As teams continue dominating the real estate landscape, the Mid-Atlantic’s massive Bright MLS has debuted a new feature that should allow teams to better track their performance and maintain a group identity.
Bright MLS calls the new feature “Teams by Bright.” A statement explains that it will allow teams to “collaborate easily, build a team’s brand recognition and visibility on listings, route workflows more efficiently and easily track volume and rankings.”
The feature spent the last few months in a beta version available to about a dozen users, then launched widely for all of Bright MLS’s nearly 100,000 subscribers this week.
Frank Major
Frank Major, Bright MLS’s chief technology officer, told Inman in a phone call this week that the new offering specifically allows teams to track their group metrics. In the past, individual agents have been able to pull data on how they are performing, but multiple listing services (MLSs) generally don’t have good ways for teams — which are less formal organizations than brokerages — to see how the whole team was doing.
“For the value that the teams were bringing, there really wasn’t that much insight,” Major said.
Bright MLS leaders recognized this gap last year, Major continued, and began working on a solution.
Teams hoping to use the new feature have to get approval from their broker of record — a measure meant to ensure they’re following local guidelines — and then can input the names of their team members as a group.
Teams by Bright will ultimately allow users to build reports related to statistics such as listings and transactions both individually and collectively. The feature will also allow agents to direct questions to various members of their team, and have team members’ names show up on listings.
Major said that Bright MLS is also working on a “productivity widget” that will offer more features, and which will debut in the coming months.
Teams by Bright is free for Bright MLS subscribers. Teams are not obligated to use the feature, though Major said he hopes it appeals broadly to members of Bright MLS.
The launch of Teams by Bright comes amid a boom time for the teams concept. Though the idea has its origins in the 1980s when RE/MAX encouraged agents to hire assistants, and in the 1990s when Keller Williams pioneered the modern version of the concept, teams really took off in more recent years. That’s thanks in part to high profile brokerages such as eXp Realty and Compass, both of which operate nationally but without franchising, that have strongly emphasized teams.
Many leaders who have spoke to Inman have also said forming teams is easier than starting their own brokerage, and allows them unique expansion opportunities to boot.
Major said leaders at Bright MLS — which serves the Mid-Atlantic region — ultimately believe the team concept will continue being a dominant force in real estate, noting that “we don’t think there’s going to be any kind of reduction in its usage.”
“It’s going to be out there,” Major said. “And if it’s going to be out there, we want to support it.”
