Why Homesnap Became Lyon Real Estate’s Mobile Solution
Commentary by Pat Shea
When our previous mobile app was sold to a competitor, we selected Homesnap, the public-facing brand of the Broker Public Portal (BPP), as our mobile solution. It was important for us to provide the services and tools that our agents were accustomed to, and we were excited about an app that would also consistently improve as technology continues to accelerate. Homesnap does that and more.
Lyon’s move to Homesnap is a win-win for everyone: the broker and the agent, but also the consumer. It presents a golden opportunity for our agents to get their listings in front of potentially thousands of people with no competing agent advertising interfering with their listings. This has been a pain point for agents with other national portals, where they must compete for leads on their own listings.
Another excellent feature is the Homesnap Broker’s Suite, which delivers custom branding for our brokerage and an exclusive opportunity for our agents to brand themselves to their clients.
We’re even more excited about what the future holds for our agents as we deeply integrate Homesnap and drive leads into our CRM. This will make Homesnap our agents’ “go-to app” and drive significantly more adoption and usage. All of these factors made the selection of Homesnap as our mobile app an easy decision.
Already, 95 percent of our agents are registered with Homesnap. As a brokerage, we have already generated 81,000-plus brand impressions through Homesnap—and we are just getting started. We are thrilled about the positive feedback from agents who are now actively using Homesnap.
Why Not Build an App?
We know that some brokerages who find themselves in a similar situation may consider a “build your own technology” approach. But we had no desire to build a mobile app.
First, you can buy technology today with even more exciting new innovation coming. Second, the Homesnap brokerage solution was by far the more cost-effective option. You can spend upwards of $100,000 building a basic brokerage mobile app, and then it takes half that much continued investment every year to maintain and update it. Third, due to the intense competition with mobile apps in the space, consumer adoption of brokerage’s apps simply doesn’t scale.
Homesnap is a proven mobile app in the hands of more than a million agents nationwide. It has reigned as the top-rated real estate app in the App Store for years. Our agents love the fact that consumers are coming directly to them through the Homesnap app. It connects each of our agents to their clients for life.
As a brokerage, we also benefit from the fact that BPP with Homesnap consistently reinvests a major portion of its revenue into making the app better and more widely adopted. It’s actually in their business charter. What other mobile app company does that?
Despite the surprise of unexpectedly losing a key technology services vendor, the good news for Lyon agents is that we haven’t missed a beat. Lyon continues to provide one of the very best technology stacks in the industry. We do believe, however, that the most important place to compete is on service. Homesnap helps Lyon agents deliver better service to every client. And that’s the kind of technology that helps us remain a leader in the industry.
Pat Shea has more than 25 years of real estate leadership and sales experience in the Greater Sacramento Region in Northern California. Under his leadership as president and COO, Lyon Real Estate has maintained the No. 1 ranking for independent residential real estate brokerages in the market. For more information, please visit www.homesnap.com/pro.
Note: This column originally appeared in the October edition of Real Estate Magazine and online at RISMedia.com