Overview

Founded in 1930, Harry Norman Realtors is Atlanta’s oldest and largest residential real estate firm. In a highly competitive market, Harry Norman Realtors’ average sales price is $125,000-$150,000 higher than their competitors, setting an expectation for on-the-ball agents that offer the greatest level of service to their clients.

Problem

To equip agents with an on-the-go tool set, Harry Norman Realtors sought a mobile app to provide an easy way for agents to get information while working in the field:

“Ninety-nine percent of the time when our agents are showing a property to a client, a client is always going to ask about a house that is not on our initial list,” said Scott Bennett, Vice President IT for HNR. Productivity loss prompted a desire for a mobile solution: agents were going back to the office to print out a new list of homes and information for their clients, slowing the process of closing a sale.

With an already strong web presence, providing a seamless experience between the HarryNorman.com website and a mobile search app was top priority to ensure clients could access their saved properties from anywhere, while agents could receive leads and inquiries instantly. Maintaining their brand and being seen as a tech leader in their market were additional needs the Harry Norman Realtor organization hoped to satisfy.

Solution

To solve this problem, Harry Norman Realtors partnered with HomeSpotter to provide a best-in-class branded mobile app for iOS and Android that integrated with their existing website, and most recently includes improved integration with their all-new website. The HomeSpotter integration with the new Boston Logic website and Boston Logic CRM platform ensures all agent activities and leads are managed in one place, eliminating duplicate data entry. Agents use the Boston Logic dashboard to monitor their clients’ favorited listings to continue to provide the best customer experience in the Atlanta market.

In addition to the seamless integration with Boston Logic, Bennett identified three immediate benefits to agents and clients after launching the Harry Norman Realtors mobile app from HomeSpotter:

On-the-go Searching: The augmented reality search scans the area using your phone or tablet’s GPS, pulling up properties that are right in front of you. For agents, this meant they didn’t have to run back to the office to access listing information: “While it may not seem like much, from the perspective of the client, this shows the client that the agent is a true professional and who they should want to work with,” said Bennett. Of the three benefits, this outweighs all others by a factor of two-to-one, he said.

Full MLS Listing Information: The Harry Norman Realtors app from HomeSpotter includes full access to MLS listing information for agents, including agent-only information.

“If our agents didn’t have the HomeSpotter app, they would panic,” said Bennett. “It has become such a valuable tool to them.”

With access to full MLS information, Harry Norman Realtor agents can quickly and easily provide answers to all their clients’ questions and provide next-level service: “Without the HomeSpotter app, our agents wouldn’t be able to quickly contact the listing agent and say, ‘Listen, I just pulled up in front of the house you just listed. Is there any way we can go into it now? My clients and I were driving around and we came across it,’” said Bennett. He described this as a huge advantage when looking to provide excellent service to their clients.

Agent Productivity: Giving agents access to on-the-go search and complete MLS information, inevitably, made them more productive. The mobile app put the MLS in the agent’s pocket at all times. Making just one extra trip into the office or someplace where they could pull out their computer to access the internet and a printer was adding extra hours into their work week that could have been spent on new deals. Being able to instantly access information about a property that wasn’t on their client’s initial list allowed agents to cut down on the number of trips they were taking and be more efficient.

The Payoff

For Harry Norman Realtors’ day-to-day business, HomeSpotter made their agents’ lives easier and positioned them to close deals faster.  Clients now have the ability to contact an agent or email an agent with one touch. This enables agents to be more effective, more productive and ultimately sell more houses with a faster turnaround time.

And the payoff isn’t just for the agents.  Consumers are much more likely to act on a property they see while using HomeSpotter, as Bennett points out, “If they had to drive home and get the information, they probably would forget it. But because they have a mobile app and they see something, they pull over to the side of the road, pull up the app, take a quick look at it and see if it’s something they want or not.”

In this day-and-age when everyone wants things now, this mobile app provides it — for the agents as well as for consumers, and that’s good for business. Using the Harry Norman Realtors HomeSpotter app let’s agents get out from behind a desk, and do what they do best — meet with clients and help them find their dream home.