In a shifting real estate market, the guidance and expertise that Inman imparts are never more valuable. Whether at our events, or with our daily news coverage and how-to journalism, we’re here to help you build your business, adopt the right tools — and make money. Join us in person in Las Vegas at Connect, and utilize your Select subscription for all the information you need to make the right decisions. When the waters get choppy, trust Inman to help you navigate.
Real estate communication platform Happy Grasshopper has added Houston-based ERA Legacy Living as its latest hgRECRUITS brokerage partner, according to an announcement on Friday.
ERA Legacy Living joins 123 leading brokerages, such as Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate and 72 Sold, that also use the platform.
Jemila Winsey
“Happy Grasshopper brings in a personal touch that I think sometimes goes missing in the crazy day-to-day world of real estate,” ERA Legacy Living co-owner Jemila Winsey said in a statement. “[The] Chirp [messaging platform] has given us the tools to stay in touch with past clients and sphere and bring value in to create more business and amazing opportunities for our agents.”
Founded in 2010, Happy Grasshopper helps real estate agents, teams and brokerages streamline their marketing, communication and lead generation strategies with four services: HG Keep-in-Touch, HG-Recruits, Position-Me and white label customer relationship management platforms.
HG said the cost of its service starts at a minimum of $500 per month and scales upward based on team or brokerage size.
To get started with hgRECRUITS, prospective clients must complete a free recruitment strategy session, when an HG recruitment expert will assess their current recruitment and retention strategy, identify strengths and weaknesses and determine if HG’s platform is a good fit for their needs.
From there, HG’s recruitment, copywriting, marketing and tech experts will collaborate to create a customized plan that helps brokers attract and retain the right recruits with automated, personalized emails, texts, ringless voicemail drops, social media posts and handwritten cards via Chirp.
The company also provides success coaches that keep brokers on track with their recruiting and retention goals and identify areas of improvement. That coach also helps brokers’ agents successfully utilize the HG platform to generate and convert more leads.
HG said its plans lead to a 1,160 percent return on investment — which means every dollar a broker spends yields $11.60.
Dan Stewart
“The thing that I love more than anything is solving real problems, and the problem that I see today is it’s easier than ever to send a message,” Happy Grasshopper founder and CEO Dan Stewart told Inman. “And yet it’s harder than ever to get our messages really to be heard, and to get the response that we’re looking for.”
“I have a team of copywriters and a team of technologists, and we create really compelling content by interviewing our members,” he added. “We also study the data from the 26 million contacts we’re currently nurturing — we’ve got a large enough data set now to where we don’t have to guess about how to create a response. We just have to do what works.”
The current recruiting standard forces brokers to join “a race to the bottom” when they rely upon things, such as low commission splits to undercut the competition and bolster their agent count, Stewart said. While that method works in the short term, it leads to weak retention rates since you’re not attracting agents who align with and want to follow your brokerage strategy, Stewart said.
“We work really hard to position our clients as leaders in their market that agents should be willing to follow,” he said. “With that in mind, let’s imagine a recruitment client that wants to work with tech-forward agents.”
“In our cold email, we’d start a conversation on a tech topic, like, ‘Remember a few months ago when Zillow shut down their iBuyer division? A few of us have been talking about that and realized launching an iBuyer service could be a key opportunity this quarter. Would love to know if you’re thinking the same thing. Give me a call when you have a few minutes to chat,'” he added.
“So that’s starting the conversation on something that causes a recruit to be curious. We’re not delivering the answer in the email, we’re raising curiosity in the message. That’s really the secret of engagement — to raise the curiosity and leave it unresolved.”
As the market shifts, brokers must become savvier in how they approach recruitment and retention by mastering the art of creating and maintaining relationships, Stewart said.
“Relationships matter and all relationships really only live inside conversation,” he said. “That’s where agents generate leads. That’s where they win clients and negotiate through all the problems between lead acquisition and close.”
“It’s where brokers build relationships with the people they’re recruiting and it’s where they maintain those relationships with people after they join,” he continued.
