Pam O’Connor retired only two years ago from Leading Real Estate Companies of the World, where she was more than its President and CEO, she was an industry leader and a mentor to many. Inside Real Estate was thrilled to have her join us on the second edition of Insider Spotlight.

In an insightful and candid discussion with Inside Real Estate’s Executive Vice President of Marketing and Enterprise Sales, Alissa Harper, REAL Trends President Steve Murray offered attendees a slew of suggestions on how brokerages can do just that to cope with the inevitable changes that the COVID-19 crisis will bring to the industry.

With the landscape more crowded and confusing than ever, we reflected on the lessons we all learned last year, uncovering three ideas that we believe can lead us back to a path toward service, collaboration, and smart growth. And, it favors the agent-based model that’s worked for more than a century.

Actually working out the commission program needed to recruit agents presents much less of a challenge than tracking these unique commission programs designed for each agent on something other than an Excel spreadsheet. Small and midsized firms need to support variety in their compensation plans in order to recruit and require an affordable solution that integrates with QuickBooks. In 2016 and 2017, entrepreneur Jeremy Shoenig developed software for exactly this purpose, called BrokerSumo.

Teams are often the highest contributors to brokerage sales volume and one of the fastest-growing segments in real estate. This makes teams a critical part of today’s real estate landscape, so it’s important for brokers to make an effort to do whatever they can to recruit and retain teams in their organization. Fortunately, industry technology has improved in recent years and there are solutions today, like kvCORE Platform from Inside Real Estate, that effectively support teams and individual agents on one platform. Now, broker-owners have complete control, but can also allow their teams and agents to customize the platform to fit their needs and create their personal and private platform within the broker platform.

Ah, Zillow. The real estate portal we all know and love? It’s no secret that many homebuyers leverage the “Z word” to begin their initial stages of the homebuying process. Due to the popularity of Zillow with homebuyers, many brokerages and agents alike feel they must be committing a dedicated monthly budget to the platform for a perceived fear of missing out on a potentially limitless stream of leads. Many real estate professionals also feel there is an unspoken expectation they need to be present on the search portal to truly compete with those who are also on Zillow. However, often the cons/disadvantages of advertising with Zillow outweigh the perceived pros.