Harry Norman, RE/MAX: Connecting with Consumers Easily

RISMEDIA, Nov. 10, 2008-At Harry Norman Realtors, President and CEO Martha Hayhurst and Associate Managing Broker Bill Murray have worked with VoicePad technology for nearly three years, they said.

According to Murray, VoicePad is a proactive source of contact for interested consumers.

His agents can easily engage the potential buyer, even if the initial generating listing is out of the caller’s price range.

“They’re still a buyer in that market who likes that house,” Murray says. “So by the agent being able to go back and talk with them, we may be able to get the client into a (similar) home in their price range…oftentimes, a listing with that agent.”

The job of today’s agents is changing, says Murray-their primary responsibility is no longer finding houses for consumers.

“Consumers are doing a pretty good job doing that online,” he says. “The agent’s job now is being a conduit to that transaction, more of an advisor role in the transaction. And VoicePad is positioning our agents to be just that.”

The integration of VoicePad technology has also saved Hayhurst’s company a measurable amount of money by helping Harry Norman best target its marketing dollars.

“We paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain that newspaper positioning,” she says. “But within a year of introducing VoicePad, we discontinued that contract. Savings of more than a half-million dollars gave us the ability to reallocate dollars into other areas of media and technology, including VoicePad.”

RE/MAX Properties East: All on Board

Harrell Tague, principal broker of RE/MAX Properties East in the metropolitan Louisville area, and president of the local Realtor’s association MLS arm, MetroSearch, Inc., learned about VoicePad after a visit by Standard several years ago.

Today, he says, all 122 of his agents can take advantage of the system.

“If they’re a smart agent, they can even put their own voice on the message at the end or have the homeowner offer a testimonial on the house,” Tague says. “And if someone calls the office on one of the listings after hours, the agent is still notified by text message that somebody is on the listing.”

Tague’s company also takes the VoicePad IDX technology’s back office capabilities further by using it to track important statistics.

“We are able to see how many people have accessed the system and how many people have clicked through for more information,” says Eric Blackwell, director of technology for RE/MAX Properties East. “We can tell how long they spend on the line or how quickly they got off. We can tell if they hung up as soon as they heard the price and we can share that information with the seller. This provides a ton of information that the agent can take back to the seller.”

Realtors today have to use all the tools at their disposal, says Tague, and VoicePad technology is among his agents’ most powerful tool in the box-or the handset.

“There’s an old saying that if you do what you always do, you get what you always got. But today you have to move forward and change, or you won’t get what you want,” he says. “This kind of technology is going to get much more pervasive in the future because so many of us are turning to our phones to deliver information. So it just makes sense to get in on a system like VoicePad-a technology leader that backs it up with a level of integrity and service you just don’t find out there very much nowadays.”

For more information, please visit www.voicepad.com.