Bobby Puim

Director of Operations, REC Canada Team (Canada's #1 Team)

Toronto, Ontario

COO of Broker’s Playbook

REC Canada is a full-service real estate sales and consulting brokerage, operating under the banner of Royal LePage Signature. The Toronto based company is composed of experienced Realtors with storied track records across all property asset classes. Since inception, they have been steadfast in their journey to become the top team in Canada by always delivering “World Class Service Experience” to their clients. Bobby Puim, Director of Operations at REC Canada, has helped fuel that impressive growth, and his secret might surprise you.

When Bobby was introduced to RLP Sphere (Royal LePage’s version of the kvCORE Platform) in March of 2020, they had 22 agents. One of his priorities was to grow the team. It didn’t take long for tech-savvy Bobby to figure out that kvCORE was designed to work for every type of business function within the brokerage universe, and he could use the tools within kvCORE himself to accelerate the growth of his team.

“It’s with kvCORE and the support of the system itself that we’ve been able to leverage our offering outwardly and provide value to our agents that want to come onboard. 

There’s an interesting example of this. Agents have clients, and those are commonly buyers, sellers, investors, renters, whatever it may be.

In my particular case, my client is the agent. So I treat them as though they are my client within the realm of the database itself. I use kvCORE to market to them. If I’m recruiting them, I’ll put them through an automated pre-onboarding campaign. Or, if they’ve decided to join the team, I put them through their entire onboarding completely automated through the kvCORE system. I tell them when their homework is due, their onboarding processes are due, what learnings they need to be then tethered to at any particular time. It’s all perfectly timed and executed via email and text. They might get a text that says, “Hey, make sure you log in to your team calendar today to make sure you are at our team meeting.”

And because of the way I can set all of those things up, they don’t even realize that it isn’t me. That’s the beauty of it. The aha moment for the agent is when they realize it isn’t me messaging them all the time, it’s actually the system doing all of these things. They say, “Wait a second, this isn’t you messaging me at these odd times? You knew where I was at in my training and hit me at the exact time?” Then they know that it’s the system doing it. If the system can do that for them, what can it do for their clients? And then I have complete buy-in.

Our uptake in the utilization of the system itself has been incredible. They all of a sudden need to know how they can utilize this for THEIR people, their databases. That’s how it supports me, and it allows me to do it with not just 22 agents or 51—in theory I could do it with 40,000 agents, and it wouldn’t matter. The level of organization it has given me is unreal.”

In addition to leveraging the precise behavioral automation within kvCORE, Bobby talked about the other key feature that was giving him a huge recruiting advantage. 

“The real interesting part of this technology is the ability to segment databases. Of those 22 agents when we first started, they all run their own businesses. They want to protect their databases. Up until kvCORE / RLP Sphere, we’ve never been able to come up with a solution to say “your database is protected,” and we can supplement your database from a team level in order for you to build your business the way that you’d like. Once we realized that kvCORE has the ability to partition every single user's database and protect them all individually, that built more trust with our team than we could have ever done with previous software. Database privacy, but built within the brokerage ecosystem so that you get the best of both worlds, was a game-changer for us.”

Agents with the REC team have been loyal, and for good reason. They are seeing a boost in their businesses by taking advantage of some of the same automation features that Bobby used to onboard them. 

“The very first question I ask a new agent is “where does your database live, and what are you doing on a daily basis to segment those people?” One of the ways we’ve been able to really help them boost their productivity is to help them identify people sitting in their database and creating simple ways to separate them into different groups. I show them in kvCORE how easy it is to create hashtags that are tethered to that individual in order to put them into the right email campaign, or create a saved filter for everybody that meets certain markers—like did they buy five years ago, or do they have potential equity? The hashtags and filters in kvCORE make it easy for them to segment their database so they can be sure they are delivering the most compelling messages to those segments. Once they utilize the system to start nurturing their databases with the right messages, it helps push prospects down the line closer to their next potential deal.”

The REC team has already grown to over 50 agents, and continues to grow rapidly. We asked Bobby what he would tell other brokerages considering kvCORE:

“It doesn’t matter whether you are an agent, an administrator, a team leader, a director…kvCORE has something for you that you will derive value from no matter what. I said this on stage at our national sales conference recently: If you’re not using kvCORE, I think you’re crazy.”