Prudential Douglas Elliman’s chief digital officer heads to Keller Williams NYC

A few months after Prudential Douglas Elliman’s chief digital officer, Dawn Doherty, was tapped to act as assistant manager at the firm’s Hudson Street office, the real estate digital marketing maven has moved to Keller Williams.

Doherty was named head of productivity coaching at Keller Williams NYC. She will integrate the Keller Williams national coaching and education platform to the New York City franchise and focus on “working with real estate professionals to hire, develop and lead teams that will allow them to grow their business.”

She commenced the job yesterday, working out of the firm’s new offices at 425 Park Avenue, between 55th and 56th streets, with company CEO Eric Barron, and COO Zhann Jochinke. While she has taken the new position at Keller Williams, Doherty is open to coaching agents outside the firm as part of her productivity coaching and education business. She recently completed her professional coaching coursework at a coaching certification training school.

Doherty, who said Keller Williams is “different and entrepreneurial,” compared to most real estate brokerages because agents “build their own brands,” will focus on “helping agents brand and communicate their beliefs and strengths as effectively as possible, both online and offline.” Doherty will help agents work more efficiently.

“Partnering with Dawn to oversee our productivity coaching program will make it much easier for our agents to work smarter with more structure, translating into a dramatically increased bottom line,” Barron said.

Doherty is so confident that she can help agents improve that she is guaranteeing people who sign a 12-month contract, a 20 percent increase in business within 12 months or they get their money back. She said she hasn’t worked out the prices yet, but individual agents and brokers, rather than the company, pay for her services. The reason, she said: “When people don’t pay for [stuff], they don’t value it.”

Doherty said she was impressed with the size of Keller Williams (more than 80,000 real estate agents in the United States and Canada, making it the second largest real estate franchise in the country), its nearly 30-year history, its profit-sharing system and that it has a “coaching culture.” She’s a fan of the book “The Millionaire Real Estate Agent,” whose lead author, Gary Keller, co-founded Keller Williams.

“Nobody in this city knows what this is,” Doherty said of the book, which has a big following among some agents nationally. But, “[Keller Williams has] an entire program that’s based on this book plus technology, and they have hundreds of agents that are certified and are doing this.”

Doherty joined Elliman in May 2011 to become the company’s first chief digital officer.

But Elliman didn’t prove to be the right fit for Doherty, who was previously instrumental in the development of the sales and rental listing website Streeteasy.com, which she joined in 2007, about a year after its launch.

“To be very honest with you, my love and passion is coaching,” Doherty said. “There wasn’t a role like that [at Elliman]. It’s a culture in place for 100 years [there]. I’m a startup person.”

Dottie Herman, president and CEO of Elliman, said: “It’s a good move; they need her help and she should go there. And I always wish Dawn well.”