Inman

Here is Realogy’s big agent tech play

Rawpixel/Unsplash

Real estate titan Realogy has an ambitious new agent tech offering. Its brokerage-owning subsidiary NRT has officially launched Desk, a new, unified platform that acts as the central point from which agents can manage their email, contacts, marketing, profiles and create market reports.

Desk is already live in the beta phase exclusively for the 45,000 agents affiliated with NRT’s Coldwell Banker operations. The platform aims to unite all of the key products and tools that agents use to efficiently run their businesses and acts as the central point of NRT’s open architecture technology play, a combination of proprietary and outside vendor solutions. That strategy was described by NRT CEO Ryan Gorman in a recent Inman interview.

A look at the desktop of NRT’s Desk platform. (Credit: NRT)

“Desk is part of our open architecture strategy to enable agents to use ours and other great products seamlessly and effectively through our systems,” Gorman said in a statement today. “We are leveraging our scale and talent to unify products in one cohesive, integrated solution. Desk is an agent’s first and only stop to accessing the tools most important to their business, saving them time and adding to their productivity.”

NRT CEO Ryan Gorman. Credit: NRT

From Desk, agents can access their email, manage contacts, create listing presentations, update their bios and profiles, create and send market reports, view educational opportunities, market their listings through NRT’s proprietary Listing Concierge program, and much more, according to a release from NRT.

Agents can adjust the program to their preferences through a desktop interface that allows them to add, remove and rearrange the applications they use more frequently.

Since its launch, a third of all Coldwell Banker NRT agents have opted-in to use Desk. It was developed in-house by The Studio, Realogy’s product marketing professionals and software engineers, responsible for Listing Concierge, which was launched in December.

Desk’s development included feedback from agents through focus groups, one-on-one interviews and a product test program. The development team processed more than 1,600 pieces of feedback throughout the development.

“We are working in an agile environment with a focus on listening to users and bringing products they want to market quickly, then growing and evolving these products based on agent input,” Kacie Ricker, vice president of product marketing for Coldwell Banker NRT said in a statement. “Desk is part of our core four values, specifically Production Power, which helps agents sell more homes, make more money and work more efficiently… and we’re just getting started.”

NRT is the own-side brokerage under the Realogy umbrella and includes 790 offices and more than 50,000 agents working under the Coldwell Banker, Citi Habitats, Corcoran, Sotheby’s Internation Realty, Zip Realty and Climb Real Estate brands.

Email Patrick Kearns