Inman Connect Austin, Oct. 9 at Brazos Hall, is the ultimate one-day gathering for real estate professionals, bringing together industry leaders, innovators and top agents sharing their secrets so you can seize this moment of change. Seats are limited and almost sold out — register now.
Spyglass Realty broker-owner Ryan Rodenbeck began his career as an agent and self-described tech-geek at a major brokerage. His desire to increase efficiency and modernize the real estate model drove him into entrepreneurship.
Rodenbeck’s Austin-based brokerage now boasts 150 agents who all contribute to the collective goal of providing the consumer with an elevated approach to buying and selling homes.
Inman pinned down the mobile-first top producer ahead of his Oct. 9 appearance at Inman Connect Austin. Here’s a snippet of what he might offer when under the lights.
Let’s get right into it: you emphasize in your company’s marketing the importance of trained agents. It’s right at the top of the page; it’s in the body copy. I don’t see that very often. Why is it important to emphasize that to the consumer?
I think it’s important because the average agent doesn’t really have access to a lot of training. We have a three-hour-a-week minimum training every Wednesday, then offshoots in addition to that. For agents to be at the top of their game, they need to have access to that, and while we don’t hire brand new agents usually, our newer agents are required to go to our training, and the agents we provide leads to have to go through our leads training.
I can tell you, it’s important. Even veteran agents need to know this stuff is important, especially with the new forms post-NAR settlement. We also record every training, and we’re launching RealtyHack academy, which will be free for our agents but fee-based for those outside the company.
You require leads training?
Here’s what we found out: Leads are an option for agents in our company, and we encourage them to get off of our leads to do referrals. We found that the agents that came into our business starting with our leads then move away from them, they’re so much better prepared than if you hired even a 10-year agent who didn’t go through our leads training.
We don’t make them go through the process if they’re not taking the leads, but those that do, do better when they go off of our leads.
I know this sounds cliche, but right now, agents need to be trained on best practices more than ever. What specific actions have you done to adjust to the new commission standards?
This hasn’t been that hard for us simply because we’ve been training for them to get buyer reps buyer representation agreements to begin with. We do a buyer rep agreement for one property and try to add value before that showing. We send them other listings, ask if they need information on the neighborhood, and then the agent shows them, we do what we call a driveway consultation, and we look at that one property showing as an audition to be an agent.
You’ve been asking for buyer representation agreements all along?
For years. Residential real estate on the buying side is the only industry that has been historically afraid of getting an agreement to work with someone. You can go to a doctor, a lawyer and even a mechanic has you sign something before they’ll do any work.
You’re a believer that the right software can help grow a real estate brokerage. Adoption is likely the broker’s biggest technology challenge. Can you share how you get your agents to buy into your solutions?
I’m not from the tech world, but I’m very tech-forward. I was on the customer advisory board for Workplace by Meta for several years and worked as a beta tester for a lot of different companies. So, you’re right on adoption, and what we usually do is have a focus group of agents, our most effective, and have them test that for a month or two to get buy-in before releasing to the masses.
We have 150 agents and can’t release something they won’t use, so we release it to 20 and we’ll have feedback meetings, see what they like, what they don’t. If they don’t, we cut it; if they do, then when it’s released, we have advocates for the technology.
Are you consistently looking for new products to fit into your operation, or do you wait to find a hurdle then look for a solution to get over it?
Curiosity has me looking at stuff a lot, I mean, I’m a tech nerd. But we don’t want to adopt too much because agents get tired of that. If we find a hurdle, we look for a solution and get over it.
I’ve done that in the past, ‘Let’s get this, let’s get that.’ It can overwhelm agents; you don’t want to adopt too much technology in too short a period of time. Everyone suffers from shiny object syndrome, and if you go too crazy, agents don’t know what to do. And if we adopt a technology, we look to see what we can replace.
Most brokers didn’t sign up to be software consultants. When did you realize it’s a necessity to growing a business?
When I was an agent at a different brokerage. You know, a lot of the big box brokerages have their standard technology and I would buy my own because I wanted to be more efficient , professional and have better tools. I’ve always been an early adopter, and I look at stuff all the time and don’t tell anyone because it would cause mass confusion.
We don’t jump into anything haphazardly. I know enough about technology to know when a vendor says ’That feature is on our roadmap’ that it means it’s going to be a lot longer than people realize before it’s available.
The modern, choice-addled consumer is a hard entity to reach. What kind of sales messages have you found hit home with your buyers and sellers?
I don’t think they’re super confused, I really don’t. I think that’s an interpretation agents put on it … when anything changes in our industry, it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh oh my gosh.’
We’re just going back to basics. Like, how do you add value? They do have a lot of choices, that’s right, so we teach sales methods that, when you show a property, bring value, an item of value, maybe it’s a list of expired homes that did not sell, or it’s three more properties they didn’t look at.
We have a website, MovetoAustin.org, that has probably 300 pages with different blogs about different neighborhoods and areas. We have a spreadsheet where we teach our agents what else to offer when a lead is looking in a specific area. Send them an article about what dog parks are near there, or how the schools are, you know?
We’re also categorizing every downtown residential building in Austin through YouTube.
Nice!
We do video walkthroughs on all the high rises. And, more than that, we’ve made quadrants of Austin and make newsletters on each area, north, south, west, east and downtown. We plug those videos into each newsletter.
I do a lot of marketing myself, but I have a marketing director; I have a videographer.
A lot of brokers don’t like to pay for those things.
Um … I don’t know. It’s in the results. It started off just me when I was a much smaller brokerage, then I started with an assistant, and then as we’ve grown, we scaled it all up. When you scale up your business, you need to scale up your services. You can’t provide all that stuff with only 10 agents.
With all these systems in place, it doesn’t take as many services to double the agent count. We just opened a Houston office this week, in fact.
I’ve sat in on a lot of these sessions at Connect events. Can you promise me that you’ll offer hard advice and, most of all, honesty, to the audience? No cliches or navel-gazing inspiration. Agents today need to know that it’s hard to achieve what you did and that you have to spend money to do it.
Absolutely. They have to spend time and they have to work their ass off. I still treat this company like a startup. I could be making a lot more money if I wasn’t spending as much, but I want to scale it.
