Coldwell Banker

Tech Tools Provided

ColdwelBankerOnline.com, the brokerage’s national website, which generates a lot of traffic – about 6.8 million visitorsfrom 201 countries and more than 42 million page views  in 2012.. All of these statistics were sourced from Google Analytics. In addition, Coldwell Banker recently started using a new e-marketing platform powered by New Panda, which is a CRM and email marketing program paid for by Coldwell Banker that helps our agents with automated monthly newsletters, social media content, listing emails and autopilot ecampaigns. Bluenet is also a free internal system for agents to promote pocket listings that aren’t yet active on the MLS.

QR Codes/Text-Driven Campaigns

“In all honesty, QRs and texts are great to use at a listing presentation as new technology, but they don’t generate a lot of leads,” Haran says. “People are afraid to text because they don’t want agents calling them back, in general. As a company, we didn’t see a whole lot of results from texts, and for QR codes, there are many factors that go into making it effective, and as a company, they are not really worth the investment for us.” Instead, Coldwell Banker pushes agents to use mobile websites.

Tech Training/Tech Education

“Coldwell Banker University is our national program. CBecast is our local program where agents can watch training videos and interviews with top agents about how to properly price properties or how to win on a listing presentation, for example, wherever they are,” Haran says.

Individual Agent Websites

Coldwell Banker agents, as of last year, have their own mobile website so buyers can search for properties on that website, giving the agent all those leads. One out of every five people who visit ColdwellBankerOnline.com do so via a mobile device. In 2011, it was one out of every 10, and in 2010 it was one out of every 100. “We made a conscious decision to make the mobile experience the same or better than on a computer,” Haran says.

Pay for Syndication Sites

Coldwell Banker pays to have agents’ listings enhanced on six different sites – Trulia, Zillow, Realtor.com, Yahoo Real Estate, AOL Real Estate and MSN Real Estate. On Zillow, Trulia and Yahoo, the company also pays to have all 3,300 agents featured, meaning no competitors will show up on their listings, and all of the leads for those listings will go back to Coldwell Banker agents through its lead management system.

SEO Strategy

On an individual basis, Haran can talk to an agent about how to implement an SEO strategy. “We’ll consult with the agent for free about what kind of terms they should be going after and what kind of specialization they should be going after, what kind of markets they should be targeting…so they’re not competing against all of these big companies,” he says. “But we don’t have lot of agents who handle SEO individually because we send them a ton of leads based on the company program we have set up.”