One of the biggest challenges enterprise real estate brokerages face as they grow is managing the agent onboarding / offboarding. Starting with the process of moving the license to your brokerage - checking to make sure they haven't been suspended or revoked in either the current state or a previous one, getting the license sent off to the state, waiting to receive it back, and then the real arduous process begins.
Adding an agent to a broker back office solution takes staff time. Multiply that time for every software application that you have. Email systems like Google Workspace / Office365, your brokerage platform, and the more than 12-22 products that you make available to your agents.
Your agent onboarding checklist may take a staff member a full day or more to complete. Most brokers do not see this “time” because it happens by salaried staff. But larger brokerages often feel this in terms of payroll costs. If you are onboarding 50 or more agents per motnh, the time allocation is absurd.
Just look at the agent pages on any broker website. Agents are missing. Agents are there that should not be there. Most new agents do not have headshots or bios at all - they are gray heads. Those agents who do have a completed page may or may not be making a compelling statement to a consumer on why they should choose them as an agent. As an industry, we need to do better. The good news is that we can!
Roster/Identity Management
Nautilent looks at the process differently from any other brokerage tech vendor or onboarding platform. We know that we need to save your enterprise brokerage time. Very few brokers have developed this component of their tech platform.
Most brokerage firms currently onboard and offboard agents poorly because the process is manual. Moreover, they are not collecting the full sum of information needed to onboard the agent to all of the software systems across the enterprise. A clear example of this is the agent's headshot and bio. When a gray skull represents the agent’s headshot in software, it look unprofessional - so some brokerages don't show the new agents until that's complete, or the show the dreaded "Photo Coming Soon" grey box. Just look at the number of incomplete headshots and bios on brokerage websites.
With an up-to-date headshot, brokerages can proactively populate all of their tools with every agent’s contact information to maximize impact on third party portals, social media, email blasts, and every location where agent branding is allowed.
When you onboard an agent into the system - Nautilent will connect and process the onboarding to all of the tools you offer your agents. Nautilent serves as the source of truth for your roster data. This saves our clients money every time an agent comes or goes. For many brokerages today, there is a 13% turn over in agents each year. That's why it's important for every brokerage to have an enterprise identity management platform.
Single Sign-On (SSO)
The biggest barrier to agents and staff adoption of an enterprise real estate brokerage system is password management. Many firms have integrated between 10 and 20 applications for every agent. Each of those apps needs a username and password, and the top support item is password management. Enterprise brokerage firms can use Nautilent to solve that easily by providing a dashboard, enabling a simple way to log-in once and then get access to all of the applications available. Most importantly, Nautilent's dashboard and entire login platform does away with username's and passwords. Our platform uses the same technology that your phone implements to login to your bank and stock accounts - Passkeys. We do away once and for all with Realtors having to remember a password or change it every so often for security purposes.
The Nautilent SSO platform for example, can show California agents, California forms, while showing Ohio tools to Ohio agents, and Florida tools to Florida agents.
Showing solutions often vary from MLS to MLS, and transaction management may differ across markets. The key criteria here is to align the right products with the right person and do not show them integrations that they cannot use.
Another fairly unused technology is Federated Identity Management (FIM), also known as federated SSO. FIM enables trusted sharing of user identities between separate organizations and third parties, such as application vendors or partners, across domains. An example would be an Intranet where agents are able to interact with any of their social media accounts.
The more functions delivered via the brokerage’s dashboard, the more chances the broker has to eliminate frustrations from their agent’s day. One single access location also enables the brokerage to consistently promote their value proposition by advertising training, events, and technology success stories.
If you want to learn more about how we can help you with onboarding, offboarding, and tool management, reach out to the Nautilent team to learn more.