The Human Side of hunter
As more AI-backed tools make their way into the public consciousness, The Real Deal spoke with the team at LocalizeOS about how they’re balancing their powerful proactive AI-solution hunter with a personal touch to give their clients the edge over the competition. hunter, the proactive AI conversational engine that engages and qualifies leads before connecting them with agents, is backed up by the Customer Success and Advisor team, a group of local real estate industry professionals who both keep hunter ticking and work with agents to ensure they’re making the most of the powerful LocalizeOS platform. We caught up with the LocalizeOS team and met with two new launch partner teams in Chicago to get their perspective on the value of LocalizeOS’ AI solution, hunter, and how it helps them amplify their business.
A Personal Trainer for Brokers
The Customer Success team is led by Shannon Dodge, a ten-year real estate industry veteran. “I don’t want to just dump a piece of software in someone’s lap and say, ‘See you later, go figure it out for yourself,’” says Dodge. “I’ve seen that before, and I don’t like it. It’s not professional, and it’s not valuable.” While hunter is incredibly powerful at helping convert leads into highly engaged buyers that can turn into closings, in some ways it’s the equivalent of a gym membership: unless you know how to use the training equipment and are disciplined in doing so, you’re not going to succeed. In this way, Dodge and her team are akin to personal trainers, working with their clients to maximize their potential via training, collaboration and support. “A lot of SaaS solutions have really great technology but only a few have real people that help to bridge that gap and explain to agents how to successfully use the tools they provide,” says Dodge, “With hunter, that’s where we come in.”
New agent teams receive a personalized onboarding process, during which Customer Success meets with the client, guides them through their first steps on the platform, and tailors the solution to meet the client’s specific needs. During this process, the client will be assigned both a dedicated Customer Success team member and a dedicated Advisor. The LocalizeOS team is in constant contact with the realty group to ensure that the solution is optimized for their business. For example, in the monthly business review, they will show the client exactly how the solution has performed over the last 30 days, from lead engagement stats to how they compare with their peers to where the team sees room for further value creation. Much like an athlete who is working with a personal trainer to get ready for a competition, there’s a point at which the broker has to take the engaged lead and actually close the deal. Dodge and her team are there to give agents and brokers the best chance of doing that, both at scale and with each individual lead.
In addition to engaging clients to help them get the most out of hunter, the Customer Success team is constantly working in the background to keep hunter humming along. “When we think there is potential for AI to be tripped up, an Advisor is flagged and immediately jumps in,” says Julie O’Hara, Vice President of Marketing for LocalizeOS. “For example, in our NY region, there’s a Long Island and a Long Island City, and maybe someone doesn’t specify which they mean. An Advisor can clarify this with the home buyer and based on how this is done, our machine learning will continue to build and become smarter, improving the AI experience.” No matter what issue crops up with hunter, the Customer Success and Advisor teams are always waiting in the wings to jump in and take over interaction with the potential buyer, creating a backstop behind the AI as it continues to learn.
“This is a major differentiator in the market for solutions such as ours, because it is human and AI centered”, said O’Hara.
“We Align Ourselves with the Best”
Who are some of these clients and how do they feel about working with LocalizeOS and the Customer Success team? The Real Deal met with a couple of the early adopters in Chicago about why they chose LocalizeOS, how they’ve integrated LocalizeOS into their business, and what their interactions with the team have been like. We spoke first with Grigory Pekarsky, Co-Founder of Vesta Preferred Realty in Chicago and an industry leader in converting online leads to sales with over $118M total sales in 2022. “When it comes to online leads, it’s a mass volume game,” says Pekarsky. “It’s about spreading your net as wide as possible, consistently.” What attracted Pekarsky to LocalizeOS was the platform’s ability to proactively engage buyers at scale without losing the personal touch.
“The beautiful thing about LocalizeOS is that they have the AI piece, but they also have the human piece” muses Pekarsky. “With AI, people don’t want to be tricked, right? With LocalizeOS, you have that human element to remind them, you’re not being tricked, we’re just trying to help you.”
Pekarsky compared LocalizeOS to having an entire department of Inside Sales Agents working around the clock to engage with leads.
“That’s a multi, multimillion-dollar investment,” says Pekarsky. “Now I have one massive machine learning program that can do thousands of things a day.”
One aspect of working with LocalizeOS that Pekarsky finds particularly valuable is the amount and quality of data and statistics that the system and the Customer Success team provides; for example, LocalizeOS gave Pekarsky visibility into the relative quality of the many leads sources that Vesta was paying for, giving him insight into how best to invest his online leads budget moving forward. “We align ourselves with the best,” says Pekarsky. “That’s why we’re aligning ourselves with LocalizeOS.”
Teammates You Can Trust
Next, we met with Medhi Mova, Founder of The Mova Group, a team of agents who have done $60 million in sales in the Chicago area in just the last two years. Mova, who takes a hands-on approach with every client, needed to feel confident handing over his leads to an AI solution. “Before jumping on board, I spent about a month on LocalizeOS’ New York platform pretending I was a buyer just to see how it interacted with me,” says Mova. “hunter is so smooth that you know it’s some kind of AI, but it’s so good at doing what it does that, if you’re in the market, you don’t really mind.” For Mova, hunter’s lack of emotion is a major benefit in an industry where agents get rejected more than 90% of the time. “hunter’s feelings don’t get hurt,” says Mova. “That’s a big deal in this business.”
A big part of Mova’s confidence in LocalizeOS and hunter comes from his relationship with The Mova Group’s dedicated Advisor Mimi Sillings. “It’s been a pleasure working with Medhi and the team,” says Sillings, who jumped on the call with Mova and The Real Deal.
“The clients have had amazing things to say about giving them new listings based on their feedback and the speed with which we get them out to showings.” Sillings will often participate in the handover of a lead from hunter to Mova or one of his agents, passing along all the information about the lead that hunter has captured in its buyer profile and ensuring that the process goes smoothly. More than just a consultant, Sillings feels like part of The Mova Group, and much like a personal trainer working with a star athlete, she takes evident pride in the work they’ve done together.
Mova believes that hunter’s ability to work with potential buyers at their pace and at scale represents the next phase of home buying, which has been stuck in the Zillow model for over a decade. “People love Zillow because they can look at whatever they want,” says Mova. “In this case, that information just comes to them. They don’t even need to look for it.”
Working with the LocalizeOS team and its AI solution means adding a powerful member to a brokerage’s team, multiplying their ability to expand the opportunity pool by proactively engaging and qualifying existing leads at scale.
If you’re ready to take your business to the next level, reach out to LocalizeOS today and add hunter to your team.
This article was produced by The Real Deal’s Brand Studio Team in conjunction with LocalizeOS. For more information about working with our Brand Studio Team please click here.