Jeff Bezos has famously called the concept of a brand “what people say about you when you are not in the room.” Whether you consciously work to develop and maintain your brand or not, people will talk about your brokerage.
To build success and scalability for your firm, you need to be able to control that conversation.
Before, creating a brand and drafting marketing materials aligned with that branding was a time-consuming process. But fortunately, Buildout has changed the game, offering a platform that helps you create, publish and promote brand-aligned materials quickly to gain exposure and increase brand recognition.
This allows you to more efficiently market your brokerage’s properties and frees you and your marketing team to focus on higher-level marketing strategies. Because at the end of the day, you want your brokerage to be talked about for all the right reasons.
Customize your brand
What makes your brokerage different from the rest? Defining that is the first step to perfecting your brand, which is key to your brokerage’s success in courting clients and retaining brokers.
In recent years, there has been a rise in the prominence of boutique real estate brokerages, attributed in part to their dedication to finding their voice and niche and truly owning it. Today, 80 percent of brokerages are independent, and more than half of agents are affiliated with independent brokerages, but large, franchised brokerages still have a crucial, not-so-secret weapon: their brands.
The vast majority, 71 percent, of brokers working with a large brokerage indicated in an Inman survey that they chose to work with a franchised brokerage because they sought the brand recognition. And 80 percent said the biggest advantage of affiliated firms over independent firms was brand recognition.
Boutique real estate brokerages march to the beat of their own drum — and they’re on fire. Their popularity is fueled, in part, by the passion of their owners, who cultivate unique brands, cultures and business models. –Inman News
When you get started with Buildout, we’ll work to ensure that your brand is differentiated from your competitors and stands out. Once your brand guidelines are established, your team can use Buildout to draft brand-aligned proposals, flyers and brochures—instantly.
With our help, your brokerage’s marketing department will have a set of robust, dynamic blueprints at your fingertips to bring your brand to life in every marketing piece you create. So now, no matter the size of your brokerage—boutique or franchise—you’re set up to be competitive in the space.
Buildout changed the way we do business. [It] has been a critical tool for recruiting, winning listings, and closing deals at every level of our business. –Kevin Maggiacomo, CEO, Sperry Van Ness
Create and promote materials
Every year, more than 70,000 brochures, 25,000 flyers and 20,000 proposals are created with Buildout. And each of these materials is tailored to display only the most important aspects of each property. Elements that would typically take hours to customize for each individual listing, including location, size, photos and a map featuring points of interest surrounding the property—are incorporated almost instantly.
Now, it’s not enough to simply create brochures and flyers to promote a listing. Once these materials are created, they can be promoted directly through Buildout through the syndication portal, shared on individual property websites, property search plugins for your brokerage’s website and featured or multi-property emails.
With Buildout, brokerages have the option to syndicate their property listings with partnering industry-leading listing websites. In a given year, 60,000 property listings are instantly syndicated across these different property websites using Buildout.
This allows your brokerage to easily get your listings out to maximize exposure and interest so you can close more deals in less time.
And not only can your listings be promoted on multiple property sites at any given time, but Buildout can help you create a unique property website for a listing in a matter of minutes. Over 65,000 property websites are created every year in Buildout, and each has its own unique domain so your brokerage is able to track your own site analytics.
Buildout also powers plugins for your brokerage's website where you can feature your listings. Your team has the convenience of selecting which of your properties appear within the plugin and are featured on your site. When visitors click on an individual property, they’re led to that listing’s own site within your brokerage’s domain so you can keep and track your own SEO.
And finally, to get your listings into your target’s email inboxes, you can send one of the more than 75,000 single or multi-property emails that are created in Buildout in a year using your brokerage’s own branding. This way, you can easily promote your brokerage’s network of properties directly to the right buyers.
What does having the power to draft these materials in less time mean for your brokerage and its brand?
Buildout in action: Create a flyer with Buildout
With Buildout, all the marketing materials your brokers need can be created in minutes by any member of your marketing team.
These are the steps to take to create a flyer with Buildout.
- Input all of the data on the property at hand into Buildout.
- Go to the individual property listing page, click the blue “New Document” button and select which flyer you’d like to create.
- Watch while the flyer automatically populates the information into your brand-aligned flyer.
- Move any images and add or remove information for that specific property.
- Hit save and share with your brokers.
Save time and scale your brand
Now that anyone on your team has the capability to quickly and reliably create beautiful and brand-consistent marketing materials, the number of those valuable pieces your brokerage puts out on a weekly basis will drastically increase, scaling your marketing efforts.
The whole package has been a real time saver not only with the database, but also with our custom flyers, email blasts and Craigslist access. –Kristina Konen, Former Director of Marketing, GPE Companies
Between the creation of 20- to 40-page proposals, OMs and numerous materials like flyers, brochures, emails and websites targeted toward potential buyers, your team can spend weeks getting your materials off the ground and a property officially on the market.
This delay in getting your client’s property in front of the right people means it’ll take longer to close the deal with a buyer. This also gives your competition more time to get their properties in front of those same buyers.
However, once your team is able to remove duplication of efforts and systematically create and update materials, the time spent from proposal to close will be a fraction of what it used to be. Now, your brokerage’s listings have a better chance of being set apart from the competition. As one Buildout customer says, “With Buildout, I went from creating materials in eight business days to eight business minutes.”
Some may worry that the increased rate at which materials are being produced and updated would create inconsistencies in information and client property branding across platforms. On the contrary: with Buildout, all of your documents are live links and are instantly updated across all platforms when you make changes to your listing. This ensures all materials remain consistent and accurate with the most up-to-date information.
Now that your marketing team has all but eliminated tedious material-creation tasks, you’ll have the opportunity to reinvest your time in marketing activities that help your firm achieve what matters most: growing its bottom line.
To learn more about how Buildout can help your brokerage leverage its brand and time saved creating materials to scale, contact us today.