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The real estate software company Inside Real Estate has rebranded its portfolio of real estate business software, leaving behind its 16-year-old kvCORE name for what it’s calling BoldTrail, Inman has learned exclusively.
The company, which serves as a technology partner to more than 500,000 brokerages and agents, will retain the Insides Real Estate moniker, and its collection of applications will carry the BoldTrail name in a range of iterations as they roll out this summer. In addition to new product features and top-down user experiences, users will see all new color schemes, brand assets and product identifiers coalescing around the company’s new ecosystem.
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“The reality of technology in the space is that no one can get its full value without a partner that knows how to offer technology services, support and guidance through the process,” CEO Joe Skousen told Inman, adding at another point in the interview, “I can honestly say that what’s really exciting for us is not just what we’re landing on, but how it really captures who we are.”
Inside Real Estate has built its reputation on providing real estate business software supporting a number of business functions, such as customer relationship management (CRM), digital marketing and presentations, listing promotion, back-office oversight, transaction management and recruiting, and others.
The company isn’t sunsetting any products or features, but instead renaming and updating how it works in harmony. BoldTrail users will be treated to a more vivid solution: a platform rather than a series of related products.
The rebrand comes as a result of mounting marketing challenges as it acquired a number of companies over the past several years to round out what it offered to the industry, the most consequential being the January 2023 purchase of BoomTown, itself a well-regarded omnichannel solution. While product missions aligned, a good deal of energy was expended to get them working together as a singular experience.
Skousen, Vice President of Marketing Joan Daily and Senior Vice President of Strategic Growth Alissa Harper spoke to Inman about the rebrand, with all agreeing the process — including the renaming — was a long, costly and frequently terrifying experience but well worth the challenge.
IRE’s Joe Skousen
“I can’t tell you how many times during this process, I thought, ‘This thing is a total hot mess,'” Skousen told Inman. “You’re like, ‘I hate every name that’s been brought up. ‘But I will say, you get to a point where you start to turn the corner and land on it, and I’m like, ‘This is it!’”
BoldTrail was driven in part by the company’s belief that real estate is not for the timid, and that it wants to be a strong partner in tough times.
Inman was provided a brief demonstration of the product updates. Underneath the new pinks, reds and blues of BoldTrail is an entirely renovated user front-end designed for rapid feature lookup and minimal learning curve, supported by artificial intelligence and intuitive system-wide search, as well as enhanced workflow and comprehensive product collaboration.
The marriage of multiple applications should lead to benefits for the company’s users, namely a unified vision of how the products become better when working so closely together. It allows for more granular insights on clients, marketing efforts, transactions and the brokerage operation. Tighter windows between features means reduced time spent interacting with them and in turn, improved business decisions.
Emphasis is being placed on collaboration with an expansive team of trainers, coaches and support personnel to work as closely as possible with customers, a hands-on approach that’s critical for long-term adoption and success. Collectively, they’re called TrailGuides. The increased presence of human expertise can offer users more insight on how features support commission goals.
Skousen lauded the efforts of his team in helping him through the rebrand, which was teetering on launch earlier this spring before being derailed by a sudden hack of services within the BoomTown line of products.
IRE’s Joan Dailey
“There’s not only choosing the name, there’s the licensing, and the domain and all the other things that go with it,” Daily said. “But it was a fun exercise, and we learned a lot.”
IRE’s Alissa Harper
Skousen said the brand and product evolution give them a fresh start, a uniform foundation that can now be further refined for the user. Not having to sift through the detritus of multiple acquisitions to determine what stays and what goes can certainly free up an executive team’s time to refocus on the market.
“It’s like combining the tribes on Survivor,” Daily said, in reference to the long-running reality show. “We can all wear the same brand new bandana.”
“This unifies it as one new thing we can rally behind,” Harper said. “There have been a number of positive reactions internally, but above it all, it’s about coming together.”
