The days of dropping off a valuation or a voucher on someone’s desk are behind us for now—but that doesn’t mean your brokerage has ground to a halt.
Even while remote, your team needs to continue devoting deliberate attention to maintaining the quality of service your clients expect. That comes down to process—even as everyone has developed personal strategies for working remotely, your team needs to ensure those methods work together.
Whether you’re a five broker shop supported by a single admin or a team focused on a particular property type inside a larger organization, collaboration in a now-online brokerage hangs on the same two elements.
Clear communication and accurate and available information are key for successfully working deals remotely as a team.
Phone calls, texts, emails, company-wide messaging systems like Slack… these can all be quick and convenient ways to stay connected while working remotely. But having conversations in multiple places is the easiest way for things to get missed.
Which email chain had the updated lease terms in it? Or maybe you and your co-broker decided you needed to create a new set of flyers, but your support staff was left out of the loop.
Project or deal management tools can help you bring all those threads together. In Buildout, our Premium Marketing feature creates one workspace for every deal in your pipeline.
You can use these tools to build a comprehensive discussion thread for a deal in one place. Log calls with a property owner, leave a note for your collaborators, assign tasks to your support staff, and more.
This makes it easy to never miss a beat of your process—just look up the deal in your system and you’re instantly caught up.
Seeing your coworker every day in the office can remind you to update them on things that have changed, but working from home requires you to be so much more intentional about those updates.
That’s why adding your process touchpoints should be easy—otherwise, your team might struggle with adoption and miss important communication. Buildout creates a BCC email address for your deals so you can forward or include emails in your projects without any extra work.
You can even build task lists that populate automatically every time your projects enter a new deal phase so that everyone knows exactly what to do, as soon as possible.
Strong communication tools can replace quick discussions in the office while everyone is working from home and help everyone stay up-to-date on where deals are and what’s needed to push them forward.
When you centralize your communication, you’re taking a big step toward creating one definitive location for everything your brokerage needs to know.
Building and maintaining that one source of data can be difficult when multiple people are contributing—that’s why it’s important your system is consistent and easy-to-use.
With your listing database in Buildout Marketing, everyone sees the same input form for property data. New fields appear dynamically depending on what property type, subtype, and sale/lease status is chosen. This same logic carries over to our other products when you’re building up your contact and research databases or taking advantage of our free data imports.
Every record in Buildout is accessible on mobile devices and stored in the cloud—so your team can access the data you need at any time, no matter where your remote office is located.
Buildout's full suite of tools connects all of your different databases with every step of your active deals. From your CRM to marketing deal management—all the way through back-office processing.
This seamless integration between your brokerage tools means you never have to manually re-enter data in order to advance a deal, making everything your team works with all the more accurate.
With all your data connected across deal stages, your brokerage has better insight into the health of every deal—and your brokerage as a whole. Tools that help you keep a pulse on your office are especially helpful when your team is remote.
Some of the metrics behind Buildout’s internal reporting features can also be used to build powerful reports for your clients.
This connection benefits individual brokers too. Deal pipelines are informed by closed transactions and help show probable gross income and commission plan progress. Leads from marketing can be instantly added to your CRM and back-office vouchers can generate comps for your database.
It’s important to have the right tools in place to bridge the gap between your team’s remote workplaces. For more on CRE tech and brokerage best practices, subscribe to our blog today!
.png)
