RE/MAX announced Thursday that it’s annual Broker Owner Conference (BOC), the company’s second-biggest in-person event, is going fully virtual. And for the first time in company history, the event, which takes place August 17-18, will be open to the massive franchise network’s global audience.
Pam Harris | Photo credit: RE/MAX
“Our brokers and owners come to the BOC to sharpen their business acumen and discover the latest in RE/MAX technology, training and marketing tools,” Pam Harris, RE/MAX’s senior vice president, customer experience, said in a statement.
“We’re hard at work to seamlessly transition the same world-class experience our attendees have come to expect to an online environment,” Harris added. “Expanding the event for international attendees this year will help us bring that high energy our events are known for to a larger group of brokers and owners across the world.”
The event will include a vendor marketplace, networking meetings, educational sessions, an opening general session and notable speakers. The general session will be a livestreamed event that will be immediately on-demand after it ends. At last year’s event in Chicago, RE/MAX unveiled its booj-powered platform for the first time.
All of the sessions will be available on-demand for users, which allow the event to reach global audiences. While those in the United States will be encouraged to attend the events at the actual time they are happening, it will allow them to view multiple sessions.
“People can watch it at any time it fits in their schedule,” Harris told Inman.
“The on-demand feature is something that I think is really great,” Harris added. “Having five breakouts at a time, I’ll go to one live but then I can go back and watch the other ones that I may have missed on my own time.”
The entire event will take place on the Intrado platform, a dynamic virtual environment that will aim to mimic what it’s like to be onsite at the conference. Approximating that environment will specifically be one of the tasks ahead for Harris and her team.
“We didn’t just want to offer a Zoom experience, we wanted them to really feel like they were a part of a two-day BOC,” Harris said.
To re-create that experience, RE/MAX will have roughly a dozen virtual lounge areas where attendees can chat with one another. Rooms can be reserved for specific reasons — like a room for luxury brokers, or commercial brokers or only the top 100 brokers — and there will be a lobby bar lounge open to all.
“RE/MAX is known for our social events,” Harris said. “We like to be with each other and talk to each other. [We’ll] really be able to have a two-day experience that’s not just like, ‘Oh I’m going to sit in a meeting room and have a conversation.’”
The vendor marketplace will be fully customizable to each vendor, where real estate companies can chat with attendees, show them videos, hand out virtual fliers or connect their social media accounts.
RE/MAX is the latest real estate company to lean into virtual technology for a major event.
EXp Realty, already a virtual cloud-based real estate brokerage, held its first virtual eXp Shareholder Summit general session last week, with more than 9,500 attendees.
On Monday, Compass hosted a virtual, all-hands meeting for its nearly 20,000-agent strong community.
Inman is even launching its own virtual event, Connect Now, which is a three-day, fully digital event featuring some of the industry’s biggest leaders.
