my own skills and capabilities, but those of the average or lower-than-average agent at that brokerage.

I knew that I wanted to build a brokerage of highly skilled, individually reliable, and collectively disciplined professionals.

4. What's been your biggest challenge in running the business?

In 2009 we completely redesigned our Web site to serve the needs of today's buyers and sellers. We moved off of Top Producer onto Salesforce as a full contact-management and quality-control system. We designed and rolled out a complete social media marketing system.

Instead of sending our agents to a vendor to learn social media, we built the social media strategies and tools inside of the organization to enable our agents to be social-media savvy. These are just a few of the innovations we have put into place this year to survive and thrive in this down market. Needless to say, the biggest challenge has been the workload required to innovate and execute on these new innovations. ...CONTINUED

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