Renwick Congdon is the CEO and founder of Imprev Inc., a trend-setting marketing technologies company based in Seattle. He began his career in the 1980’s as a top-producing loan officer, helping the agents he worked with create personalized marketing fliers and eventually developing software to automate the process. A serial innovator, Congdon went on to write code for the PC and Mac desktop software program Flyerware, which instantly created personalized real estate flyers for agents and brokers.
In 2000, he built Imprev in his garage (literally!), and the company has flourished. Imprev designed the first Enterprise marketing technology solution for real estate brokerage firms, the first multilingual real estate marketing application, the first private-label Marketing Center for a leading franchise, and helped to pioneer MLS integration for automated, data enabled marketing materials. No real estate marketing technology corporation works with more agents or brokers.
An authority in the industry, Congdon speaks regularly on marketing trends and technology. He was an Inman News Innovator Award finalist in both 2004 and 2011, and he serves on the board of directors of the Seattle chapter of Entrepreneurs Organization, a network of more than 8,000 business owners in 40 countries. On this episode of the podcast, he speaks to the benefits of Imprev’s marketing automation, how they became the go-to platform for real estate franchisers, work-life balance and trends in real estate technology.
What’s Discussed:
-Why Imprev’s marketing automation platform works especially well for the real estate industry
-Real estate is the only industry where the salesperson is responsible for conceptualizing and creating the marketing as well as distributing it
-With Imprev, a listing automatically triggers the generation of a website, fliers, postcards, video, social media pushes, etc.
-Why Imprev invests in a very large QA team
-Having “too many testers” allows their customer service team to be very small (two people serving 260,000 agents)
-How establishing the ‘why’ of your business can improve work-life balance
-Imprev’s ‘why’ is to have a great place to work with a product they believe in, strong customer relationships
-Renwick’s regret re: not having a partner
-Some venture capitalists won’t invest if you don’t have partners
-Why it is better to let a customer go rather than adding services (i.e.: CMA, CRM) that don’t fit your business model
-Why ease of use is key in developing a platform
-The first time someone gets on the platform, they can use it
-The second time, they are comfortable
-The third time, they’re an expert
-The beauty of automation
-Find the agents that do something the best and codify their best practices for everyone
-Trends in real estate and real estate tech
-Taking one piece of data from a property and using it to pull valid information and market to a particular group
Resources Mentioned:
Project Upstream Thought Leader Survey
Results of Imprev’s Fall Thought Leader Survey 2016
Zillow Consumer Housing Trends Report
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