Craig Rowe reviews a recruiting and retention solution called 3 Data Pulse, designed to assist real estate teams, brokers, and operations personnel in agent recruiting, retention, and management.
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3 Data Pulse is an agent recruiting, retention, and coaching application
Platforms: Browser
Ideal for: Operations managers, brokers, team leaders, and agents
Top selling points:
• Proactive productivity oversight
• Intuitive leader boards and KPI insights
• Multi-office flexibility
• Coaching guidance; personality profiles
• Agent-by-agent upkeep
Top concern(s):
The software is likely best suited for those companies with staff to commit to its highest and best use; otherwise, it could be viewed as another burden for a broker to tackle, despite the appeal of the value proposition.
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What you should know
3 Data Pulse is designed for the broker or team lead with actual business acumen — or at least for the one who wants to create some. This is software for the leader who uses more than the number of butts in seats to gauge success, an approach that to this day remains unfortunately predominant.
What this application can do is support a user’s vision for their brokerage five years from now; it’s the tool that will alert you when hammering away at a square peg jammed in a round hole. Sometimes, an agent just doesn’t fit what you’re trying to build and sometimes it’s what you’re building. Either way, 3 Data Pulse can help you figure it out.
This software’s benefits are thanks to a broker and team manager who was open to the fact that managing people is hard and that an agent’s success shouldn’t be left to them alone. It’s easy to manage transactions. People are another matter.
In terms of features and functionality, just about everything you need to find, keep, and nourish a brokerage’s revenue stream is here. There are dashboards with in-depth performance metrics across standalone or multi-office operations that depict income pipelines by office and agent, as well as agent count (loss and growth), recruiting targets with activity insights, and enough critical data to take a daily EKG of a real estate business.
Drilling down into recruiting, the user can probe as deep as they’d like into a potential new agent. There are transaction histories and profiles, and a series of auto-generated templates that can power outreach campaigns tailored to each prospect.
Timelines are created for each recruiting effort, and the performance of a campaign can be measured, too. Thus, like every effective marketing effort, 3 Data Pulse allows its users to know what messages hit home when trying to persuade new agents to reprint their business cards.
I like that the software doesn’t stop being helpful after landing a coveted prospect. In addition to an onboarding module that ensures the initial courtship goes well, 3 Data Pulse offers coaching as its third pillar between recruiting and retention to help ensure mutual success.
It does a good job of separating the two principles but not disconnecting them. Coaching resources include breakdowns of historic list price accuracy, days on market averages, recent closing details, and a sharp artificial intelligence component that offers ideas on how to best talk to the subject agent when it’s time to review what’s working.
Charts and metrics give users transparency into performance dips and indications as to why a deal went south or why a person isn’t getting as many leads as they may have last year at this time. Is it personal? Did they start working a new ZIP Code?
Admins can pull in data from their CRM to continually feed agent activity into the coaching components. Meeting notes can be kept, and there’s also the same sort of response reminder system and activity notifications as one might expect when nursing a new buyer or seller lead or managing a transaction.
Brokers can use 3 Data Pulse as a way to monitor the top-down operation, too. It offers comprehensive agent rosters per location, a RealTrends integration to keep an eye on possible entire office acquisitions, a company-wide scoreboard, and other business intelligence to ensure each week, month, and quarter is aligning with long-term goals.
A regular dose of internal accountability isn’t an easy concept for real estate leaders to swallow. After all, a few new agents can turn things around quickly, right? You can always blame it on the market, too.
At some point though, a good long look in the mirror becomes overdue. And all those lines and cracks and flaws you were so good at pointing out in others can finally be seen in your own visage.
I know that sounds dramatic. But the best drama is always rooted in the truth, and nothing bad ever comes from a little humility.
If your business goal for 2025 is to make it through 2025, then it’s going to need some support beyond clever listing videos and lead provisioning. It’s going to take some uncomfortable looks in the mirror and probably some better hires.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe
Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.
