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Presence Copilot is a collaborative mobile business support app for real estate teams and brokerages
Platforms: iOS; Android pending
Ideal for: Teams and brokerages; buyers and sellers
Top selling points:
- AI-integrated voice notes
- Consumer-grade UI/UX
- White-label capable
- Automatic market insights layered over MLS data
- Board-based collaboration
Top concern:
Technology adoption is hard, and it’s going to take team leaders and influential, forward-thinking brokers to make Copilot stick. It’s absolutely capable of doing what it promises, and I feel that Luxury Presence is going to need to hire a few dedicated staff for onboarding and account oversight. It’s hard to sell homes, let alone apps.
What you should know:
Presence Copilot is the latest software product from Luxury Presence, the LA-based website development firm that has evolved into a “proptech” of sorts. It makes sense. Years of strategy intelligence gained from working closely with high-performing agents to build brands and web presences can result in a deep understanding of business-wide pain points. After all, the best real estate websites do more than brand-build and market listings; they solve problems for consumers. Malte Kramer, the company’s founder and CEO, would only be remiss to not capitalize on the smarts sitting across from him on a regular basis, as he did with this app by acquiring it from Dawn McKenna, an established customer who embarked on her own app development journey to leverage her expertise for the benefit of her fast-growing team.
In short, if you want an agent’s fingerprints on some technology for your brokerage, you could do a lot worse than those of McKenna, to put it mildly.
With McKenna’s wisdom streaming through the roots of the app and Luxury Presence’s development smarts fueling its upward trajectory, I’m willing to dub Presence Copilot a superior mobile productivity solution than recent entries, such as Real and 1060, both of which have a place in what I argue are different categories.
Presence Copilot isn’t blending AI for the sake of it, and it’s not using it to merely recite input. It has legitimate productivity applications, such as the automatic assigning of verbal inputs to client records and the ability to segment a single note into bulleted lists and action items. This is for the agent who won’t look up from the screen when making their coffee order or who can meet someone in person with a phone to their ear. Sure, we all hate that person a little, but not when they’re our agent.
The app can be fully white-labeled for a team or brokerage, and its authentic consumer-grade UI/UX works to elevate that because it doesn’t come across as an off-the-shelf experience with duct-taped logos and copy-and-paste functionality. If you don’t need the full integration, a branded version is doable, as well. Kramer told me he didn’t want “to commoditize the agent,” so the quality of the custom deliverable mattered from the start. It helps, again, that the app’s origins are cemented in an agent’s footprint.
The app’s functionality is delivered primarily through its customizable boards, content modules that categorize features, resources and snippets of useful information, such as featured listings, saved searches and the agent’s profile. They can be private by client, meaning only they and who they invite can participate, or openly collaborative, such as a collection of cool stuff about a trendy part of a city or new-build community. There are a bunch of ways to use it.
Notes can be added, via voice or type, into any board and even saved as templates, such as a list of vendors or action items for a new seller to take. Because the boards are two-way, clients will see and respond to what’s entered when appropriate, and the conversation is then powerfully summarized within the context of the relationship, not scattered amongst an array of text threads, voicemails and inboxes.
Copilot will request an MLS ID upon sign-up to generate a listing feed, and for use when delivering its graphical market insights based on wherever the agent is or needs to be. The search functionality is, as Kramer admitted, a “table stakes” experience. I get it. This is not a search app; it’s a productivity tool. Search is merely in support of the greater purpose, in the same way the client oversight feature is not intended to be a CRM. Both functions are meant to contribute components of the overall business process, as sources of content that, when combined, shorten the time it takes for an agent to deliver value.
Still, the search is designed to incorporate multiple people, which is crucial today. Mosaik, a sleek new client experience application, does this really well, too. In short, if agents aren’t finding ways to ensure their clients’ sphere of influence is somehow involved, whether through software or general conversation, they’re losing a tremendous opportunity to build referrals and ensure their client ends up in the right house.
Clients can be automatically tagged in the management feature according to the level of attention they command, and adding a note for one of them can proliferate the information into all instances of that client’s presence. Tags can be manually edited, and the content will contribute to the lead-scoring mechanism.
This is really good stuff. It’s rare for a tech company and top producer to come together in this fashion. Typically, it’s a surface-level marketing partnership, or an agent trying to shift from top producer to proptech CEO, which can certainly work. But I very much respect McKenna’s approach here: Knowing she had something and recognizing that its true potential is ultimately better in the hands of a company experienced in taking technology to market. That’s smart business.
In brief, it’s really no surprise she’s grown as she has, and equally so that this app can do what it can do.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe
Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.
