Real estate brokers who provide websites to their agents need to provide IT support to operate them effectively. Without support, it’s like giving someone a fishing pole without hooks or bait to actually catch anything. In both cases, you wind up casting about with tools you’re not equipped to use, likely to never hook anything (client or fish).
However, providing the necessary tech support to agents is costly, time-consuming, and difficult to do consistently, right? Not anymore. With Placester’s Agent Manager tool, you can exceed your agents’ expectations with less time, less expense, and in a consistent, replicable way.
Why Do Most Broker-provided Real Estate Websites Suck?
Actually, they don’t. Most broker-provided websites are full-featured and IDX-enabled, and check the critical boxes for 90% of agents. If this is the case, why don’t more agents use them?
Support.
It’s often not the websites themselves that drive agents to pay for an independent solution (even though they have one provided by their broker for free)—it’s the launch, the customization, the strategy, and the ongoing support.
Put yourself in the shoes of a new agent at your brokerage who needs to launch a website.
When they officially sign on, they’re expected to launch their website, usually using some relatively outdated instructions or a walk-through from a three-ring binder, while remaining brand compliant, and customizing it based on their exact needs—usually with no web design or marketing experience.
If you’re a new agent with (literally) a hundred different priorities, plus the ever-present pressure of lead prospecting, tapping your sphere of influence, and actually getting some transactions on the board, the appeal of concierge-level support from an independent website solution is obvious.
Broker-provided Website Support: Not as Easy as It Sounds
Most of the brokers I know recognize this problem. In fact, over the last year, I’ve consulted with multiple brokers on this specific issue, and they’ve all outlined the same problems with providing tech support for their agents:
- We don’t have the skill set: It’s often an office admin or the broker themselves who is tasked with this support. Many professionals in this space don’t come equipped with the specific tech-support knowledge needed to help agents with this.
- We don’t have the time: Onboarding + ongoing support is time-intensive and unpredictable, which means that anyone who’s tasked with providing tech support will have a difficult time creating a schedule and getting away from day-to-day ad-hoc requests.
- We can’t scale this: Once you get a competent, available, consistent tech support person in place, they only have so many hours to give, so your agent onboarding and website support becomes limited, thus stunting your recruiting and retention.
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Placester’s Agent Manager: The Tech Support Solution You’ve Been Waiting For
Placester, named The Close’s Best Real Estate Website Builder of 2022, is already a dominant force in the single agent and real estate team website space, but with the exclusive Agent Manager tool, they are now offering best-in-class options for brokerages as well.
Not familiar with Agent Manager? Here’s a basic rundown of what this feature provides brokers and anyone managing the back-end for multiple real estate agent websites:
Brokerage-specific, Brand-compliant Website Templates
Using Agent Manager, brokers, admins, and tech support staff can create unique, brand-compliant website templates, allowing their agents to launch their brand-specific website in a matter of minutes, simply by filling in their personal information, uploading a headshot, and hitting go.
Why this matters: If every single agent starts from scratch with every single website build, you’re likely to encounter the same questions, roadblocks, and needs for support with every agent onboarding. Agent Manager allows you to shortcut this process for your team members, taking 95% of the website building process off their plate.
A Single, Unified, Agent Manager Dashboard
On the Agent Manager dashboard, those providing support to their Realtors can see every single Placester website active under their umbrella. You can see important information like website status, activity levels, and more. From this dashboard, you can create new profiles, deactivate agents no longer with your firm, and make universal changes across your organization with a couple of clicks.
Why this matters: Tech support used to require an individual login and unique support experience, usually meaning anyone helping an agent would likely have to physically go to their office, then sit shoulder-to-shoulder with them to offer help and training. With the Agent Manager Dashboard, you can provide the lion’s share of this support from a single desktop, allowing workflows to be more efficient and speeding turnaround time on support requests.
📌 Pro Tip
The Placester Agent Manager Dashboard is a perfect solution for any brokerage that has shifted to a remote office since support can be provided from anywhere—an ideal solution for agents who don’t make many office visits.
A Universal ‘Source of Truth’
With Agent Manager, you’ve got a unified database of information that allows you to apply changes across your entire website infrastructure with just a couple of clicks.
Why this matters: Let’s say you’ve got an agent in your brokerage who just got married, so she’ll be changing her last name and email address, as well as the office from which she works. Rather than having to make all these changes to the brokerage website, to the individual office website, and to the agent’s individual website, you can make these changes in one place. Placester’s Agent Manager Dashboard’s centralized database will automatically make updates across your entire ecosystem, all at once.
Tech Support With vs Without Agent Manager
Placester’s Agent Manager is all about providing better service to your agents, in less time, and with more consistency. To illustrate this, let’s look at a typical day for a brokerage tech support person using Placester and Agent Manager versus someone who is working to support a run-of-the-mill, generic brokerage website for their agents.
| Task | Placester With Agent Manager | Generic, Broker-provided Website |
|---|---|---|
| Onboarding 3 new agents | Add their contact information to the Placester Agent Manager Unified Dashboard, activate their new website. Total Time = 1 hour | Meet each agent individually, sit shoulder-to-shoulder with them, walking them through how to activate their website. Total Time = 2.5 hours |
| Deactivating a retiring agent’s website presence | Remove them from the active agent roster on the Dashboard, automatically deactivating their website, stopping their billing, removing them from the company website. Total Time = 5 minutes | Log in to the company website, the agent’s website, and the billing department individually, deactivating the agent’s media. Total Time = 30 minutes |
| Auditing 10 agent websites for brand compliance | Using super-admin access, log into each agent website from your Unified Dashboard, where you have access to every agent’s website, theme, and customizations. Total Time = 15 minutes | Schedule a time to meet with each agent individually, review their website with them one at a time, in their office or yours, with no direct access or control to make changes if necessary. Total Time = 3 hours |
| Servicing a request from an agent starting a real estate team to get a website that allows for team pages and lead distribution | Using the super-admin access, change the agent’s website template from single-agent to team. Then change their status in the database to “Team Leader.” Total Time = 5 minutes | Go to the agent’s office, help them log in to their website manager, find a template that will support their needs, work through the changes page-by-page, making sure they remain brand compliant. Then go the brokerage page and manually change agent status to “Team Leader.” Total Time = 1 hour |
| Transferring an agent from your west-side office to your east-side office on your company website | Using the Agent Manager database, simply change the home office of the agent, automatically removing them from one place, adding them to the other, and changing their office information on their personal website automatically. Total Time = 5 minutes | Log in to each office website individually, making each change manually, then double-checking with the agent who made the request to ensure they made the change on their personal website. Total Time = 30 minutes |
Total Time Required With Agent Manager = 1.5 hours
Total Time Required Without Agent Manager = 7.5 hours
How To Get Placester’s Agent Manager
To activate and use Placester’s Agent Manager, you’ll need to be a Placester client with their Office Builder Plan ($240). This entitles you to:
- A complete brokerage website (with options for multiple offices)
- Advanced websites with multiple templates for individual agents (each receive a Placester Advanced account, a $120 per month value)
- All the bells and whistles Agent Manager offers
Placester Review + Video: Is It Really the Best Real Estate Website Builder?
More Perks of Using Placester for Your Brokerage Website
In addition to the massive time savings, productivity boost, and enhanced tech support for your agents provided by the Agent Manager tools, Placester users receive other powerful benefits.
- Access to Placester Marketplace: Most agents only dream of an exclusive, creative support network like Placester’s website designers, graphic designers, search engine optimization (SEO) specialists, and more. Placester users can request help with individual, ad-hoc tasks through the Placester Marketplace—accomplishing everything from installing a Facebook Ad Pixel, designing a new logo, integrating your customer relationship manager (CRM) with your website’s lead capture pages, and more.
- Exclusive brokerage support: Brokerages can take the Placester Marketplace concept to the next level, including creative and technical support for your entire enterprise (up to 100 agents), including original site design, branded site templates, and individual agent websites of up to 50 pages.
- CRM access: Even though Placester’s bread and butter is websites, they also have some custom tools that Office Builder users gain access to, including a basic connected CRM to give your agents a way to better track, respond to, and nurture their leads.
Placester’s CRM doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of some of the standalone products on our list of the best real estate CRMs, but it’s a great perk to have nonetheless.
Placester Marketplace Makes Real Estate Websites Insanely Easy to Create
Is Placester’s Agent Manager Right for You & Your Brokerage?
If you’re in the market for an enterprise-level real estate website solution, Placester is a very strong choice. They offer exceptional designs and templates, technical expertise, and the tools necessary to create a sustainable ecosystem. These power-ups will present your brand consistently, allow for easy scaling when new agents join your team, and make your IT support levels the envy of every other broker in your market.
Visit Placester today to find out more about how they can be a part of your brokerage’s success.
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