Memo from Pete 5.6.19

EMAIL PROGRAM

There is a wide divergence of opinion about how Concierge Service should conduct our email campaign.  Part of our marketing offering to sellers, that is used by many of our agents to show the advantage of listing with the #1 national brand in the market, is the availability of e-mailing all CBV agents and 500 top performing agents with other agencies with new listings, price reductions, open houses, etc.  These agents feel it is important to continue the program as it has been.  The other thought is that this is close to spam and many agents tire of all of the emails that end up in their in-box.  In order to resolve this CBV will open another email account that will be used solely to email property information.  Agents may opt out of the new account and still receive all other emails from CBV.  The new account will be in place by Friday and agents wishing to opt out may do so by blocking the sender (CBV) on property emails starting Monday.  Thank you, Ryan Nix, for a sensible solution.

CUSTOM ORDERS FROM CONCIERGE SERVICE

On April 19^th CS stopped taking custom orders.  There were multiple reasons for this including doing the work and then never having the product ordered and, too much time devoted to simple products that required multiple iterations.  The issues with custom orders made it impossible to fulfill regular orders correctly and in a timely manner.  In the 2 weeks since we instituted this change the number of errors has been significantly reduced and the time from order to proofing and proofing to print and delivery has been reduced.  I understand that this is a major inconvenience for agents who find that they not only have to have pieces created, they have to have them printed, folded, bundled and delivered to the post office at a significantly higher price than CS has done this.  When CS is comfortable that they can manage the work load we will start to add specific custom products to our offerings.  This will occur this summer as we transition into a department that can both meet most of the needs of the sales team and complete the work in a speedy and seamless fashion.

AGENT ADVOCATE

A special thank you to Daniella Dous who has stepped in to become our Agent Advocate.  Her SLAs of 98% (percentage of time she meets time goals) have been far above the industry standard of 90%.  She has learned a lot in the last 60 days and will continue to be a bigger and bigger asset for all of us.  Thank you to all of the agents who have embraced the program, the response has been overwhelmingly positive and we expect to continue to provide more service for Concierge Service issues.  In June we will start the Agent Advocate program for Client Builder, Donna Layton is currently training on the system.  We expect this to be a true resource for the Client Builder Team.

HOME WARRANTIES

The home warranty ordering process has been revamped and made simpler.  To receive the $25 marketing credit for a home warranty the warranty must be ordered through ProWorks.  The step to order a warranty are as follows:

1. Go to ProWorks and select your transaction
2. Click on “Marketing” the three home warranty companies will drop down
3. Select the company you wish to use
4. Select either “Seller” or “Buyer”
5. ProWorks will
   1. Electronically notify the warranty company that there is an order
   2. Send you an email stating the warranty company has been notified
   3. Send the credit to the accounting department when the transaction closes
6. Upload the warranty application with your other documents.

STATE OF THE MARKET

After a very slow start to the year we are seeing excellent activity in all offices and our pending sales are ahead of the same time last year.  The economic outlook for the country, Florida and Duval County are all very strong and have made me feel like the economist who predicted fifteen of the last three recessions.  Especially important to north Floridians is that for the last year the fastest growing airport in the United States has been JIA, which has added 99 flights per month, many of them direct, and an additional capacity of 20,000 seats.  This kind of growth portends a very favorable business climate for the area even if the national economy sags.  So, at the end of the day the outlook is, if you do the right things it will be a great year!