What do you do when you need more vendors to renovate homes in a hot real estate market?
You find leverage.
When real estate agents work together, as a group they can exert leverage with vendors – and vendors benefit, too.
Vendor demand
The pandemic has had a significant impact on vendor demand in some markets.
Homeowners fortunate enough to do remote work are clamoring to fix up their homes for work, remote schooling, and more stay-at-home time. They’re adding and renovating space for home offices, family rooms, home gyms and more.
Full-time remote work is allowing people to move to more affordable places, or to where they can have a different lifestyle. And that means more homes being bought and sold, and more home preparation to be done. And higher vendor demand.
Agent leverage
In spite of the high demand for vendors, vendors know that a single real estate agent can provide as much as 50x more work than a single homeowner. For example, if a homeowner paints their home once every 5 years, a single real estate agent might paint 50 homes in those same 5 years.
A brokerage of 500 agents can have the buying power of up to 25,000 homeowners. That kind of buying power is hard for vendors to ignore. Even a boutique brokerage of 10 agents can have the buying power of 500 homeowners. The potential leverage can be staggering.
Agent-vendor synergy
A brokerage is a very efficient and valuable source of new business for vendors. But more importantly, vendors are motivated to protect their reputation within a brokerage by delivering quality and timely work, in order to further grow their business. When a vendor knows that there’s potential for referrals and their reputation may be shared and readily visible to all the agents at the brokerage, they are even more motivated to deliver.
Building a strong agent-vendor synergy takes more than a static preferred vendor list or concierge program. It takes agent collaboration where agents can dynamically share their vendor experience and regularly discover new vendors.
VendorBot™ consolidates your leverage
For the first time, agents can truly consolidate their leverage with vendors. And vendors can benefit from that consolidation.
VendorBot is far more than a preferred vendor list – it’s a digital assistant that helps agents share vendor experiences and identify vendors that their fellow agents trust.
VendorBot not only supports sharing vendor experiences, but VendorBot also remembers them. Within a matter of a short time, your brokerage and agents will have an extensive list of vendors across a wide range of services.
For each vendor, agents will know who has used the vendor, when, and how their experience was. If an agent wants to know more specifics about a vendor, they know exactly which agents to check in with.
Normally building a vendor database with this level of depth requires a lot of effort in the form of cooperation, data entry and IT support. Which is why it doesn’t happen, except perhaps as a semi-static vendor list.
VendorBot fully automates the collaboration process, every step of the way from the moment an agent needs a vendor. VendorBot works and has a high adoption rate among agents because there is no training, no new software, no data entry, and no IT support needed. It’s truly effortless.
Learn more about VendorBot and how your brokerage can achieve an agent-vendor nirvana, even in the hottest and most demanding markets.