Open communication. Ease of use. A custom experience. These are all things that describe what you should expect when you have a healthy tech partnership with a vendor. And for Vanessa Bergmark, CEO and owner of the San Francisco Bay Area’s Red Oak Realty, she has all this and more thanks to her longstanding partnership with Propertybase, a global real estate and mortgage software company.
A complete real estate platform ideal for independent brokerages, Propertybase provides real estate CRM software, web design, marketing, lead generation and back-office transaction management solutions.
While Bergmark has known about Propertybase for many years, her journey to partnering with the company involved a number of unpleasant experiences with other vendors.
Bergmark explains that she knew of several respected businesses that used Propertybase, but nonetheless, she partnered with another tech company years ago when she wanted to refresh her online appearance. Long story short, she knew she wanted a custom feel for her brokerage’s website and thought she had finally found the right company to work with until the company went belly-up in the middle of the process.
“We were stuck in a weird place with a template but no partner,” says Bergmark. “I reached out to a number of respected individuals in real estate and ended up contacting three vendors based on their advice.”
After a truncated relationship with one of those vendors that ended due to a total lack of customer service on the tech company’s part, Bergmark reached out to Propertybase.
“It was a tech decision, but it was Propertybase’s customer service that sealed the deal,” says Bergmark.
Red Oak Realty is an independent real estate company, which, more often than not, is notorious for stitching together back-end tech, she remarks.
“Propertybase managed to sync quite well with that,” explains Bergmark. “And when they can’t, they find solutions for us.”
Today, Bergmark can safely say that Propertybase is her favorite tech vendor by far. Aside from the actual tech solutions, they provide customer service that is second to none.
“I work with a lot of vendors, and Propertybase is my favorite as far as the human relationship goes,” says Bergmark. “They work really well with companies that don’t have a template approach.”
She tells us that she has an open line of communication with Vance Loiselle, CEO of Propertybase, and can run questions by him. However, she’s quick to note that it’s not just at the C-level that her company has found that ease of communication. Others in her company, including the Red Oak Realty marketing team, have an excellent relationship with Propertybase support.
“They go above and beyond,” says Bergmark. “It’s not often that you find a vendor that you can reach out to as a point of reference when you have questions about a new product.”
Her relationship with Propertybase’s leadership team is more than surface-level. In fact, Bergmark regards the relationship as more of a friendship. Recently, she attended her first real estate event since the start of the pandemic, and she went with the Propertybase team.
“I think we ended up spending more time with each other than we did at the conference sessions,” says Bergmark with a laugh.
Above all else, though, Bergmark values her partnership with Propertybase because having a tech partner that she can rely on and trust on a personal level is invaluable.
For more information, please visit www.propertybase.com.
Jameson Doris is RISMedia’s social medial/blog editor. Email him your real estate news ideas to jdoris@rismedia.com.
