Realtor.com operator Move Inc. is teaming up with local Realtor associations to let new agents know what tools the portal can offer to help them get their careers in real estate off the ground.
Move introduced “new agent success kits” co-branded with local associations at the NAR Association Executives Institute in Vancouver last week.
“Realtor.com’s new agent program is designed to help local Realtor associations get new agents off to a good start,” said Russ Cofano, Move’s senior vice president of industry relations, in a statement.
“We looked at all of our tools, training, products and applications — anything that would be useful to a new agent — and put this together as a program that highlights the value of the association to these new members and the importance of the partnership with and business value provided by realtor.com.”
Screenshot of co-branded realtor.com/Fort Collins Association of Realtors new agent success kit
The kits familiarize agents with several Move tools — some free, some paid — including:
- Connection for Co-Brokerage for lead generation.
- Free “open house productivity kit” and homebuyer guide from Top Producer.
- Free goal-setting and business planning tool that quickly calculates how many prospects agents will need to acquire weekly or follow-up calls they will need to make daily to achieve their transaction goal for the year.
- Instructions for getting recommendations that will appear on an agent’s free realtor.com profile.
- Free Housing Trends e-newsletter that functions as a branded, drip-marketing system to follow up with prospective clients that “aren’t quite ready to buy,” according to realtor.com’s website.
Success kits are also available for teams. The team kits talk up Move’s TigerLead, FiveStreet and Top Producer products, walk agents through setting up a team realtor.com profile, and offer free webinars.
Many local associations want to be a central source of information for their members and the kits will help them do that, Cofano told Inman.
“[The hope is] that new Realtors say, ‘Oh great, my association is partnering with realtor.com and Top Producer and I can do all these neat things that I didn’t know about,'” he said.
Through these kits, realtor.com further avails itself of a key advantage it has over its rival, Zillow Group, in their mutual quest to become the industry’s friendliest partner: its affiliation with the National Association of Realtors.
“We are very supportive of realtor.com’s new agent success kit, which was developed with feedback from our members, and urge Realtors to check it out to see if it meets their individual needs,” NAR said in an emailed statement.
“We are always encouraging of Move/realtor.com producing products like this that include multiple free elements and provide members with tools to assist them in their planning processes and be more efficient and productive.”
Move considers the kits “a starting point” in its relationship with local associations, Cofano said. There is no official program in place for additional, paid co-branding opportunities between realtor.com and associations, but the company hopes that the kits will open up discussions for such opportunities, he said.
Move has also recently rolled out its “Agent Passport Platform” program, which allows associations to put “white-label” (unbranded) versions of agents’ realtor.com profiles on associations’ websites at no cost. When consumers search for an agent on an association site, the site surfaces the agent’s realtor.com profile.
The first association to flip the switch on this new offering is the New Hampshire Association of Realtors.
Screenshot of a white-label realtor.com profile on the New Hampshire Association of Realtors website
The offering is part of realtor.com’s profile strategy, Cofano said.
“We think we’ve got the best profile out there today. It’s very Realtor-friendly. It’s going to get even better,” he said.
“It doesn’t benefit the Realtor or the consumer to have multiple [inconsistent] profiles out there.”
The new agent success kits and the white-label realtor.com profiles are not tied together, so associations do not have to have one in order to get the other, Cofano said.
Move also allows agents to put white-label versions of their realtor.com profiles on their own websites, including their .realtor websites.
“It’s completely portable so it can go wherever the agent wants it to go. The agent only has to update it once in the realtor.com profile manager,” Cofano said.