How Real Estate Brokerages Help Agents Win with Online Learning

For real estate brokerages, quality agent education is not a nice-to-have. Today, it is absolutely critical. 

Why? Two reasons:

1. If an agent isn’t successful with one brokerage (i.e., they’re not earning as much as they’d like) they will leave and work for another one with stronger enablement and resources.
2. The housing market has become increasingly competitive and the demand from sellers and buyers for a frictionless experience is at an all-time high.

By having a fully powered learning experience, brokerages have a competitive advantage by providing easy access to resources agents can take full advantage of to make more money. 

4 Common Agent Training Use Cases

So, why would a brokerage use a real estate LMS to train their agents? 

There are 4 common use cases:

1. New Agent Onboarding
2. Continuous Education & Professional Development
3. Real Estate Compliance
4. Agent Recruiting

Want to learn more? Let’s dive in!

1. New Agent Onboarding

   The goal of new agent onboarding is to decrease the ramp time of new agents in addition to upleveling experienced agents joining your brokerage for the first time.

   For this reason, it’s imperative that the onboarding process includes relevant courseware in an easy-to-access sequence.

   To do this, brokerages can create an agent-friendly, intuitive course sequence by using learning paths. New agents are enrolled directly into a learning path that includes specific courses and events sharing essential information about your brokerage.

   Common learning path courseware includes professional coaching, overview of tools and programs, business planning, compliance courses, and an introduction to brokerage departments and company standards.

   The wide range of educational offerings ensures new agents are set up for success and as a result, reduces onboarding time significantly.

   “We are getting more people trained and boarded faster than we ever have before. The speed at which we can turn up locations increases when people are boarded faster.”
   —Nathan Kimpel, SVP Technology, Engel & Volkers.

2. Professional Development & Continuous Education

   Training doesn’t end with new agent onboarding. All agents, especially those in the first few years of their career, take advantage of professional development and continuous education.

   Skills learned include best practices in marketing, setting pricing standards, negotiating a sale, writing contracts and more. Whether a real estate beginner or a seasoned professional, with a full catalog of relevant courseware, all agents can find training resources to fit their needs.

   “The development and launch of Hanna University has completely enabled our teams to learn, grow, and evolve,”
   —Karlton Utter, Vice President of Career Development at Howard Hanna Real Estate Services.

   Want to see a live example of a fully launched academy? Take a peek at Howard Hanna’s Hanna University!

3. Real Estate Compliance

   Brokerages know real estate is demanding and requires sophisticated knowledge, ranging from tax laws to housing regulations and more. It’s important for agents to know and understand regional housing and area laws while also ensuring a top-quality experience for buyers and sellers.

   Brokerages readily update and create new courses about current city regulations and local laws making sure agents fully comprehend and uphold critical safety regulations. Compliance education continues throughout an agent’s journey with a brokerage, from being a new agent through having several years in the field.

4. Agent Recruiting

   Having a public academy directly assists brokerages with attracting new talent. Recruiters share academy content with prospective agents, helping them learn the value the brokerage provides in addition to highlighting different tools available to them when signing with the firm.

   To ensure course links are easy to share, brokerages often set up their recruiting academies with open access authentication. This way, recruiters can readily share open source course links in emails directly to prospective agents. The academy becomes a powerhouse to showcase the brokerage’s impact and brand.

   “We didn’t anticipate that the Compass Academy would become a marketing tool, however, given the value created for our agents in their learning journey, we were able to evolve the original use case,”
   — Damaris Troche, Compass Program Manager

   Want to take a peek at an academy fueling agent recruitment, click here to learn more!

3 Tips to Elevate Agent Education

Ready to elevate your agent learning experience? Below are the 3 tips brokerages employ to ensure agent learning is seamless and easy. 

1. Optimize for Mobile Devices

   Agents need professional resources available anytime, anywhere. By having training materials at their fingertips, agents can effortlessly access course content addressing individual competencies in addition to sharing essential brokerage knowledge.
   
   Whether agents are out in the field showing homes or in the office drafting contracts, having relevant trainings readily available ensures their most urgent questions are answered while completing critical activities.
   
   To do this, brokerages should optimize their content for mobile devices. Instead of relying on in-person trainings or resource repositories, agents are able to access a variety of relevant courseware across devices regardless of their location.
   
   “Lighthouse has also been developed specifically for mobile devices, so that our people can access the platform anytime from anywhere – empowering them to be in control of their development and growth.”
   —LJ Hooker Group Acting CEO and Chief Performance Officer, Christine Mikhael

2. Connect With Your Tech Stack

   Real estate brokerages can achieve further ease of accessibility by incorporating their academies into their own intranet. By setting up a direct connection to other key platforms, brokerages provide a modern, integrated training system with targeted, flexible courseware.
   
   As a best practice, there’s a single icon featuring the academy on a brokerage’s proprietary platform, and agents click and open a full suite of courses, webinars, downloadable resources, and instructional videos on an academy dashboard.
   
   “We are solving the need to be able to provide just-in-time learning for our network members. We have been able to successfully integrate Northpass within our proprietary technology making it feel not like an extension but an inherent part of our brand”.
   —Meredythe Brainard, VP, Product Enterprise, Engel & Volkers.

3. Personalize Content

   To further take an agent-first approach, brokerage education and knowledge teams can create original content and personalize their training programs.
   
   By developing individual learning tracks, agent education leaders ensure all enrolled courses are relevant, contextual and engaging, helping agents quickly find what they need from a full course catalog without being distracted by unnecessary information and resources. Even more, the content is fully tailored to agent needs and personalized to increase engagement and instill vital knowledge.
   
   “What I like best about is the flexibility and customization...the functionality within Northpass is impressive, and has given us use-cases and content ideas beyond where we were initially searching.”
   —Kevin Van Eck EVP of Innovation and Education at @Properties

Why It’s Important to Educate Your Agents

Any brokerage relies on three things to stay in business:

• Closing deals
• Helping agents share service value
• Keeping customers happy (and using the brokerage for future real estate transactions)

There’s no way around it. Agent education does all of those things.

If you want to learn more about how Northpass can help you launch an agent education program or take an existing one to the next level, reach out today.