The Pros and Cons of IDX

Why High-Performance Teams Are Moving Beyond Basic Listing Display

In 2025’s hyper-competitive real estate market, displaying MLS listings on your website isn’t enough. With the average buyer spending less than two minutes on real estate websites and the dominance of national portals like Zillow, high-performance teams need to rethink their approach to online lead generation and nurture.

Key Takeaways

  • Traditional IDX creates a fragmented experience between MLS data and consumer-friendly search
  • Most buyers eventually leave IDX websites for national portals, risking agent relationships
  • Modern platforms combine powerful search with automated lead nurture
  • Advanced tracking reveals client preferences and buying signals
  • Today’s buyers expect a neutral, comprehensive search experience

The Traditional IDX Approach: A System Showing Its Age

Internet Data Exchange (IDX) was conceived 20 years ago with a noble goal: leveling the playing field by allowing brokers and agents to share listings on their websites. The idea was simple – give every agent the ability to display MLS listings, and they could compete more effectively for leads.

But the world has changed dramatically since then. Recent industry shifts suggest that traditional IDX no longer serves the evolving needs of modern real estate teams. As major brokerages across the country reassess their digital strategies, it’s becoming clear that the conventional approach to online listing display needs to evolve.

Why Traditional IDX Falls Short Today

The fundamental challenge with IDX isn’t just technical – it’s strategic. When buyers spend less than two minutes on real estate websites, simply displaying listings isn’t enough to capture and hold their attention. Even more concerning, we hear from agents all the time that consumers often revert to national portals for their home search, seeking what they perceive as a more neutral, unbiased experience.

This creates multiple challenges for agents. First, they lose visibility into their clients’ search behavior and preferences. Second, their clients become exposed to competing agents on these portals. Finally, the limited search capabilities of most IDX systems often force agents to fall back on MLS searches for specific client needs – creating a disjointed experience at the exact moment when engagement is most critical.

The technical challenges compound these strategic limitations. Teams invest anywhere from $54 to $899 monthly for basic IDX implementation yet struggle with fundamental issues:

  • Limited access to hyper-local search criteria available in the MLS
  • Lack of insight into client preferences and behavior
  • No protection against losing clients to competing agents
  • Fragmented experience between IDX, MLS, and CRM systems

The Modern Lead Nurture Imperative

Today’s real estate market demands a solution combining the best of both worlds: the MLS’s comprehensive data and search capabilities with the intuitive, consumer-friendly experience of national portals. 

High-performance teams need systems that engage website visitors and provide deep insights into client preferences and behavior.

The most successful teams understand that every lead represents potential future business – but only if you can maintain meaningful engagement over time. This requires sophisticated systems that can track behavior, identify opportunities, and automate follow-up at scale while providing clients with the neutral, comprehensive search experience they expect.

A Strategic Alternative: Modern Lead Nurture Platforms

Forward-thinking teams are discovering that comprehensive lead nurture platforms offer a more effective approach. These systems combine MLS-level search capabilities with a consumer-grade interface, giving clients the expected experience while providing agents with complete visibility and control.

The key difference lies in the depth of engagement. While traditional IDX passively displays listings, modern platforms provide insights into what clients like, don’t like, and what specific features attract their attention. This allows agents to understand client needs better and provide more targeted, valuable service.

Making the Strategic Choice

The decision to move beyond traditional IDX isn’t just about technology – it’s about business growth. Consider how many leads you lose due to a lack of systematic follow-up. What would converting even 10% more of your existing database mean to your business? These are the questions that should drive your technology decisions.

Looking Forward

The real estate industry is at a turning point. The traditional IDX model, built for a different era, is showing its age. High-performance teams need to stay ahead of this curve by investing in solutions that drive genuine engagement and conversion, not just basic property searches. The future belongs to those who can build lasting relationships at scale – which requires moving beyond traditional IDX’s limitations.

Clearing the Low-Inventory Logjam

How Your Castle Real Estate agents are unlocking “latent listings” by reducing seller uncertainty

THE LAST 12 MONTHS have been marked by unprecedented low inventory, with the pandemic and the ensuing economic uncertainty reinforcing a long term trend of dwindling listing opportunities. These market conditions have created fierce competition among agents, rapid innovation, and new winners and losers.

Across the board, the winners, some of which have achieved their best sales performance on record, have differentiated themselves by doubling-down on their strengths, delivering value to consumers via their expert knowledge, business network, and problem-solving-driven service. This model delivers exactly what real estate consumers desire in a high-consequence, complex transaction in times on market volatility.

Unfortunately, what consumers often experience when interacting with status quo real estate marketing and tech is the exact opposite. Instead of being an extension of the personalized, consultative experience an agent should be providing, real estate marketing and technology throw consumers into an ecosystem of generic messages and one-size-fits-all experiences.

For brokerages and agents stuck in the status quo, the client’s poor experience can be especially damaging during a low-inventory-market, leading to systematic problems including lower marketing conversion, customer attrition and commission pressure.

It is the perfect timing, therefore, for all real estate professionals to carefully examine their marketing and technology strategies to ensure that consumers are getting meaningful, personalized value.

This commitment to elevate and personalize the real estate experience is not only a solution to clear the current low-inventory logjam, but a meaningful evolution in the real estate industry itself that will pave the way for its long-term future.

Personalized vs Spray-and-Pray

Whether it’s a postcard farm, Facebook advertising, or a portal advertisement, spray-and-pray marketing methods target a loosely defined audience with a lowest-common-denominator message. Inevitably, this approach — while scalable — does little to communicate why a potential client should work with a particular agent or brand. In fact, with the exception of some of the most sophisticated, highest volume teams, most agents derive an exceedingly small portion of their business through these methods.

The tech strategy for brokerages and agents fares even worse, with many firms simply resigned to the fact that their clients will use national portals and other 3rd party controlled technologies.

It goes without saying that this provides no benefit to the brokerage and agent, and it offers a poorly personalized experience for the consumer.

Contrast these realities to what actually generates the bulk of an agent’s business: sphere of influence. When working with their sphere of influence, communication with a potential client is, by default, personalized, consultative and actionable. Agents actively provide customized data and analysis, and solve problems specific to a particular client and market. Although highly manual, these activities are what lead to high conversion rates and customer satisfaction.

In low-inventory conditions, spray-and-pray marketing and a resigned tech strategy become even less effective as competition amongst listing agents intensifies.

Even personalized, SOI tactics can get even more time-consuming as seller confidence wavers in response to increased market uncertainty and risk.

Question is, how do you create a personalized yet scalable experience for your clients?

Meaningful Personalization That’s Not Just for Show

Many existing examples of personalization have been superficial and without measurable value. Handwriting a client’s name in a mass-mailer or asking about a family member in an email are perhaps thoughtful gestures, but they don’t take advantage of the deep potential that exists in thoughtful customization of marketing and technology experiences.


Meaningful personalization starts with understanding the problems a particular client faces, whether it’s their particular property, neighborhood, financial considerations or family situation. These inputs will shape the solutions that both marketing messages and technologies should deliver, and maximizes the chances a client will respond positively.

In the current low-inventory market, any number of concerns could be top of mind for a potential home seller. Is it risky to put my home on the market? What price can I get? Will I be able to find or afford a new place to live?

These problems can be addressed in generalizations, but the more specific the solutions are, the more receptive a potential seller will be. Arguably, if more potential sellers could have their problems addressed in a personalized manner, it would have a positive effect on the market as a whole as anxieties ease and confidence grows.

Meaningful personalization will always require a human-element provided by an agent, but it also requires data and tools to deliver the rigor. That’s where RealScout’s latest product release becomes a key factor.

Scalable, Personalized Problem Solving for a Low-Inventory Market

In a low inventory market, every home seller wants extra assurance that putting a home on the market won’t be overly risky, the price attractive and the process simple. Providing personalized answers to every potential seller can seem like a daunting undertaking. Not only does the work seem highly manual, often the appropriate tools and relevant data are unavailable to both real estate professionals and consumers.

While a solution like the CMA is a good retrospective tool to illustrate how listings will perform, they can be unreliable during periods of low-inventory with reduced sample size and increased price volatility.

Brokerages can provide more real-time insights through office meetings, in-house data-collection and analysis, but this can be difficult to implement and even harder to maintain through agent and client participation.

There are, however, platforms specifically designed to gain insights into serious, real-time, agent-represented demand in a particular market. RealScout’s network of brokerage and agents use RealScout’s home search platform with their clients, setting up MLS-grade search alerts. This preference and behavioral data is then anonymized and securely presented to listing agents as a way for them to assist their clients.

Market Alerts, for example, present a heatmap of homebuyer demand in a particular area, and how that demand has shifted over time.

It’s a powerful tool to keep potential sellers informed of current market demand in a very specific and relevant geographic area.

Test-the-Market takes this a step further by allowing listing agents to simulate a listing without actually putting a property on the market. Insert the basic parameters of a listing, and RealScout will provide a real-time measure of how many RealScout homebuyers would match with that listing. Furthermore, it calculates how incremental increases or decreases in listing price affects the number of matching buyers, enabling listing agents to present both an estimate for homebuyer demand as well as a data-driven pricing strategy for a particular listing.

Finally, the Reverse Prospecting feature allows listing agents to identify and reach out to buyer agents with matching homebuyers, once a listing is put on the market. This ability provides an additional, highly targeted marketing channel to the listing agent, something they can explain to potential sellers to reassure them that there are many avenues to finding the perfect buyer.

Tools, like the ones provided by RealScout, help listing agents problem-solve for their potential clients without extensive time investment, even before a listing agreement is in place. This level of personalized value-delivery is exactly what’s needed is winning competitive listings, especially during a low-inventory environment.

A Paradigm Shift in Brokering Deals

The data-driven approach to personalized problem-solving naturally extrapolates to a bigger paradigm shift in how real estate deals are brokered.

Since RealScout-powered brokerages and agents understand their clients better and at scale, that knowledge can be used not only for providing expert advice, but also for matching buyers and sellers.

The traditional model of putting a listing on the MLS and waiting for buyers to raise their hands to express interest is an acceptably effective, if limiting method, of brokering deals. By definition, this status quo broadcast model of brokering deals applies to 2 primary groups, buyers and sellers with active listings. A deeper look reveals, however, that there’s a subtle — yet critical — asymmetry to this picture: while both serious and potential buyers can participate in this model (since listings are available to anyone), only sellers with active listings (the serious ones) can participate.

A data-driven, personalized strategy, championed by companies like RealScout, enables the excluded category of potential sellers to participate in the market in a more meaningful way.

In the same way that potential buyers can see what sort of inventory is available before they decide to jump into the market, potential sellers can preview the demand before they decide to go through the more arduous and costly process of listing their property.

Especially in a market where listings are few and far between, unlocking latent listings through broader participation can be a real boon for listing brokerages and agents. This also helps potential sellers, by allowing them to reduce the uncertainty of listing their home, not to mention buyers in the market, who will enjoy the benefits of having more inventory.

A Personalized Future

The low inventory market that we face today, personalized problem-solving is the approach that creates the transparency and confidence needed to clear the logjam. Along the way, buyers, sellers, agents and brokerages benefit through more efficient, effective workflows that lead to better outcomes for every party.

Beyond that, a commitment to better understanding clients will empower brokerages and agents to truly play the role of ‘broker,’ match-making perfect buyer-seller pairs while increasing market participation.

In fact, adopting a marketing and technology strategy that focuses on personalization is a back-to-basics moment for the industry. It seeks to turn back the years of erosion caused by impersonal online real estate marketing and technologies, and build a modern client experience that humanizes the transaction without sacrificing substance. It amplifies the value of brokerages and agents by doubling down on their strengths.

It’s a vision of the future that expands the real estate industry as a whole, and not one that disrupts it.

Clearing the Low-Inventory Logjam

How Parks Realty agents are unlocking “latent listings” by reducing seller uncertainty

THE LAST 12 MONTHS have been marked by unprecedented low inventory, with the pandemic and the ensuing economic uncertainty reinforcing a long term trend of dwindling listing opportunities. These market conditions have created fierce competition among agents, rapid innovation, and new winners and losers.

Across the board, the winners, some of which have achieved their best sales performance on record, have differentiated themselves by doubling-down on their strengths, delivering value to consumers via their expert knowledge, business network, and problem-solving-driven service. This model delivers exactly what real estate consumers desire in a high-consequence, complex transaction in times on market volatility.

Unfortunately, what consumers often experience when interacting with status quo real estate marketing and tech is the exact opposite. Instead of being an extension of the personalized, consultative experience an agent should be providing, real estate marketing and technology throw consumers into an ecosystem of generic messages and one-size-fits-all experiences.

For brokerages and agents stuck in the status quo, the client’s poor experience can be especially damaging during a low-inventory-market, leading to systematic problems including lower marketing conversion, customer attrition and commission pressure.

It is the perfect timing, therefore, for all real estate professionals to carefully examine their marketing and technology strategies to ensure that consumers are getting meaningful, personalized value.

This commitment to elevate and personalize the real estate experience is not only a solution to clear the current low-inventory logjam, but a meaningful evolution in the real estate industry itself that will pave the way for its long-term future.

Personalized vs Spray-and-Pray

Whether it’s a postcard farm, Facebook advertising, or a portal advertisement, spray-and-pray marketing methods target a loosely defined audience with a lowest-common-denominator message. Inevitably, this approach — while scalable — does little to communicate why a potential client should work with a particular agent or brand. In fact, with the exception of some of the most sophisticated, highest volume teams, most agents derive an exceedingly small portion of their business through these methods.

The tech strategy for brokerages and agents fares even worse, with many firms simply resigned to the fact that their clients will use national portals and other 3rd party controlled technologies.

It goes without saying that this provides no benefit to the brokerage and agent, and it offers a poorly personalized experience for the consumer.

Contrast these realities to what actually generates the bulk of an agent’s business: sphere of influence. When working with their sphere of influence, communication with a potential client is, by default, personalized, consultative and actionable. Agents actively provide customized data and analysis, and solve problems specific to a particular client and market. Although highly manual, these activities are what lead to high conversion rates and customer satisfaction.

In low-inventory conditions, spray-and-pray marketing and a resigned tech strategy become even less effective as competition amongst listing agents intensifies.

Even personalized, SOI tactics can get even more time-consuming as seller confidence wavers in response to increased market uncertainty and risk.

Question is, how do you create a personalized yet scalable experience for your clients?

Meaningful Personalization That’s Not Just for Show

Many existing examples of personalization have been superficial and without measurable value. Handwriting a client’s name in a mass-mailer or asking about a family member in an email are perhaps thoughtful gestures, but they don’t take advantage of the deep potential that exists in thoughtful customization of marketing and technology experiences.


Meaningful personalization starts with understanding the problems a particular client faces, whether it’s their particular property, neighborhood, financial considerations or family situation. These inputs will shape the solutions that both marketing messages and technologies should deliver, and maximizes the chances a client will respond positively.

In the current low-inventory market, any number of concerns could be top of mind for a potential home seller. Is it risky to put my home on the market? What price can I get? Will I be able to find or afford a new place to live?

These problems can be addressed in generalizations, but the more specific the solutions are, the more receptive a potential seller will be. Arguably, if more potential sellers could have their problems addressed in a personalized manner, it would have a positive effect on the market as a whole as anxieties ease and confidence grows.

Meaningful personalization will always require a human-element provided by an agent, but it also requires data and tools to deliver the rigor. That’s where RealScout’s latest product release becomes a key factor.

Scalable, Personalized Problem Solving for a Low-Inventory Market

In a low inventory market, every home seller wants extra assurance that putting a home on the market won’t be overly risky, the price attractive and the process simple. Providing personalized answers to every potential seller can seem like a daunting undertaking. Not only does the work seem highly manual, often the appropriate tools and relevant data are unavailable to both real estate professionals and consumers.

While a solution like the CMA is a good retrospective tool to illustrate how listings will perform, they can be unreliable during periods of low-inventory with reduced sample size and increased price volatility.

Brokerages can provide more real-time insights through office meetings, in-house data-collection and analysis, but this can be difficult to implement and even harder to maintain through agent and client participation.

There are, however, platforms specifically designed to gain insights into serious, real-time, agent-represented demand in a particular market. RealScout’s network of brokerage and agents use RealScout’s home search platform with their clients, setting up MLS-grade search alerts. This preference and behavioral data is then anonymized and securely presented to listing agents as a way for them to assist their clients.

Market Alerts, for example, present a heatmap of homebuyer demand in a particular area, and how that demand has shifted over time.

It’s a powerful tool to keep potential sellers informed of current market demand in a very specific and relevant geographic area.

Test-the-Market takes this a step further by allowing listing agents to simulate a listing without actually putting a property on the market. Insert the basic parameters of a listing, and RealScout will provide a real-time measure of how many RealScout homebuyers would match with that listing. Furthermore, it calculates how incremental increases or decreases in listing price affects the number of matching buyers, enabling listing agents to present both an estimate for homebuyer demand as well as a data-driven pricing strategy for a particular listing.

Finally, the Reverse Prospecting feature allows listing agents to identify and reach out to buyer agents with matching homebuyers, once a listing is put on the market. This ability provides an additional, highly targeted marketing channel to the listing agent, something they can explain to potential sellers to reassure them that there are many avenues to finding the perfect buyer.

Tools, like the ones provided by RealScout, help listing agents problem-solve for their potential clients without extensive time investment, even before a listing agreement is in place. This level of personalized value-delivery is exactly what’s needed is winning competitive listings, especially during a low-inventory environment.

A Paradigm Shift in Brokering Deals

The data-driven approach to personalized problem-solving naturally extrapolates to a bigger paradigm shift in how real estate deals are brokered.

Since RealScout-powered brokerages and agents understand their clients better and at scale, that knowledge can be used not only for providing expert advice, but also for matching buyers and sellers.

The traditional model of putting a listing on the MLS and waiting for buyers to raise their hands to express interest is an acceptably effective, if limiting method, of brokering deals. By definition, this status quo broadcast model of brokering deals applies to 2 primary groups, buyers and sellers with active listings. A deeper look reveals, however, that there’s a subtle — yet critical — asymmetry to this picture: while both serious and potential buyers can participate in this model (since listings are available to anyone), only sellers with active listings (the serious ones) can participate.

A data-driven, personalized strategy, championed by companies like RealScout, enables the excluded category of potential sellers to participate in the market in a more meaningful way.

In the same way that potential buyers can see what sort of inventory is available before they decide to jump into the market, potential sellers can preview the demand before they decide to go through the more arduous and costly process of listing their property.

Especially in a market where listings are few and far between, unlocking latent listings through broader participation can be a real boon for listing brokerages and agents. This also helps potential sellers, by allowing them to reduce the uncertainty of listing their home, not to mention buyers in the market, who will enjoy the benefits of having more inventory.

A Personalized Future

The low inventory market that we face today, personalized problem-solving is the approach that creates the transparency and confidence needed to clear the logjam. Along the way, buyers, sellers, agents and brokerages benefit through more efficient, effective workflows that lead to better outcomes for every party.

Beyond that, a commitment to better understanding clients will empower brokerages and agents to truly play the role of ‘broker,’ match-making perfect buyer-seller pairs while increasing market participation.

In fact, adopting a marketing and technology strategy that focuses on personalization is a back-to-basics moment for the industry. It seeks to turn back the years of erosion caused by impersonal online real estate marketing and technologies, and build a modern client experience that humanizes the transaction without sacrificing substance. It amplifies the value of brokerages and agents by doubling down on their strengths.

It’s a vision of the future that expands the real estate industry as a whole, and not one that disrupts it.

Clearing the Low-Inventory Logjam

How Gibson Sotheby’s International Realty agents are unlocking “latent listings” by reducing seller uncertainty

THE LAST 12 MONTHS have been marked by unprecedented low inventory, with the pandemic and the ensuing economic uncertainty reinforcing a long term trend of dwindling listing opportunities. These market conditions have created fierce competition among agents, rapid innovation, and new winners and losers.

Across the board, the winners, some of which have achieved their best sales performance on record, have differentiated themselves by doubling-down on their strengths, delivering value to consumers via their expert knowledge, business network, and problem-solving-driven service. This model delivers exactly what real estate consumers desire in a high-consequence, complex transaction in times on market volatility.

Unfortunately, what consumers often experience when interacting with status quo real estate marketing and tech is the exact opposite. Instead of being an extension of the personalized, consultative experience an agent should be providing, real estate marketing and technology throw consumers into an ecosystem of generic messages and one-size-fits-all experiences.

For brokerages and agents stuck in the status quo, the client’s poor experience can be especially damaging during a low-inventory-market, leading to systematic problems including lower marketing conversion, customer attrition and commission pressure.

It is the perfect timing, therefore, for all real estate professionals to carefully examine their marketing and technology strategies to ensure that consumers are getting meaningful, personalized value.

This commitment to elevate and personalize the real estate experience is not only a solution to clear the current low-inventory logjam, but a meaningful evolution in the real estate industry itself that will pave the way for its long-term future.

Personalized vs Spray-and-Pray

Whether it’s a postcard farm, Facebook advertising, or a portal advertisement, spray-and-pray marketing methods target a loosely defined audience with a lowest-common-denominator message. Inevitably, this approach — while scalable — does little to communicate why a potential client should work with a particular agent or brand. In fact, with the exception of some of the most sophisticated, highest volume teams, most agents derive an exceedingly small portion of their business through these methods.

The tech strategy for brokerages and agents fares even worse, with many firms simply resigned to the fact that their clients will use national portals and other 3rd party controlled technologies.

It goes without saying that this provides no benefit to the brokerage and agent, and it offers a poorly personalized experience for the consumer.

Contrast these realities to what actually generates the bulk of an agent’s business: sphere of influence. When working with their sphere of influence, communication with a potential client is, by default, personalized, consultative and actionable. Agents actively provide customized data and analysis, and solve problems specific to a particular client and market. Although highly manual, these activities are what lead to high conversion rates and customer satisfaction.

In low-inventory conditions, spray-and-pray marketing and a resigned tech strategy become even less effective as competition amongst listing agents intensifies.

Even personalized, SOI tactics can get even more time-consuming as seller confidence wavers in response to increased market uncertainty and risk.

Question is, how do you create a personalized yet scalable experience for your clients?

Meaningful Personalization That’s Not Just for Show

Many existing examples of personalization have been superficial and without measurable value. Handwriting a client’s name in a mass-mailer or asking about a family member in an email are perhaps thoughtful gestures, but they don’t take advantage of the deep potential that exists in thoughtful customization of marketing and technology experiences.


Meaningful personalization starts with understanding the problems a particular client faces, whether it’s their particular property, neighborhood, financial considerations or family situation. These inputs will shape the solutions that both marketing messages and technologies should deliver, and maximizes the chances a client will respond positively.

In the current low-inventory market, any number of concerns could be top of mind for a potential home seller. Is it risky to put my home on the market? What price can I get? Will I be able to find or afford a new place to live?

These problems can be addressed in generalizations, but the more specific the solutions are, the more receptive a potential seller will be. Arguably, if more potential sellers could have their problems addressed in a personalized manner, it would have a positive effect on the market as a whole as anxieties ease and confidence grows.

Meaningful personalization will always require a human-element provided by an agent, but it also requires data and tools to deliver the rigor. That’s where RealScout’s latest product release becomes a key factor.

Scalable, Personalized Problem Solving for a Low-Inventory Market

In a low inventory market, every home seller wants extra assurance that putting a home on the market won’t be overly risky, the price attractive and the process simple. Providing personalized answers to every potential seller can seem like a daunting undertaking. Not only does the work seem highly manual, often the appropriate tools and relevant data are unavailable to both real estate professionals and consumers.

While a solution like the CMA is a good retrospective tool to illustrate how listings will perform, they can be unreliable during periods of low-inventory with reduced sample size and increased price volatility.

Brokerages can provide more real-time insights through office meetings, in-house data-collection and analysis, but this can be difficult to implement and even harder to maintain through agent and client participation.

There are, however, platforms specifically designed to gain insights into serious, real-time, agent-represented demand in a particular market. RealScout’s network of brokerage and agents use RealScout’s home search platform with their clients, setting up MLS-grade search alerts. This preference and behavioral data is then anonymized and securely presented to listing agents as a way for them to assist their clients.

Market Alerts, for example, present a heatmap of homebuyer demand in a particular area, and how that demand has shifted over time.

It’s a powerful tool to keep potential sellers informed of current market demand in a very specific and relevant geographic area.

Test-the-Market takes this a step further by allowing listing agents to simulate a listing without actually putting a property on the market. Insert the basic parameters of a listing, and RealScout will provide a real-time measure of how many RealScout homebuyers would match with that listing. Furthermore, it calculates how incremental increases or decreases in listing price affects the number of matching buyers, enabling listing agents to present both an estimate for homebuyer demand as well as a data-driven pricing strategy for a particular listing.

Finally, the Reverse Prospecting feature allows listing agents to identify and reach out to buyer agents with matching homebuyers, once a listing is put on the market. This ability provides an additional, highly targeted marketing channel to the listing agent, something they can explain to potential sellers to reassure them that there are many avenues to finding the perfect buyer.

Tools, like the ones provided by RealScout, help listing agents problem-solve for their potential clients without extensive time investment, even before a listing agreement is in place. This level of personalized value-delivery is exactly what’s needed is winning competitive listings, especially during a low-inventory environment.

A Paradigm Shift in Brokering Deals

The data-driven approach to personalized problem-solving naturally extrapolates to a bigger paradigm shift in how real estate deals are brokered.

Since RealScout-powered brokerages and agents understand their clients better and at scale, that knowledge can be used not only for providing expert advice, but also for matching buyers and sellers.

The traditional model of putting a listing on the MLS and waiting for buyers to raise their hands to express interest is an acceptably effective, if limiting method, of brokering deals. By definition, this status quo broadcast model of brokering deals applies to 2 primary groups, buyers and sellers with active listings. A deeper look reveals, however, that there’s a subtle — yet critical — asymmetry to this picture: while both serious and potential buyers can participate in this model (since listings are available to anyone), only sellers with active listings (the serious ones) can participate.

A data-driven, personalized strategy, championed by companies like RealScout, enables the excluded category of potential sellers to participate in the market in a more meaningful way.

In the same way that potential buyers can see what sort of inventory is available before they decide to jump into the market, potential sellers can preview the demand before they decide to go through the more arduous and costly process of listing their property.

Especially in a market where listings are few and far between, unlocking latent listings through broader participation can be a real boon for listing brokerages and agents. This also helps potential sellers, by allowing them to reduce the uncertainty of listing their home, not to mention buyers in the market, who will enjoy the benefits of having more inventory.

A Personalized Future

The low inventory market that we face today, personalized problem-solving is the approach that creates the transparency and confidence needed to clear the logjam. Along the way, buyers, sellers, agents and brokerages benefit through more efficient, effective workflows that lead to better outcomes for every party.

Beyond that, a commitment to better understanding clients will empower brokerages and agents to truly play the role of ‘broker,’ match-making perfect buyer-seller pairs while increasing market participation.

In fact, adopting a marketing and technology strategy that focuses on personalization is a back-to-basics moment for the industry. It seeks to turn back the years of erosion caused by impersonal online real estate marketing and technologies, and build a modern client experience that humanizes the transaction without sacrificing substance. It amplifies the value of brokerages and agents by doubling down on their strengths.

It’s a vision of the future that expands the real estate industry as a whole, and not one that disrupts it.

Clearing the Low-Inventory Logjam

How Seven Gables agents are unlocking “latent listings” by reducing seller uncertainty

THE LAST 12 MONTHS have been marked by unprecedented low inventory, with the pandemic and the ensuing economic uncertainty reinforcing a long term trend of dwindling listing opportunities. These market conditions have created fierce competition among agents, rapid innovation, and new winners and losers.

Across the board, the winners, some of which have achieved their best sales performance on record, have differentiated themselves by doubling-down on their strengths, delivering value to consumers via their expert knowledge, business network, and problem-solving-driven service. This model delivers exactly what real estate consumers desire in a high-consequence, complex transaction in times on market volatility.

Unfortunately, what consumers often experience when interacting with status quo real estate marketing and tech is the exact opposite. Instead of being an extension of the personalized, consultative experience an agent should be providing, real estate marketing and technology throw consumers into an ecosystem of generic messages and one-size-fits-all experiences.

For brokerages and agents stuck in the status quo, the client’s poor experience can be especially damaging during a low-inventory-market, leading to systematic problems including lower marketing conversion, customer attrition and commission pressure.

It is the perfect timing, therefore, for all real estate professionals to carefully examine their marketing and technology strategies to ensure that consumers are getting meaningful, personalized value.

This commitment to elevate and personalize the real estate experience is not only a solution to clear the current low-inventory logjam, but a meaningful evolution in the real estate industry itself that will pave the way for its long-term future.

Personalized vs Spray-and-Pray

Whether it’s a postcard farm, Facebook advertising, or a portal advertisement, spray-and-pray marketing methods target a loosely defined audience with a lowest-common-denominator message. Inevitably, this approach — while scalable — does little to communicate why a potential client should work with a particular agent or brand. In fact, with the exception of some of the most sophisticated, highest volume teams, most agents derive an exceedingly small portion of their business through these methods.

The tech strategy for brokerages and agents fares even worse, with many firms simply resigned to the fact that their clients will use national portals and other 3rd party controlled technologies.

It goes without saying that this provides no benefit to the brokerage and agent, and it offers a poorly personalized experience for the consumer.

Contrast these realities to what actually generates the bulk of an agent’s business: sphere of influence. When working with their sphere of influence, communication with a potential client is, by default, personalized, consultative and actionable. Agents actively provide customized data and analysis, and solve problems specific to a particular client and market. Although highly manual, these activities are what lead to high conversion rates and customer satisfaction.

In low-inventory conditions, spray-and-pray marketing and a resigned tech strategy become even less effective as competition amongst listing agents intensifies.

Even personalized, SOI tactics can get even more time-consuming as seller confidence wavers in response to increased market uncertainty and risk.

Question is, how do you create a personalized yet scalable experience for your clients?

Meaningful Personalization That’s Not Just for Show

Many existing examples of personalization have been superficial and without measurable value. Handwriting a client’s name in a mass-mailer or asking about a family member in an email are perhaps thoughtful gestures, but they don’t take advantage of the deep potential that exists in thoughtful customization of marketing and technology experiences.


Meaningful personalization starts with understanding the problems a particular client faces, whether it’s their particular property, neighborhood, financial considerations or family situation. These inputs will shape the solutions that both marketing messages and technologies should deliver, and maximizes the chances a client will respond positively.

In the current low-inventory market, any number of concerns could be top of mind for a potential home seller. Is it risky to put my home on the market? What price can I get? Will I be able to find or afford a new place to live?

These problems can be addressed in generalizations, but the more specific the solutions are, the more receptive a potential seller will be. Arguably, if more potential sellers could have their problems addressed in a personalized manner, it would have a positive effect on the market as a whole as anxieties ease and confidence grows.

Meaningful personalization will always require a human-element provided by an agent, but it also requires data and tools to deliver the rigor. That’s where RealScout’s latest product release becomes a key factor.

Scalable, Personalized Problem Solving for a Low-Inventory Market

In a low inventory market, every home seller wants extra assurance that putting a home on the market won’t be overly risky, the price attractive and the process simple. Providing personalized answers to every potential seller can seem like a daunting undertaking. Not only does the work seem highly manual, often the appropriate tools and relevant data are unavailable to both real estate professionals and consumers.

While a solution like the CMA is a good retrospective tool to illustrate how listings will perform, they can be unreliable during periods of low-inventory with reduced sample size and increased price volatility.

Brokerages can provide more real-time insights through office meetings, in-house data-collection and analysis, but this can be difficult to implement and even harder to maintain through agent and client participation.

There are, however, platforms specifically designed to gain insights into serious, real-time, agent-represented demand in a particular market. RealScout’s network of brokerage and agents use RealScout’s home search platform with their clients, setting up MLS-grade search alerts. This preference and behavioral data is then anonymized and securely presented to listing agents as a way for them to assist their clients.

Market Alerts, for example, present a heatmap of homebuyer demand in a particular area, and how that demand has shifted over time.

It’s a powerful tool to keep potential sellers informed of current market demand in a very specific and relevant geographic area.

Test-the-Market takes this a step further by allowing listing agents to simulate a listing without actually putting a property on the market. Insert the basic parameters of a listing, and RealScout will provide a real-time measure of how many RealScout homebuyers would match with that listing. Furthermore, it calculates how incremental increases or decreases in listing price affects the number of matching buyers, enabling listing agents to present both an estimate for homebuyer demand as well as a data-driven pricing strategy for a particular listing.

Finally, the Reverse Prospecting feature allows listing agents to identify and reach out to buyer agents with matching homebuyers, once a listing is put on the market. This ability provides an additional, highly targeted marketing channel to the listing agent, something they can explain to potential sellers to reassure them that there are many avenues to finding the perfect buyer.

Tools, like the ones provided by RealScout, help listing agents problem-solve for their potential clients without extensive time investment, even before a listing agreement is in place. This level of personalized value-delivery is exactly what’s needed is winning competitive listings, especially during a low-inventory environment.

A Paradigm Shift in Brokering Deals

The data-driven approach to personalized problem-solving naturally extrapolates to a bigger paradigm shift in how real estate deals are brokered.

Since RealScout-powered brokerages and agents understand their clients better and at scale, that knowledge can be used not only for providing expert advice, but also for matching buyers and sellers.

The traditional model of putting a listing on the MLS and waiting for buyers to raise their hands to express interest is an acceptably effective, if limiting method, of brokering deals. By definition, this status quo broadcast model of brokering deals applies to 2 primary groups, buyers and sellers with active listings. A deeper look reveals, however, that there’s a subtle — yet critical — asymmetry to this picture: while both serious and potential buyers can participate in this model (since listings are available to anyone), only sellers with active listings (the serious ones) can participate.

A data-driven, personalized strategy, championed by companies like RealScout, enables the excluded category of potential sellers to participate in the market in a more meaningful way.

In the same way that potential buyers can see what sort of inventory is available before they decide to jump into the market, potential sellers can preview the demand before they decide to go through the more arduous and costly process of listing their property.

Especially in a market where listings are few and far between, unlocking latent listings through broader participation can be a real boon for listing brokerages and agents. This also helps potential sellers, by allowing them to reduce the uncertainty of listing their home, not to mention buyers in the market, who will enjoy the benefits of having more inventory.

A Personalized Future

The low inventory market that we face today, personalized problem-solving is the approach that creates the transparency and confidence needed to clear the logjam. Along the way, buyers, sellers, agents and brokerages benefit through more efficient, effective workflows that lead to better outcomes for every party.

Beyond that, a commitment to better understanding clients will empower brokerages and agents to truly play the role of ‘broker,’ match-making perfect buyer-seller pairs while increasing market participation.

In fact, adopting a marketing and technology strategy that focuses on personalization is a back-to-basics moment for the industry. It seeks to turn back the years of erosion caused by impersonal online real estate marketing and technologies, and build a modern client experience that humanizes the transaction without sacrificing substance. It amplifies the value of brokerages and agents by doubling down on their strengths.

It’s a vision of the future that expands the real estate industry as a whole, and not one that disrupts it.

Schedule Demo

Clearing the Low-Inventory Logjam

How Jack Conway & Company, Inc. agents are unlocking “latent listings” by reducing seller uncertainty

THE LAST 12 MONTHS have been marked by unprecedented low inventory, with the pandemic and the ensuing economic uncertainty reinforcing a long term trend of dwindling listing opportunities. These market conditions have created fierce competition among agents, rapid innovation, and new winners and losers.

Across the board, the winners, some of which have achieved their best sales performance on record, have differentiated themselves by doubling-down on their strengths, delivering value to consumers via their expert knowledge, business network, and problem-solving-driven service. This model delivers exactly what real estate consumers desire in a high-consequence, complex transaction in times on market volatility.

Unfortunately, what consumers often experience when interacting with status quo real estate marketing and tech is the exact opposite. Instead of being an extension of the personalized, consultative experience an agent should be providing, real estate marketing and technology throw consumers into an ecosystem of generic messages and one-size-fits-all experiences.

For brokerages and agents stuck in the status quo, the client’s poor experience can be especially damaging during a low-inventory-market, leading to systematic problems including lower marketing conversion, customer attrition and commission pressure.

It is the perfect timing, therefore, for all real estate professionals to carefully examine their marketing and technology strategies to ensure that consumers are getting meaningful, personalized value.

This commitment to elevate and personalize the real estate experience is not only a solution to clear the current low-inventory logjam, but a meaningful evolution in the real estate industry itself that will pave the way for its long-term future.

Personalized vs Spray-and-Pray

Whether it’s a postcard farm, Facebook advertising, or a portal advertisement, spray-and-pray marketing methods target a loosely defined audience with a lowest-common-denominator message. Inevitably, this approach — while scalable — does little to communicate why a potential client should work with a particular agent or brand. In fact, with the exception of some of the most sophisticated, highest volume teams, most agents derive an exceedingly small portion of their business through these methods.

The tech strategy for brokerages and agents fares even worse, with many firms simply resigned to the fact that their clients will use national portals and other 3rd party controlled technologies.

It goes without saying that this provides no benefit to the brokerage and agent, and it offers a poorly personalized experience for the consumer.

Contrast these realities to what actually generates the bulk of an agent’s business: sphere of influence. When working with their sphere of influence, communication with a potential client is, by default, personalized, consultative and actionable. Agents actively provide customized data and analysis, and solve problems specific to a particular client and market. Although highly manual, these activities are what lead to high conversion rates and customer satisfaction.

In low-inventory conditions, spray-and-pray marketing and a resigned tech strategy become even less effective as competition amongst listing agents intensifies.

Even personalized, SOI tactics can get even more time-consuming as seller confidence wavers in response to increased market uncertainty and risk.

Question is, how do you create a personalized yet scalable experience for your clients?

Meaningful Personalization That’s Not Just for Show

Many existing examples of personalization have been superficial and without measurable value. Handwriting a client’s name in a mass-mailer or asking about a family member in an email are perhaps thoughtful gestures, but they don’t take advantage of the deep potential that exists in thoughtful customization of marketing and technology experiences.


Meaningful personalization starts with understanding the problems a particular client faces, whether it’s their particular property, neighborhood, financial considerations or family situation. These inputs will shape the solutions that both marketing messages and technologies should deliver, and maximizes the chances a client will respond positively.

In the current low-inventory market, any number of concerns could be top of mind for a potential home seller. Is it risky to put my home on the market? What price can I get? Will I be able to find or afford a new place to live?

These problems can be addressed in generalizations, but the more specific the solutions are, the more receptive a potential seller will be. Arguably, if more potential sellers could have their problems addressed in a personalized manner, it would have a positive effect on the market as a whole as anxieties ease and confidence grows.

Meaningful personalization will always require a human-element provided by an agent, but it also requires data and tools to deliver the rigor. That’s where RealScout’s latest product release becomes a key factor.

Scalable, Personalized Problem Solving for a Low-Inventory Market

In a low inventory market, every home seller wants extra assurance that putting a home on the market won’t be overly risky, the price attractive and the process simple. Providing personalized answers to every potential seller can seem like a daunting undertaking. Not only does the work seem highly manual, often the appropriate tools and relevant data are unavailable to both real estate professionals and consumers.

While a solution like the CMA is a good retrospective tool to illustrate how listings will perform, they can be unreliable during periods of low-inventory with reduced sample size and increased price volatility.

Brokerages can provide more real-time insights through office meetings, in-house data-collection and analysis, but this can be difficult to implement and even harder to maintain through agent and client participation.

There are, however, platforms specifically designed to gain insights into serious, real-time, agent-represented demand in a particular market. RealScout’s network of brokerage and agents use RealScout’s home search platform with their clients, setting up MLS-grade search alerts. This preference and behavioral data is then anonymized and securely presented to listing agents as a way for them to assist their clients.

Market Alerts, for example, present a heatmap of homebuyer demand in a particular area, and how that demand has shifted over time.

It’s a powerful tool to keep potential sellers informed of current market demand in a very specific and relevant geographic area.

Test-the-Market takes this a step further by allowing listing agents to simulate a listing without actually putting a property on the market. Insert the basic parameters of a listing, and RealScout will provide a real-time measure of how many RealScout homebuyers would match with that listing. Furthermore, it calculates how incremental increases or decreases in listing price affects the number of matching buyers, enabling listing agents to present both an estimate for homebuyer demand as well as a data-driven pricing strategy for a particular listing.

Finally, the Reverse Prospecting feature allows listing agents to identify and reach out to buyer agents with matching homebuyers, once a listing is put on the market. This ability provides an additional, highly targeted marketing channel to the listing agent, something they can explain to potential sellers to reassure them that there are many avenues to finding the perfect buyer.

Tools, like the ones provided by RealScout, help listing agents problem-solve for their potential clients without extensive time investment, even before a listing agreement is in place. This level of personalized value-delivery is exactly what’s needed is winning competitive listings, especially during a low-inventory environment.

A Paradigm Shift in Brokering Deals

The data-driven approach to personalized problem-solving naturally extrapolates to a bigger paradigm shift in how real estate deals are brokered.

Since RealScout-powered brokerages and agents understand their clients better and at scale, that knowledge can be used not only for providing expert advice, but also for matching buyers and sellers.

The traditional model of putting a listing on the MLS and waiting for buyers to raise their hands to express interest is an acceptably effective, if limiting method, of brokering deals. By definition, this status quo broadcast model of brokering deals applies to 2 primary groups, buyers and sellers with active listings. A deeper look reveals, however, that there’s a subtle — yet critical — asymmetry to this picture: while both serious and potential buyers can participate in this model (since listings are available to anyone), only sellers with active listings (the serious ones) can participate.

A data-driven, personalized strategy, championed by companies like RealScout, enables the excluded category of potential sellers to participate in the market in a more meaningful way.

In the same way that potential buyers can see what sort of inventory is available before they decide to jump into the market, potential sellers can preview the demand before they decide to go through the more arduous and costly process of listing their property.

Especially in a market where listings are few and far between, unlocking latent listings through broader participation can be a real boon for listing brokerages and agents. This also helps potential sellers, by allowing them to reduce the uncertainty of listing their home, not to mention buyers in the market, who will enjoy the benefits of having more inventory.

A Personalized Future

The low inventory market that we face today, personalized problem-solving is the approach that creates the transparency and confidence needed to clear the logjam. Along the way, buyers, sellers, agents and brokerages benefit through more efficient, effective workflows that lead to better outcomes for every party.

Beyond that, a commitment to better understanding clients will empower brokerages and agents to truly play the role of ‘broker,’ match-making perfect buyer-seller pairs while increasing market participation.

In fact, adopting a marketing and technology strategy that focuses on personalization is a back-to-basics moment for the industry. It seeks to turn back the years of erosion caused by impersonal online real estate marketing and technologies, and build a modern client experience that humanizes the transaction without sacrificing substance. It amplifies the value of brokerages and agents by doubling down on their strengths.

It’s a vision of the future that expands the real estate industry as a whole, and not one that disrupts it.

Clearing the Low-Inventory Logjam

How Corcoran Global Living agents are unlocking “latent listings” by reducing seller uncertainty

THE LAST 12 MONTHS have been marked by unprecedented low inventory, with the pandemic and the ensuing economic uncertainty reinforcing a long term trend of dwindling listing opportunities. These market conditions have created fierce competition among agents, rapid innovation, and new winners and losers.

Across the board, the winners, some of which have achieved their best sales performance on record, have differentiated themselves by doubling-down on their strengths, delivering value to consumers via their expert knowledge, business network, and problem-solving-driven service. This model delivers exactly what real estate consumers desire in a high-consequence, complex transaction in times on market volatility.

Unfortunately, what consumers often experience when interacting with status quo real estate marketing and tech is the exact opposite. Instead of being an extension of the personalized, consultative experience an agent should be providing, real estate marketing and technology throw consumers into an ecosystem of generic messages and one-size-fits-all experiences.

For brokerages and agents stuck in the status quo, the client’s poor experience can be especially damaging during a low-inventory-market, leading to systematic problems including lower marketing conversion, customer attrition and commission pressure.

It is the perfect timing, therefore, for all real estate professionals to carefully examine their marketing and technology strategies to ensure that consumers are getting meaningful, personalized value.

This commitment to elevate and personalize the real estate experience is not only a solution to clear the current low-inventory logjam, but a meaningful evolution in the real estate industry itself that will pave the way for its long-term future.

Personalized vs Spray-and-Pray

Whether it’s a postcard farm, Facebook advertising, or a portal advertisement, spray-and-pray marketing methods target a loosely defined audience with a lowest-common-denominator message. Inevitably, this approach — while scalable — does little to communicate why a potential client should work with a particular agent or brand. In fact, with the exception of some of the most sophisticated, highest volume teams, most agents derive an exceedingly small portion of their business through these methods.

The tech strategy for brokerages and agents fares even worse, with many firms simply resigned to the fact that their clients will use national portals and other 3rd party controlled technologies.

It goes without saying that this provides no benefit to the brokerage and agent, and it offers a poorly personalized experience for the consumer.

Contrast these realities to what actually generates the bulk of an agent’s business: sphere of influence. When working with their sphere of influence, communication with a potential client is, by default, personalized, consultative and actionable. Agents actively provide customized data and analysis, and solve problems specific to a particular client and market. Although highly manual, these activities are what lead to high conversion rates and customer satisfaction.

In low-inventory conditions, spray-and-pray marketing and a resigned tech strategy become even less effective as competition amongst listing agents intensifies.

Even personalized, SOI tactics can get even more time-consuming as seller confidence wavers in response to increased market uncertainty and risk.

Question is, how do you create a personalized yet scalable experience for your clients?

Meaningful Personalization That’s Not Just for Show

Many existing examples of personalization have been superficial and without measurable value. Handwriting a client’s name in a mass-mailer or asking about a family member in an email are perhaps thoughtful gestures, but they don’t take advantage of the deep potential that exists in thoughtful customization of marketing and technology experiences.


Meaningful personalization starts with understanding the problems a particular client faces, whether it’s their particular property, neighborhood, financial considerations or family situation. These inputs will shape the solutions that both marketing messages and technologies should deliver, and maximizes the chances a client will respond positively.

In the current low-inventory market, any number of concerns could be top of mind for a potential home seller. Is it risky to put my home on the market? What price can I get? Will I be able to find or afford a new place to live?

These problems can be addressed in generalizations, but the more specific the solutions are, the more receptive a potential seller will be. Arguably, if more potential sellers could have their problems addressed in a personalized manner, it would have a positive effect on the market as a whole as anxieties ease and confidence grows.

Meaningful personalization will always require a human-element provided by an agent, but it also requires data and tools to deliver the rigor. That’s where RealScout’s latest product release becomes a key factor.

Scalable, Personalized Problem Solving for a Low-Inventory Market

In a low inventory market, every home seller wants extra assurance that putting a home on the market won’t be overly risky, the price attractive and the process simple. Providing personalized answers to every potential seller can seem like a daunting undertaking. Not only does the work seem highly manual, often the appropriate tools and relevant data are unavailable to both real estate professionals and consumers.

While a solution like the CMA is a good retrospective tool to illustrate how listings will perform, they can be unreliable during periods of low-inventory with reduced sample size and increased price volatility.

Brokerages can provide more real-time insights through office meetings, in-house data-collection and analysis, but this can be difficult to implement and even harder to maintain through agent and client participation.

There are, however, platforms specifically designed to gain insights into serious, real-time, agent-represented demand in a particular market. RealScout’s network of brokerage and agents use RealScout’s home search platform with their clients, setting up MLS-grade search alerts. This preference and behavioral data is then anonymized and securely presented to listing agents as a way for them to assist their clients.

Market Alerts, for example, present a heatmap of homebuyer demand in a particular area, and how that demand has shifted over time.

It’s a powerful tool to keep potential sellers informed of current market demand in a very specific and relevant geographic area.

Test-the-Market takes this a step further by allowing listing agents to simulate a listing without actually putting a property on the market. Insert the basic parameters of a listing, and RealScout will provide a real-time measure of how many RealScout homebuyers would match with that listing. Furthermore, it calculates how incremental increases or decreases in listing price affects the number of matching buyers, enabling listing agents to present both an estimate for homebuyer demand as well as a data-driven pricing strategy for a particular listing.

Finally, the Reverse Prospecting feature allows listing agents to identify and reach out to buyer agents with matching homebuyers, once a listing is put on the market. This ability provides an additional, highly targeted marketing channel to the listing agent, something they can explain to potential sellers to reassure them that there are many avenues to finding the perfect buyer.

Tools, like the ones provided by RealScout, help listing agents problem-solve for their potential clients without extensive time investment, even before a listing agreement is in place. This level of personalized value-delivery is exactly what’s needed is winning competitive listings, especially during a low-inventory environment.

A Paradigm Shift in Brokering Deals

The data-driven approach to personalized problem-solving naturally extrapolates to a bigger paradigm shift in how real estate deals are brokered.

Since RealScout-powered brokerages and agents understand their clients better and at scale, that knowledge can be used not only for providing expert advice, but also for matching buyers and sellers.

The traditional model of putting a listing on the MLS and waiting for buyers to raise their hands to express interest is an acceptably effective, if limiting method, of brokering deals. By definition, this status quo broadcast model of brokering deals applies to 2 primary groups, buyers and sellers with active listings. A deeper look reveals, however, that there’s a subtle — yet critical — asymmetry to this picture: while both serious and potential buyers can participate in this model (since listings are available to anyone), only sellers with active listings (the serious ones) can participate.

A data-driven, personalized strategy, championed by companies like RealScout, enables the excluded category of potential sellers to participate in the market in a more meaningful way.

In the same way that potential buyers can see what sort of inventory is available before they decide to jump into the market, potential sellers can preview the demand before they decide to go through the more arduous and costly process of listing their property.

Especially in a market where listings are few and far between, unlocking latent listings through broader participation can be a real boon for listing brokerages and agents. This also helps potential sellers, by allowing them to reduce the uncertainty of listing their home, not to mention buyers in the market, who will enjoy the benefits of having more inventory.

A Personalized Future

The low inventory market that we face today, personalized problem-solving is the approach that creates the transparency and confidence needed to clear the logjam. Along the way, buyers, sellers, agents and brokerages benefit through more efficient, effective workflows that lead to better outcomes for every party.

Beyond that, a commitment to better understanding clients will empower brokerages and agents to truly play the role of ‘broker,’ match-making perfect buyer-seller pairs while increasing market participation.

In fact, adopting a marketing and technology strategy that focuses on personalization is a back-to-basics moment for the industry. It seeks to turn back the years of erosion caused by impersonal online real estate marketing and technologies, and build a modern client experience that humanizes the transaction without sacrificing substance. It amplifies the value of brokerages and agents by doubling down on their strengths.

It’s a vision of the future that expands the real estate industry as a whole, and not one that disrupts it.

Clearing the Low-Inventory Logjam

How Engel & Völkers agents are unlocking “latent listings” by reducing seller uncertainty

THE LAST 12 MONTHS have been marked by unprecedented low inventory, with the pandemic and the ensuing economic uncertainty reinforcing a long term trend of dwindling listing opportunities. These market conditions have created fierce competition among agents, rapid innovation, and new winners and losers.

Across the board, the winners, some of which have achieved their best sales performance on record, have differentiated themselves by doubling-down on their strengths, delivering value to consumers via their expert knowledge, business network, and problem-solving-driven service. This model delivers exactly what real estate consumers desire in a high-consequence, complex transaction in times on market volatility.

Unfortunately, what consumers often experience when interacting with status quo real estate marketing and tech is the exact opposite. Instead of being an extension of the personalized, consultative experience an agent should be providing, real estate marketing and technology throw consumers into an ecosystem of generic messages and one-size-fits-all experiences.

For brokerages and agents stuck in the status quo, the client’s poor experience can be especially damaging during a low-inventory-market, leading to systematic problems including lower marketing conversion, customer attrition and commission pressure.

It is the perfect timing, therefore, for all real estate professionals to carefully examine their marketing and technology strategies to ensure that consumers are getting meaningful, personalized value.

This commitment to elevate and personalize the real estate experience is not only a solution to clear the current low-inventory logjam, but a meaningful evolution in the real estate industry itself that will pave the way for its long-term future.

Personalized vs Spray-and-Pray

Whether it’s a postcard farm, Facebook advertising, or a portal advertisement, spray-and-pray marketing methods target a loosely defined audience with a lowest-common-denominator message. Inevitably, this approach — while scalable — does little to communicate why a potential client should work with a particular agent or brand. In fact, with the exception of some of the most sophisticated, highest volume teams, most agents derive an exceedingly small portion of their business through these methods.

The tech strategy for brokerages and agents fares even worse, with many firms simply resigned to the fact that their clients will use national portals and other 3rd party controlled technologies.

It goes without saying that this provides no benefit to the brokerage and agent, and it offers a poorly personalized experience for the consumer.

Contrast these realities to what actually generates the bulk of an agent’s business: sphere of influence. When working with their sphere of influence, communication with a potential client is, by default, personalized, consultative and actionable. Agents actively provide customized data and analysis, and solve problems specific to a particular client and market. Although highly manual, these activities are what lead to high conversion rates and customer satisfaction.

In low-inventory conditions, spray-and-pray marketing and a resigned tech strategy become even less effective as competition amongst listing agents intensifies.

Even personalized, SOI tactics can get even more time-consuming as seller confidence wavers in response to increased market uncertainty and risk.

Question is, how do you create a personalized yet scalable experience for your clients?

Meaningful Personalization That’s Not Just for Show

Many existing examples of personalization have been superficial and without measurable value. Handwriting a client’s name in a mass-mailer or asking about a family member in an email are perhaps thoughtful gestures, but they don’t take advantage of the deep potential that exists in thoughtful customization of marketing and technology experiences.


Meaningful personalization starts with understanding the problems a particular client faces, whether it’s their particular property, neighborhood, financial considerations or family situation. These inputs will shape the solutions that both marketing messages and technologies should deliver, and maximizes the chances a client will respond positively.

In the current low-inventory market, any number of concerns could be top of mind for a potential home seller. Is it risky to put my home on the market? What price can I get? Will I be able to find or afford a new place to live?

These problems can be addressed in generalizations, but the more specific the solutions are, the more receptive a potential seller will be. Arguably, if more potential sellers could have their problems addressed in a personalized manner, it would have a positive effect on the market as a whole as anxieties ease and confidence grows.

Meaningful personalization will always require a human-element provided by an agent, but it also requires data and tools to deliver the rigor. That’s where RealScout’s latest product release becomes a key factor.

Scalable, Personalized Problem Solving for a Low-Inventory Market

In a low inventory market, every home seller wants extra assurance that putting a home on the market won’t be overly risky, the price attractive and the process simple. Providing personalized answers to every potential seller can seem like a daunting undertaking. Not only does the work seem highly manual, often the appropriate tools and relevant data are unavailable to both real estate professionals and consumers.

While a solution like the CMA is a good retrospective tool to illustrate how listings will perform, they can be unreliable during periods of low-inventory with reduced sample size and increased price volatility.

Brokerages can provide more real-time insights through office meetings, in-house data-collection and analysis, but this can be difficult to implement and even harder to maintain through agent and client participation.

There are, however, platforms specifically designed to gain insights into serious, real-time, agent-represented demand in a particular market. RealScout’s network of brokerage and agents use RealScout’s home search platform with their clients, setting up MLS-grade search alerts. This preference and behavioral data is then anonymized and securely presented to listing agents as a way for them to assist their clients.

Market Alerts, for example, present a heatmap of homebuyer demand in a particular area, and how that demand has shifted over time.

It’s a powerful tool to keep potential sellers informed of current market demand in a very specific and relevant geographic area.

Test-the-Market takes this a step further by allowing listing agents to simulate a listing without actually putting a property on the market. Insert the basic parameters of a listing, and RealScout will provide a real-time measure of how many RealScout homebuyers would match with that listing. Furthermore, it calculates how incremental increases or decreases in listing price affects the number of matching buyers, enabling listing agents to present both an estimate for homebuyer demand as well as a data-driven pricing strategy for a particular listing.

Finally, the Reverse Prospecting feature allows listing agents to identify and reach out to buyer agents with matching homebuyers, once a listing is put on the market. This ability provides an additional, highly targeted marketing channel to the listing agent, something they can explain to potential sellers to reassure them that there are many avenues to finding the perfect buyer.

Tools, like the ones provided by RealScout, help listing agents problem-solve for their potential clients without extensive time investment, even before a listing agreement is in place. This level of personalized value-delivery is exactly what’s needed is winning competitive listings, especially during a low-inventory environment.

A Paradigm Shift in Brokering Deals

The data-driven approach to personalized problem-solving naturally extrapolates to a bigger paradigm shift in how real estate deals are brokered.

Since RealScout-powered brokerages and agents understand their clients better and at scale, that knowledge can be used not only for providing expert advice, but also for matching buyers and sellers.

The traditional model of putting a listing on the MLS and waiting for buyers to raise their hands to express interest is an acceptably effective, if limiting method, of brokering deals. By definition, this status quo broadcast model of brokering deals applies to 2 primary groups, buyers and sellers with active listings. A deeper look reveals, however, that there’s a subtle — yet critical — asymmetry to this picture: while both serious and potential buyers can participate in this model (since listings are available to anyone), only sellers with active listings (the serious ones) can participate.

A data-driven, personalized strategy, championed by companies like RealScout, enables the excluded category of potential sellers to participate in the market in a more meaningful way.

In the same way that potential buyers can see what sort of inventory is available before they decide to jump into the market, potential sellers can preview the demand before they decide to go through the more arduous and costly process of listing their property.

Especially in a market where listings are few and far between, unlocking latent listings through broader participation can be a real boon for listing brokerages and agents. This also helps potential sellers, by allowing them to reduce the uncertainty of listing their home, not to mention buyers in the market, who will enjoy the benefits of having more inventory.

A Personalized Future

The low inventory market that we face today, personalized problem-solving is the approach that creates the transparency and confidence needed to clear the logjam. Along the way, buyers, sellers, agents and brokerages benefit through more efficient, effective workflows that lead to better outcomes for every party.

Beyond that, a commitment to better understanding clients will empower brokerages and agents to truly play the role of ‘broker,’ match-making perfect buyer-seller pairs while increasing market participation.

In fact, adopting a marketing and technology strategy that focuses on personalization is a back-to-basics moment for the industry. It seeks to turn back the years of erosion caused by impersonal online real estate marketing and technologies, and build a modern client experience that humanizes the transaction without sacrificing substance. It amplifies the value of brokerages and agents by doubling down on their strengths.

It’s a vision of the future that expands the real estate industry as a whole, and not one that disrupts it.

Clearing the Low-Inventory Logjam

How CENTURY 21 New Millennium agents are unlocking “latent listings” by reducing seller uncertainty

THE LAST 12 MONTHS have been marked by unprecedented low inventory, with the pandemic and the ensuing economic uncertainty reinforcing a long term trend of dwindling listing opportunities. These market conditions have created fierce competition among agents, rapid innovation, and new winners and losers.

Across the board, the winners, some of which have achieved their best sales performance on record, have differentiated themselves by doubling-down on their strengths, delivering value to consumers via their expert knowledge, business network, and problem-solving-driven service. This model delivers exactly what real estate consumers desire in a high-consequence, complex transaction in times on market volatility.

Unfortunately, what consumers often experience when interacting with status quo real estate marketing and tech is the exact opposite. Instead of being an extension of the personalized, consultative experience an agent should be providing, real estate marketing and technology throw consumers into an ecosystem of generic messages and one-size-fits-all experiences.

For brokerages and agents stuck in the status quo, the client’s poor experience can be especially damaging during a low-inventory-market, leading to systematic problems including lower marketing conversion, customer attrition and commission pressure.

It is the perfect timing, therefore, for all real estate professionals to carefully examine their marketing and technology strategies to ensure that consumers are getting meaningful, personalized value.

This commitment to elevate and personalize the real estate experience is not only a solution to clear the current low-inventory logjam, but a meaningful evolution in the real estate industry itself that will pave the way for its long-term future.

Personalized vs Spray-and-Pray

Whether it’s a postcard farm, Facebook advertising, or a portal advertisement, spray-and-pray marketing methods target a loosely defined audience with a lowest-common-denominator message. Inevitably, this approach — while scalable — does little to communicate why a potential client should work with a particular agent or brand. In fact, with the exception of some of the most sophisticated, highest volume teams, most agents derive an exceedingly small portion of their business through these methods.

The tech strategy for brokerages and agents fares even worse, with many firms simply resigned to the fact that their clients will use national portals and other 3rd party controlled technologies.

It goes without saying that this provides no benefit to the brokerage and agent, and it offers a poorly personalized experience for the consumer.

Contrast these realities to what actually generates the bulk of an agent’s business: sphere of influence. When working with their sphere of influence, communication with a potential client is, by default, personalized, consultative and actionable. Agents actively provide customized data and analysis, and solve problems specific to a particular client and market. Although highly manual, these activities are what lead to high conversion rates and customer satisfaction.

In low-inventory conditions, spray-and-pray marketing and a resigned tech strategy become even less effective as competition amongst listing agents intensifies.

Even personalized, SOI tactics can get even more time-consuming as seller confidence wavers in response to increased market uncertainty and risk.

Question is, how do you create a personalized yet scalable experience for your clients?

Meaningful Personalization That’s Not Just for Show

Many existing examples of personalization have been superficial and without measurable value. Handwriting a client’s name in a mass-mailer or asking about a family member in an email are perhaps thoughtful gestures, but they don’t take advantage of the deep potential that exists in thoughtful customization of marketing and technology experiences.


Meaningful personalization starts with understanding the problems a particular client faces, whether it’s their particular property, neighborhood, financial considerations or family situation. These inputs will shape the solutions that both marketing messages and technologies should deliver, and maximizes the chances a client will respond positively.

In the current low-inventory market, any number of concerns could be top of mind for a potential home seller. Is it risky to put my home on the market? What price can I get? Will I be able to find or afford a new place to live?

These problems can be addressed in generalizations, but the more specific the solutions are, the more receptive a potential seller will be. Arguably, if more potential sellers could have their problems addressed in a personalized manner, it would have a positive effect on the market as a whole as anxieties ease and confidence grows.

Meaningful personalization will always require a human-element provided by an agent, but it also requires data and tools to deliver the rigor. That’s where RealScout’s latest product release becomes a key factor.

Scalable, Personalized Problem Solving for a Low-Inventory Market

In a low inventory market, every home seller wants extra assurance that putting a home on the market won’t be overly risky, the price attractive and the process simple. Providing personalized answers to every potential seller can seem like a daunting undertaking. Not only does the work seem highly manual, often the appropriate tools and relevant data are unavailable to both real estate professionals and consumers.

While a solution like the CMA is a good retrospective tool to illustrate how listings will perform, they can be unreliable during periods of low-inventory with reduced sample size and increased price volatility.

Brokerages can provide more real-time insights through office meetings, in-house data-collection and analysis, but this can be difficult to implement and even harder to maintain through agent and client participation.

There are, however, platforms specifically designed to gain insights into serious, real-time, agent-represented demand in a particular market. RealScout’s network of brokerage and agents use RealScout’s home search platform with their clients, setting up MLS-grade search alerts. This preference and behavioral data is then anonymized and securely presented to listing agents as a way for them to assist their clients.

Market Alerts, for example, present a heatmap of homebuyer demand in a particular area, and how that demand has shifted over time.

It’s a powerful tool to keep potential sellers informed of current market demand in a very specific and relevant geographic area.

Test-the-Market takes this a step further by allowing listing agents to simulate a listing without actually putting a property on the market. Insert the basic parameters of a listing, and RealScout will provide a real-time measure of how many RealScout homebuyers would match with that listing. Furthermore, it calculates how incremental increases or decreases in listing price affects the number of matching buyers, enabling listing agents to present both an estimate for homebuyer demand as well as a data-driven pricing strategy for a particular listing.

Finally, the Reverse Prospecting feature allows listing agents to identify and reach out to buyer agents with matching homebuyers, once a listing is put on the market. This ability provides an additional, highly targeted marketing channel to the listing agent, something they can explain to potential sellers to reassure them that there are many avenues to finding the perfect buyer.

Tools, like the ones provided by RealScout, help listing agents problem-solve for their potential clients without extensive time investment, even before a listing agreement is in place. This level of personalized value-delivery is exactly what’s needed is winning competitive listings, especially during a low-inventory environment.

A Paradigm Shift in Brokering Deals

The data-driven approach to personalized problem-solving naturally extrapolates to a bigger paradigm shift in how real estate deals are brokered.

Since RealScout-powered brokerages and agents understand their clients better and at scale, that knowledge can be used not only for providing expert advice, but also for matching buyers and sellers.

The traditional model of putting a listing on the MLS and waiting for buyers to raise their hands to express interest is an acceptably effective, if limiting method, of brokering deals. By definition, this status quo broadcast model of brokering deals applies to 2 primary groups, buyers and sellers with active listings. A deeper look reveals, however, that there’s a subtle — yet critical — asymmetry to this picture: while both serious and potential buyers can participate in this model (since listings are available to anyone), only sellers with active listings (the serious ones) can participate.

A data-driven, personalized strategy, championed by companies like RealScout, enables the excluded category of potential sellers to participate in the market in a more meaningful way.

In the same way that potential buyers can see what sort of inventory is available before they decide to jump into the market, potential sellers can preview the demand before they decide to go through the more arduous and costly process of listing their property.

Especially in a market where listings are few and far between, unlocking latent listings through broader participation can be a real boon for listing brokerages and agents. This also helps potential sellers, by allowing them to reduce the uncertainty of listing their home, not to mention buyers in the market, who will enjoy the benefits of having more inventory.

A Personalized Future

The low inventory market that we face today, personalized problem-solving is the approach that creates the transparency and confidence needed to clear the logjam. Along the way, buyers, sellers, agents and brokerages benefit through more efficient, effective workflows that lead to better outcomes for every party.

Beyond that, a commitment to better understanding clients will empower brokerages and agents to truly play the role of ‘broker,’ match-making perfect buyer-seller pairs while increasing market participation.

In fact, adopting a marketing and technology strategy that focuses on personalization is a back-to-basics moment for the industry. It seeks to turn back the years of erosion caused by impersonal online real estate marketing and technologies, and build a modern client experience that humanizes the transaction without sacrificing substance. It amplifies the value of brokerages and agents by doubling down on their strengths.

It’s a vision of the future that expands the real estate industry as a whole, and not one that disrupts it.

How Brokerages Thrived Through the Biggest Power Shifts in 2020

RealScout partner Vanguard Properties

Vanguard Properties and other San Francisco brokerages built a unique tech ecosystem to forge a path for long-term success

RealScout partner Vanguard Properties
Illustration by Mirko Grisendi

Amid a tumultuous and unpredictable year, real estate’s playmakers innovated at record pace and deployed new strategies that are redefining the future of the industry. Blink, and you might have missed some of these seismic shifts this year:

  • Q1: the implementation of NAR’s Clear Cooperation policy, a response to walled-garden listing data strategies that rose to prominence in 2019.
  • Q2: the pandemic necessitated the deepening of remote home buying/selling, a massive acceleration of a trend already in motion for many years.
  • Q3: Zillow’s announcement to harness its dominance with consumers to broker their own iBuyer transactions.
  • Q4: a major new player entered residential real estate with CoStar’s acquisition of HomeSnap, providing the $34B company access to one of the biggest real estate audiences in the country.

These developments represent the breakdown of long-held assumptions, yet another wave of talent and capital entering the space, and a consequential shift in economic and operational power throughout the landscape.

Meanwhile, despite the climate of uncertainty, leaders have met these challenges by deploying their own long-term strategies, taking an objective look at their own strengths and doubling down on the unique opportunities presented to them as a leading brokerage. 

One such leader is Nina Dosanjh of Vanguard Properties, a forward thinking, independently owned and operated brokerage based in San Francisco. For years, Vanguard Properties has been a vocal and active advocate for delivering best-in-class tech experiences for their clients and agents. This conviction is motivated not only by the need to fulfill modern technology needs, but also by the prediction that such robust brokerage platforms act as both defense and offense against disruptive changes in the industry. 

A key benefit of a strong technology experience is the ability to engage and therefore secure both clients and agents to the brokerage. Many of the developments seen in 2020 have a common theme around the control of consumer attention. Whether at the lead-gen phase, the home search phase, or the transaction management phase, new entrants in the market understand the critical importance of making sure real estate consumers are engaged on first party platforms. Dosanjh shares this view, and sees a strong brokerage-owned consumer technology ecosystem as table-stakes to compete in the evolving marketplace. 

Deploying powerful agent/client collaboration tools is a simple, yet powerful, starting point to engage consumers and keep them in the agent and broker ecosystem. These tools lead to higher lead-conversion and the ability for agents to manage a higher volume of clients. Furthermore, the engagement these tools create ensures brokerages are well positioned to harvest the byproducts of increased repeat and referral business, and the most valuable opportunity of all: data.

Examining the developments in 2020, it’s clear that they don’t revolve around the traditional brokerage ecosystem or business practices, despite the fact that the incumbent model is still the center-of-gravity of the industry as a whole.

As with almost any other technology experience, user engagement and data are inseparable in real estate. The key observation made by Dosanjh and others, is that there’s a big disconnect in real estate consumer data where the owner of the client relationship – the agent and brokerage – typically don’t have access or control of the client data that is generated. A consumer may work with an agent to buy or sell a home, but because they use 3rd party technology, the agent has no visibility into the technology usage, let alone the ability to then add further value to the consumer using real-time data. 

This is another reason why a RealScout-facilitated data strategy was a good fit for Vanguard Properties’s vision, since the platform is designed for secure yet transparent handling of client behavior and preference data. Instead of giving away this critical asset to 3rd party portals, agents using RealScout can better understand and serve their clients. Vanguard Properties also has more visibility into their client base and therefore the overall health of their business. 

While this initiative seems to apply solely to Vanguard Properties, a single brand, Dosanjh’s strategic analysis points to a broader opportunity that encompasses a larger pool of brokerages. Examining the developments in 2020, it’s clear that they don’t revolve around the traditional brokerage ecosystem or business practices, despite the fact that the incumbent model is still the center-of-gravity of the industry as a whole. The simple yet powerful conclusion is that by doubling down on their strengths, brokerages and agents can unlock opportunities far greater and more tangible than some of the long-shot bets made in 2020. 

A concrete example of this rallying cry is Vanguard Properties’s decision to anchor the San Francisco Buyer Graph Initiative. The Initiative brought together the leading brokerages in San Francisco to build an open platform that securely and thoughtfully shares the engagement data generated on RealScout. In doing so, the brokerages get a deeper insight into the market as a whole, deepen inter-brokerage collaboration, and ultimately deliver a more data-driven, sophisticated home buying experience to clients. 

Nearly 50,000 agents are now part of these initiatives, providing access to insights and decision-making tools unavailable anywhere else.

These initiatives have reached beyond the San Francisco market, popping up in markets such as Tahoe and Reno, New England, Washington DC, North Carolina and Philadelphia in 2020 alone. Nearly 50,000 agents are now part of these initiatives providing access to insights and decision-making tools unavailable anywhere else. 

Chart showing number of brokerages using the RealScout Buyer Graph

Even the most unpredictable element of 2020, the global pandemic, was something Dosanjh and Vanguard Properties were prepared for thanks to the initiatives described above. A best-in-class collaborative technology was exactly what agents and clients needed during remote transactions, and for Vanguard Properties, the results speak for themselves. 

What’s striking about the strategy set forth by leaders such as Dosanjh is its simplicity and consistency. By focusing on the singular goal to provide the best possible first party client experience, an experience that intimately involves client/agent collaboration, Dosanjh has been successful in responding to big industry trends, even larger macro-economic challenges, all the while elevating Vanguard Properties’s ability to serve its clients. 

Although 2021 may prove to be just as unpredictable as 2020, the lesson learned from leaders such as Dosanjh is that blindly chasing and reacting to trends is not the key to success. Instead, a simple, consistent, potentially contrarian vision, carefully formulated and boldly executed will protect against busts and accelerate booms.