Malte Kramer the CEO of Luxury Presence talks about his journey and how he ended up in real estate. Malte dispels a few myths around website creation and talks about SEO and how to bring traffic to your website organically. Malte shares a few recommendations on nurturing leads. Malte also discusses AI and its impact on the real estate business. Last, Malte shares his short-term predictions on real estate market.
Check out Malte’s profile on LinkedIn and follow him on Instagram.
If you’d prefer to watch this interview, click here to view on YouTube!
Malte Kramer can be reached at (310) 955-1077.
This episode is brought to you by Real Geeks.
Transcript
D.J. Paris 0:00
Are you thinking of upgrading your personal realtor website? Well, today we’re have a conversation with one of the top website designers in the industry, and he’s going to tell you exactly what you should think about if you decide to upgrade. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment we’re going to be speaking with multi Kramer, who is the CEO and founder of luxury presence. They make realtor websites. So it’s gonna be a really interesting one because we’re going to talk all about what a realtor website should have and shouldn’t have and maybe what you should consider for your own site. Before we get to Malte please tell a friend about the show. That’s the best way you can help us think of another realtor that could benefit from this great conversation we’re about to have or any of the other conversations we have in previous episodes, send a link over to another realtor that would really help us and also please leave us a review especially if you’re listening on iTunes or really anywhere that you’re finding our podcast. Let us know what you think of the show we appreciate it and are so grateful for everyone listening right this very second it’s been five or six years we’ve done 500 episodes over 3 million downloads all because of you guys really it’s all because of you so I’m so grateful. This is we’re getting towards the end of 2023 and I just wanted to say thanks in case I forget to do it in a future episode. So thank you thank you thank you keep listening. We’ll keep making episodes and enough from me let’s get to the main event my conversation with multi Kramer.
Okay today our guest on the show is multi Kramer and I want to tell you more about multi. Multi Kramer is the CEO of luxury presents, which is the leading real estate marketing platform and one of the fastest growing propped up companies in the United States since founding the business in 2016. He’s grown it to over 100 million in revenue with a global team of 600 employees and a client list of nearly 10,000 real estate professionals. To date luxury presents has raised 50 million from notable investors, including top VC firm of Bessemer Venture Partners, Zillow co founder Spencer Rascoff, real estate Coach Tom Ferry, NBA champion, Dirk Nowitzki, and NFL Pro Larry Fitzgerald. Now originally from Germany, Malte moved to the United States on a basketball scholarship to Pepperdine University, and after graduating as valedictorian he began his entrepreneurial journey by launching a fundraising app called giver and went on to receive an MBA from Stanford. Multi was named a Housing Wire rising star in 2021, rising Entrepreneur of the Year in 2022 by.la, and Housing Wire tech trendsetter in 2023. He’s a dedicated rescue dog dad, the author of play for something which is a North Star for student athletes and a finisher of a half Ironman multi Welcome to the show.
Malte Kramer 4:32
Thank you so much for having me DJ. I
D.J. Paris 4:35
forgot to give you the most important thing a plug. Everybody go visit multi and his website which is luxury presents.com. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes and I’d like you to follow a luxury presents on LinkedIn as well as Instagram. Just search for luxury presents and subscribe again LinkedIn and Instagram. We will have links to that as well in the show notes notes, I am very excited to chat with you. Because before we get into what your company offers, I, I very rarely have I been impressed with real estate agent websites. And I know you do more than that, but specifically that I think you guys probably do it better than just about anyone. So I’m excited to get to that. And I’ve also noticed over the years being on this show, we have we interview top 1% agents and more than any other website design firm, the luxury President shows up over and over and over again. So I figured it’s probably time to talk to the to the man who made it all happen. And I’m curious to sort of get your thoughts on why your brand has attracted so much top talent in the real estate game. And I know that you aren’t just for top tier brokers you can handle and I’m sorry, in Illinois, we call everyone a broker. So Realtors off site, but you work with individual Realtors of any of any production level. But um, let’s let’s first start with you. So tell us you know, we understand your your guy from Germany, you came over, did your undergrad by the way undergrad in Malibu, right? Is that where Pepperdine is? It? That’s right. Yeah, that’s a tough, that is a tough place to be. It’s like it’s almost right on the beach, even if I remember correctly. Very
Malte Kramer 6:24
little studying gets done out there. Grade school under. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 6:28
And then and then off to Stanford. So tell us a little bit about your journey. You know why? Why real estate because it doesn’t appear that that was really in your background?
Malte Kramer 6:39
Yeah, you’re right. I I fell into real estate. I was an entrepreneur out of undergrad. So I had two previous companies in different industries. One was a nonprofit fundraising app. And in 2015, a real estate agent out here in Beverly Hills, who was a friend asked me to do some consulting work for her. And I was very curious about the industry. And she was she still is one of the most successful agents in the world. Her name is Jade Mills, she sold over 7 billion in her Korea sales. Some of the most expensive homes has sold the Playboy Mansion and Chartwell estate and all of these very famous, you know, 100 plus million dollar homes. And naturally, I wanted to see what does the inside of her business look like? How does she market herself. And so I spent several months working with her and I told her, I will do all of this work, set up your digital marketing, which was my background, if you let me be a fly on the wall, I want to come to listing appointments, I want to see how you run your team. And so that’s how I got started and how I fell in love with the industry. And it for me, it’s always been about helping other people scale. It’s something that I really enjoy. I’ve been an entrepreneur all my life, it’s what has opened doors for me and us, I grew up in Germany. So I’ve been able to build my life and my business here and find my fiancee here. And all of it goes back to the ability to start a business. And so it’s something that I’m passionate about. And I’ve just found real estate agents, ultimately, they are all intrapreneurs at heart. And I love the idea of being part of their their growth and helping them scale. How
D.J. Paris 8:15
did you start to put together an offering that would be unique from other other tech firms that are offering website development solutions for realtors? And what was what was what was the hole that you saw in the industry that you thought you could fill? Yeah,
Malte Kramer 8:35
we wanted to bring together the performance side and the the design side and the especially in the luxury market of the very high and aesthetic that agents were looking for. Most of the agents I talked to, they said one of two things, they either said, I have a website, and it looks great, but I’m not getting any leads. And I’m not really using it for any advertising. Or they said I have a website. It’s a lead gen site, I am getting some leads from it. But I’m embarrassed to put it on my business card, I’m embarrassed to put it on my flyers. And it never made sense to me why you had to pick one or the other. And so our goal in the very beginning was to come out with a website product that worked for the very high end agents like Jade Mills, who cared about aesthetics, but also had were built on a platform and had the tools and had the services to provide the performance marketing the lead gen that agents were looking for, and that they really needed to grow. So that was the that was the starting point. And then since then we’ve obviously built a lot more and it is a full end to end marketing platform now.
D.J. Paris 9:38
Yeah, let’s let’s talk about I want to start first to dispel a few myths around website creation and then we can get into some of the the other other ancillary stuff that you do that is not just a front end website design, but there’s a lot of misconception even still with why someone should have why Realtors should have their own website isn’t just a online business card, should it have a home search feature with IDX data feed, so that they, you know, visitors can can search for properties. There’s a lot of debate on this topic. And I’m curious of how and you talked about this is we want something that looks beautiful, but also performs. You know, let’s, I would love to talk about all of this conversion. What’s the intention? As you guys think about websites? Is it more Look at how pretty I am? And is it also I want to push you through some sort of funnel so that you know you’re being marketed to, but I’d love to hear just, you know, overall, how you think about websites? Yeah.
Malte Kramer 10:43
There are two goals for for any website. And the first is to establish credibility. It’s about branding, establishing trust, and you can use your website just as a digital business card and still serve that first goal. So credibility is number one, and then two is lead generation. And not everyone uses their website as a lead generation tool, not everyone chooses to run digital ads, or do SEO, or do social in a way that drives traffic to their website. But that first goal everyone has, and everyone should have, in my mind, you know, just think about what you do when someone tells you about a product or service they like, right, you take out your phone, you Google it, and you go to the website, and you do your research. And it’s no different with any business we learn about. So even if you’re not running any advertising, chances are any repeat or repeat, sorry, referral business or word of mouth, those people are going to look you up. And so not having a website, in my opinion, is means you’re missing out on business. Almost certainly, right? If someone Google’s your name, and nothing shows up, right? You don’t you don’t have credibility. So that’s part one. And then on the lead gen side, there’s a lot that goes into it. Obviously, you know, conversion rate of the website matters a lot. You really should build dedicated landing pages, in my opinion, if you’re using them for specific ad campaigns. And not just drive traffic to a general homepage, which we both know is is never going to convert at the same level as dedicated landing page. But yeah, those are the two high level goals that we that we start with. And then based on on our clients preference, we built the site accordingly.
D.J. Paris 12:21
One of the one of the myths I want to dispel is the idea of putting up a website, and not understanding what SEO is and how important it is to actually drive traffic if you’re looking for organic traffic, meaning, you know, putting up a website and just hoping that people find it. You know, if I think most of our audience would know that, that that isn’t the way the world works these days, and hasn’t for quite some time. But it’s really important for people to remember that SEO is a is a is a difficult, difficult beast to really work with. You’re dealing with hundreds of factors that Google takes into account in order to determine when somebody does a search what you know what rank your particular website will be for that particular keyword or key phrase. And you’re not only competing against all the other realtors potentially in your area, you’re also competing against the brokerages themselves. Online lead gen companies like Zillow, Redfin, there’s a tremendous amount of competition for what we would call short tail keywords, which would be something like I live in Chicago, so Chicago realtor, if I were to try to rank for that, it would be very difficult, it would be a long, multi year process. It’s possible but it would be incredibly difficult. But there are longtail keywords that that people can have success with. So for example, in Chicago, maybe Chicago Realtors is too difficult to break into on Google, but maybe Wicker Park realtor cop for condos, you know, which is a long a longtail keyword meaning many, many words in that phrase, that is something that possibly you could work towards. Can you just talk just for a moment on SEO just so that when people are thinking about websites, they’re not necessarily getting the wrong impression? I’m going to put this website up and people are just going to find it? Yeah,
Malte Kramer 14:15
this is a very common misconception and a mistake agents make is they launched a website, and then they think magically, leads are gonna appear. And the reality is you have to drive traffic there somewhere. So the at a high level, there are three ways you can do it in a scalable way. One is on social media organically, which requires a lot of content. And we can get into that later, too is on Google organically, which is SEO, and then three is paid advertising, which we can talk about later as well, which is the most reliable, fastest way, but also probably the most expensive. So let’s hone in on the second one SEO. There’s a lot that goes into it. Google’s algorithm has hundreds if not 1000s of ranking factors that we know They take into account when they decide what are the 10 results that they’re going to show on the first page for any given search. And as you noted longtail keywords, the more specific and the smaller the search volume. Typically, the lower the competition, the easier it is to rank. And that’s usually what we recommend people start with is create a block, put blog posts on there that answer very specific questions that someone in your market may have. So something like what are the property taxes in Silver Lake could be a great blog post that someone might look for. Now, this keyword pause perhaps is only getting 10 searches a month, 50 searches a month, something very low. But if you do that with enough articles, and you rank for enough of these keywords, you can drive significant keyword search volume over time. The great thing about SEO is it compounds right you write the article once, and then once it ranks, it generates traffic every single month. And you don’t have to spend any additional money on acquiring that traffic. So it is a very effective high ROI long term strategy, in my opinion,
D.J. Paris 16:02
that we should, we should I just wanted to make one quick point about about that particular strategy. So what we have to think about, I think this will be helpful for anyone who has a website and is looking to rank organically for some of these longer tail keywords, like Malte was saying property taxes in Silver Lake, what you really have to focus on with respect to the blog post is, and this would be my recommendation, do that keyword search, do it in an incognito browser, so you get a true search result, versus doing it in your you know, locked anyway, just do the search, look for the top three or four results, see what kind of content those search results are, are, you know, have published, and then you have to beat that you have to do better than those top three searches. So you’re going to want to put some video in there, you’re going to want to put longer form content, the days of short form, text content is are over people want long form. So these are these is the way if you really want to go down this this path, you have to beat everyone out because Google’s objective is to serve up the best possible content for that particular search. And if yours isn’t the best possible content, well, Google can tell pretty quickly because people will bounce off of your site more quickly than maybe other sites and they’re gonna go well, we don’t want people to bounce off our site and have to do another search. We want them to go to the one that they think has the best. And they were just going to look at consumer behavior. So they’re going to look at what happens when someone visits your website. And then they’re going to determine Hey, this is a pretty good or not so good answer to this question that somebody put in the search. So let’s let’s talk about the other two ways of generating traffic because I think this is the more predictable path and certainly, certainly, yeah, certainly the less arduous task, which would be paid advertising and social media, organic social media. Let’s Yeah, let’s start with Windows.
Malte Kramer 18:01
Yeah, let’s talk about let’s talk about paid ads. Next, so paid advertising both on social and search, for obvious reasons as the most reliable way to get traffic to your site, you’re paying per click. And the way I recommend you approach it is by thinking about what type of offer you can make that will get get someone to give you their contact information. And usually that is a lead magnet or a type of offer that provides a lot of value. This could be a market report, this could be a home valuation, this could be access to a curated set of listings, if you have access to off market listings, this could be the promise of getting access to those. So think about what is the what is the thing that someone who’s searching on Google, or someone who’s browsing social media could be a good client will likely want and see value and and when you start with that offer, then the rest of the ad and the landing page becomes pretty clear. Usually you would target a keyword around that offer. So let’s take home valuations for example, you could target free home valuation or home valuation in Silverlake on Google, someone clicks on the ad gets to a landing page. Again, you want to mirror what you’re targeting on the landing page. So it should speak to that particular keyword search. And then you have on that landing page, a forum where someone can put in their contact information. Obviously, the more fields you ask, the lower your conversion rates going to be if you just ask an email to probably get a lot of leads, but you don’t know a lot about them. If you ask a phone number a conversion rate will be lower, but generally the quality of the leads will be higher. And from there the last and maybe most important step is these are leads that have to be nurtured. These are internet leads that are going to be on Google intent will be a bit higher than on on social media in general, because people are searching proactively for something within real estate whereas on social media, you’re in interrupting their experience by showing them an ad. So they may not be in the market at all. And so generally quality will be a little bit lower, and they’ll require more nurturing, and nurturing should take place over weeks and months. Speech elite matters. And then you want to have a nurture sequence, ideally automated, and some type of email marketing going out. Again, with the goal of providing as much value as possible, the goal is not to aggressively sell these people, the goal is to give them so much value that they trust you. And when they’re ready to transact, you’re the the agent or the brand that they call. So that’s the approach that we take two paid advertising at a high level, we’re
D.J. Paris 20:40
talking about email drip campaigns, on possible text campaigns, depending on what contact information you’re getting. Also, if you’re getting a phone number, the speed to lead is so critical. And again, these are a little different than a zillo lead. So Zillow, people have already raised their hand, they’ve already clicked on a particular property and said, I want to go see that. So it’s already as hot of a lead as you could probably get it being that they already want to take action. Whereas you’re right with paid advertising. Yes, they’re searching for something that you hope is is you know, a call to action. But you’re right, there may be a delay in the actual step to purchase or sell a property. So that the idea of how do you recommend nurturing? What what do you guys, what have you found with your clients works? Sort of the best for ROI? Is it? Is it a series of emails? Is it a combination of email, video text? What are you guys finding, as far as trends that seem to convert most,
Malte Kramer 21:45
it’s a combination of all three, ideally, and I would base the exact sequence on where the leads came from and where they are in the funnel. So if we’re talking high funnel, top of funnel, meaning someone on social media who downloaded a market report, you don’t really know if they’re ready to even talk to you. So phone call may not resonate, well, those we would have a sequence that’s a little bit lighter touch, I would recommend something that’s mostly email based, and you’re going to start sending them to newsletter, they’re going to need more warming up. Now, if you get someone who requested a home valuation, chances are on Google, chances are intense, a lot higher, they’re a lot more ready, definitely call and text them. And a lot of touch points, probably nine touch points over the course of two weeks as appropriate. One of the really exciting things that is happening now, thanks to AI is so much of this can be automated and still feel very personalized. We are about to broadly released, we’ve been in beta for our AI texting tool. And so leads that are coming in from your website, this tool can engage them. And if you read through the conversations, you are not able to tell that you’re not talking to a human being. I mean, it’s, it’s uncanny how well it corresponds. And it then sets up an appointment. And we’re seeing about 15% lead to appointment conversion rates, which is Wow, very high, obviously, for internet leads. And this was just text based text conversation.
D.J. Paris 23:15
And just to sort of put that in perspective, a 15%, lead to appointment ratio would be about Well, I think it’s three times or Well anyway, well, it’s gonna say, as I know, for Zillow, and upcity, and leads of that nature, which are internet leads already raised their hand, I want to go see this, if you can convert 5% of those leads, which by the way, our pay to play leads, either you’re paying on the front end, or the subsidy, you’re paying on the back end, but you’re buying the lead from those tech companies. And if you can close 5%, you’re a superstar. So the idea of, of getting a 15% conversion is incredible. And
Malte Kramer 23:54
to be clear, this is 15% from leads to meeting requests. So there’s the additional step you have to share of actually close, it may end up being a few closed and 30% of them that would get you to a 5% close rate, which I would be extremely high. You know, on average, I think industry average is something like 2% If that so but yeah, these, these AI tools are making it a lot easier. So you’re not the one anymore who has to do the texting and the calling yourself you can outsource that to to an AI assistant, which is really exciting. Are
D.J. Paris 24:26
you guys I am the most excited for AI around I’d love to talk about AI I’m most excited personally outside of real estate for this idea of having an assistant for me, where I’m able to converse with this assistant. Make sure that they know what I need on a daily basis, whether it’s scheduling, reminding me about XY and Z go pick up the groceries go, you know, whatever it may be that’s coming. And we’re seeing the most earliest versions of that in some of these website AI systems whether it’s Customer Service, we’re seeing this now, it used to be a lot pourer. In years past where you would go onto a website, you’d start a chat you clearly, they would just lie and say it was somebody’s somebody that wasn’t a real person, you can tell really quickly, because the conversation wasn’t all that authentic and organic. But now AI is getting a lot a lot better. And we’re seeing you’re actually able to have a meaningful interaction with with an AI Chatbot. Because the technology is just, you know, it just keeps keeps evolving. Are you guys adding that in as a feature as like a customer service? chatbot, I’m assuming to your front end websites.
Malte Kramer 25:42
We are Yes. So on the on the consumer facing side, there are a lot of these tools popping up now. And more and more companies doing this where the AI will communicate with the consumer on your behalf. And obviously, your website, chat is a great medium for it. Text after a contact inquiry comes in is a great medium for it. So that’s one part. And then the second part, which you also touched on, I’m even more excited about is AI, an AI assistant for the agent. So something that plugs into your systems, and then gives you a ideally voice based interface to interact with the AI assistant in the same way you would interact with a human assistant and just give a TAS and ask it to provide information. This is coming. We’re working on something we announced in August presents copilot which is our AI powered mobile platform. So this is exactly what we’re working on is giving agents their own 24/7 ai assistant who can take all the admin work all of the stuff that you hate doing, and take that off your plate. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 26:46
to me, that’s, that’s the, that’s the most exciting part for me is the idea of having some sort of assistant that and and companies are working on this, you guys are working on this, I think, you know, this is so exciting for agents, you know, maybe not as exciting for virtual assistants who, who who are working overseas right now for a lot of lot of realtors. But, but it is going to be really helpful. And companies like yours are going to start offering this product soon. So very excited to to see that offering in the future. Let’s talk about the platform of the actual website platform. So there’s the front end, which is the customer facing website, where they can learn about the agent, possibly search for properties, get a sense of the the realtors skill set their aesthetic, all of those things I will say before I ask about other other parts, because luxury presents, I believe has some of the prettiest and most aesthetically pleasing website design on it that I’ve seen in real estate. Have you were you surprised when he first got into this business that there wasn’t a lot of beautiful realtor website designs out there because I just can’t find them other than what you guys have.
Malte Kramer 28:02
I was and there’s so much great content to work with, especially in the luxury segment. That was always something that I was really passionate about is great design. And we from from the very beginning, we’ve invested in a in a strong design team, we brought over a design leader from Airbnb and she’s built an amazing design team. So it’s been part of the company’s DNA from from day one. And yeah, I always felt that was a missed opportunity for a lot of agents if you have this, this much great photography and videography and you’re selling such great product. Why not build a website that matches that that beautiful aesthetic? Well, let’s
D.J. Paris 28:43
talk about conversion. What’s what’s behind what’s under the hood. So we know what’s going to face the you know, eight client facing, you can go to luxury presents.com You can see some of the biggest names in real estate use luxury presents. But I’d love to know what’s behind the hood, what we can’t necessarily see ourselves, you know what’s going on behind the scenes outside of just this beautiful looking website.
Malte Kramer 29:07
Yeah, so the whole platform was built from the ground up specifically for residential real estate agents, teams and brokerages. So the entire CMS, the entire back end of the websites, everything is specific to real estate. So when you go into the back end, first thing you’ll notice is that the CMS is super easy to use. All the input fields are related to the type of content you want to show on your website. We have modules for your neighborhoods, we have pre built landing pages, we have an instant home valuation tool that you can use for lead gen, we obviously have our IDX home search tool. We’re expanding that into full collaborative search now with presence copilot, which works sort of seamlessly across desktop and mobile where you can take the leads that are coming in from the website and then start sharing listings with them via a mobile app. So it’s all integrated into one place. And then obviously you have module As for your listings, so they’re coming in from the MLS, and then you can showcase them on your website, you can create standalone property websites. So with a very intuitive website builder, you can go in, you can launch single property sites. And then you have modules for your leads for all the things we’ve talked about, we have a lead intelligence feature. So we pull in third party data, to tell you more about the leads that are coming in from the website. It’s quite spooky, actually, you go into lead, and suddenly you see past addresses they’ve lived in, and their social media links and their, their, their family names. And so it’s very easy to gauge, is this a real person or spam? And are they in my price range? Are they a good fit customer? Should I be spending my time on them? So yeah, there’s a lot there. And all of it is real estate specific. And we’ve we’ve worked, we’ve built this in very close partnership with a lot of our clients, many of which, as you noted, are at the, at the top of the game, and we take what they’ve learned what they found works, and we try to distill that into the product.
D.J. Paris 31:04
Yeah, you know, in particular, this consumer behavior, sort of database is retailers use this all the time to be able to predict when somebody is pregnant, for example. And it’s not because they’re necessarily buying a birth control, or sorry, a pregnancy test. There’s other signals that retailers have access to just with all this buying data that would actually tell somebody before they might even know that they’re pregnant, that there may be something going on with them and being being pregnant. So there is some incredible ways of of sort of taking data and running it through different systems, like you were saying, partners of yours, who then can really provide incredible information, here’s their social here, here’s what we know about their family, here’s what we know about them based on the email address they provided and their name. And it really just gives the agent more information to be able to have that conversation when they do reach out. And it gives them more than just an email and phone number and first name. So I’m a huge fan. Tell us a little bit about sort of the CRM functionality or the now that the leads in the system. So someone visits the website, there’s some call to action, they sign up, and then it goes into some sort of nurturing capacity. Talk a little bit of if you don’t mind talk a little bit about sort of what that looks like for the agent, how the agent sort of sees that lead come in and what they do do with it from there. Yeah,
Malte Kramer 32:36
so we we are not a CRM. And we while we offer some, what I would call lightweight CRM functionalities to manage your leads to now with presence copilot, do collaborative search to invite a client to have them on a list and tagged so there are some CRM functionalities. But for teams in particular that are looking for a more robust and full fledged CRM, we recommend that they use any of our integration partners. So we have native integrations with all the major CRMs and generally recommend using us in conjunction with with a CRM. Yeah, that
D.J. Paris 33:13
makes sense, because that’s a whole other sort of vertical to try to a mountain to climb, and you’re competing against massive, massive companies that have, you know, 15 years on you maybe have experience. So I agree that would be that’d be a tougher mountain. So the good news is they do integrate with all the major players out there, because of course they need to. So the good news is, it’s really, really easy, and it’s a pretty seamless integration. Let’s talk about I’d love to talk about website trend design trends, because this is something that is always evolving and changing. I remember 10 years ago or so there was a move to go to what’s called flat design, or minimal and flat design. And I’m curious on Where’s where do we think websites are headed? Because ways in which consumers are interacting online is changing. So I’m curious if you if you have any future trends that you think are emerging? Yeah.
Malte Kramer 34:14
In terms of the aesthetic, I would say, a trend. One trend we’ve noticed is back to real simplicity. And I think a recognition that what matters most at the end of the day is is usability and we have to start with usability and and craft the aesthetic rather than the aesthetic getting in the way. So there’s there’s a trend towards simplicity, I would say, given what’s possible now. We’re seeing more sort of more immersive experiences and interactive experiences. You know, five years ago had you asked me would not have recommended having video playing the background on mobile Now this is very much possible because of where internet speeds is and what technologies. So, you know, more interactive experiences, more, more use of video throughout the side. And, and I’d say an overall trend back to simplicity. What
D.J. Paris 35:17
about light versus dark as far as just color, I know you guys tend to skew dark, which I think is particularly interesting around real estate. That is a more modern trend, although now, white is is is real popular inside of homes, although that’ll probably be changing in 10 years anyway. But I’m curious on just color, what colors, I love the fact that you guys skew darker, or at least the a lot of the websites, I’ve seen skew darker, because that’s also was not really that popular in you know, realtor websites until you guys came along. Yeah.
Malte Kramer 35:52
So the preference between dark and light, I would say really comes down to the emotion someone wants to evoke. And I have seen some agents that really want the light and airy feel that you can get with a lighter color palette, and especially in markets that are perhaps more more something like Miami, where you would want to sort of present that type of feeling. I’ve seen light color palettes work really well. But overall, yeah, I think especially in the high end market, agents still love the dark and moody look. And the the one thing I would say is just regardless of the color palette, just to make sure that everything is very legible. Sometimes I see people use very small fan fonts, because it’s, you know, it looks sexy, to minimize the fonts. But again, like focus on the usability first making sure it’s readable and easily easy to navigate. So, you know, not letting the creativity get in the way of the usability. And then I do think it’s valuable to have accent colors beyond black and white, even if it’s sparingly used for things like your CTA buttons. If you’re just working in a variable, a CTA is a call to action call to action. Yeah, you want to be able to draw attention to specific buttons on the site or specific links, especially if you’re using it on as a landing page. You’re not going to get the landing page to perform as well if you don’t have any color on it, and it’s just black and white. So some color as an accent is always a good thing.
D.J. Paris 37:31
Yeah, I agree. And one thing that I’ll just sort of share if you’ve this is how you know if you’ve visited a luxury presence website for for an agent. What and I was so impressed you guys were the first company that I found that that did this. And now I’m sure they are all doing it probably copying what you guys, you know, came or I don’t know if you’d necessarily pioneered it. But really, we’re the biggest firm to bring it to market that I found was that when a consumer visits the luxury presents website, one thing happens. In fact, I have seen this a lot of brokerages now have this as well, where as the login, Google login will instantly show up, especially if you’re on a Chrome browser. So what happens is person visits website, they instantly get Hey, please log in, well, they probably haven’t logged in before. If there are new new person, they click on that it instantly creates a connection between their Google account if they’re logged into Google, which they are most likely. And then it instantly creates an account inside of the back end system for luxury presence so that the agent gets to capture that information instantly. It’s a one click thing. It is very, very, very cool. And I hopefully I’m not sharing too much of your secrets, because it’s not really a secret. But I love the fact that you guys really put a lot of faith into that process. And it works. I can’t tell you how many websites outside of real estate, I have clicked on that exact same Google thing. Before I even done anything on that website. I just go okay, whatever I’ll call click on it. It’s amazing. I’m curious to know how that came to be. And yeah, how successful that is for you guys.
Malte Kramer 39:07
It’s been incredibly successful. It’s the single it’s the one thing if you don’t do anything else, and you want to get more leads from your website, that’s one thing you should add is the one click Google login. It came about we have a team that’s just constantly focused on innovation around conversion and how can we drive more leads to our clients from their websites, and out of their research and and dem testing things? We get these ideas like this one click Google login tool. I’ll give you one other great one. This would probably be number two on my list, which is an exit intent form I was just about
D.J. Paris 39:47
to ask. Okay, so here’s what exit intent is every one as the person starts to move their mouse closer to the X for that particular tab or even the browser. The website can And notice through like JavaScript or whatever, some sort of script that will notice the mouse movement will notice its persons moving in that direction. And they will put up an interstitial, or what we would call like a faux pop up a little pop up saying, Hey, before you leave, or that’s what they used to do. I don’t know what they show now. But a little bit of a like a call to action, just before the person is like walking out the door. If it was a retail shop, one more thing, kind of thing.
Malte Kramer 40:24
Yep, that’s exactly right, that works extremely well as well. What
D.J. Paris 40:27
do you recommend putting it like, so I have a thought I want to get your take on it. So if you are going to add an exit intent, which is what we’re talking about somebody wanting to exit out the website and getting a final offer. Now, if it’s retail, if you’re selling a sort of a product, maybe you’d put off 10% off if you know before you leave that kind of coupon obviously Realtors don’t have necessarily that but it could be a white paper could be a free home pay. Before you leave, let’s let me find out. Let me tell you what I think your home’s currently worth something like that is that what you’re seeing works best?
Malte Kramer 41:01
Yeah, this goes back to the previous point around offers. Whenever you interrupt someone’s experience, I recommend make sure that you’re giving them a lot of value. Otherwise, they’ll be angry, right, you’re sort of they’re trying to leave your website and you’re telling no Hold up a second. And that’s not the time to make an ask, it’s the time to give a lot of value. And the way you give value is through an offer, like what you just mentioned, something that works really well is if you have access to off market listings, that’s often often something that’s has really high perceived value. So sign up here to get access, that’s a
D.J. Paris 41:36
good one off market. That’s a great one. The other the other thing I was I was thinking of with respect to to sort of website trends and design is, is less is more with respect to text. Because at least on a on a homepage, we certainly want information there. That specific that does talk about what the agent does, who they are. And you know, but the more information we provided in a text form, I think we start losing people as we get. Again, they’re all dependent. While I should let me back up, it really depends on the intent of the actual consumer. So what I recommend, and by the way, anyone who has a website, can can find a service that will do this is install what’s called a heatmap system, which will just basically track the clicks the mouse movement on somebody’s website, and you will start to get a better sense of what your consumers like about your site, and what they don’t like if you’re getting a high bounce rate, if you’re looking at your Google Analytics, and you know, the average bounce rate is 13 seconds. Well, okay, what why are they leaving after 13 seconds? What am I not? What am I not providing? And the heat map will tell you what’s most interesting to people on your website, it’ll give you at least a general idea of maybe the direction to go. I imagine you guys use heat mapping all the time to constantly refer How often are you reef reforming your designs to match the sort of consumer behavior that’s always changing? Yeah,
Malte Kramer 43:13
we we’re constantly adding to the library of elements. And often we’ll find something that we think everyone should have. And we turn it on for everyone if we believe that it’s a best practice. So the Google one click login, for example, people can opt out of it. But we’ve established it as a best practice that comes standard with all of our templates are all of our themes. And then our library, I think at this point, we have over 500 different elements, meaning widgets that you can use on the website. Obviously, our websites are always very customized. So every agent has different preferences, different elements they use. But there are some best practices that our team develops that we then roll out for everyone. And this is I would say on at least on a monthly basis, we come out with something something new.
D.J. Paris 44:02
And with respect to the somebody becomes a client of yours, can they do their own design? Meaning can they utilize your elements and organize them in the way that they think makes sense? And can they also offload that to you guys as well? Are there different levels of service there? Yeah, there are
Malte Kramer 44:23
we offer everything from working with our team to use the existing elements to create something that’s still customized, but within an existing design framework. All the way up to something fully custom where we’re starting from scratch our design team is can design anything that you have in mind. We don’t have a self service offering where you would build it left completely on your own. That said, once we build the first draft of a website, many of our clients they’re in the platform all the time building their own landing pages and using the existing elements so that it is very much possible Yeah,
D.J. Paris 45:00
I think that is really cool. And I would like to make sure our audience knows how they can learn more about luxury presents, because we want, even if you don’t choose luxury presents as your front end website, sort of design team, and you probably should consider that. But at the very least, you’ll get a good education of what good design looks like. So that if, if luxury presents isn’t the right fit, you can go maybe find somebody that is a little bit closer to what you need. But what is the best way that an agent can learn? And by the way, when you go to the luxury President web presence website, you will see some big names on there that you know, in the real estate world, and, you know, from from all different sorts of providers. They’re all big fans of luxury presents, but what’s the best way? Should they go to the website and request a demo? Or how does how does it work?
Malte Kramer 45:49
Yeah, so if you request the demo on the website, you can have a consultation with our team. And they’ll be able to walk you through examples of our design, they’ll be able to show you case studies of the marketing we’ve done for our clients. So you can get a sense, if you just want to get a sense of our design work on the websites we have on our website, we have a design portfolio page, you can check out or if you follow us on Instagram, we post a lot of our work there. And that will give you a good sense of the design quality.
D.J. Paris 46:20
And I had one final question and I just Oh my gosh, I It’s eluding me at the moment. So I will remind everyone to please visit luxury presents.com. There’s a call to action on there where you can put in your information and they will reach out to you and give you more information about In fact, the top producer in Chicago, actually in Illinois, Don McKenna is She’s a local legend here in Chicago. And she’s also in Florida, and I think South Carolina and a few other markets. She is She’s a customer. And along with a lot of other very Jade Mills, you mentioned Ryan serhant, Tom Ferry, etc. There’s lots of lots of big names on here. So guys, really, you should check this out, whether it’s the right fit for you today, or it’s something to aspire to, because this is not the lowest cost provider. But that’s why it’s a luxury brand. luxury brands have luxury pricing. But the top agents in the country really do use luxury presents, and they really don’t have much competition, quite honestly, at least I have. I mean, there’s little shops that in every city that will build people websites, but not people that understand realtor websites quite the same. So I definitely recommend checking that out. And also please follow them on LinkedIn. They actually I was talking to multi before the show. And he said actually our LinkedIn is really, really successful for us. So luxury presence is where you find them on LinkedIn, same on Instagram, I will have links to all of this in the show notes. And since I can’t remember my final question, I will just ask you, where do you think the real estate market is headed because you are affected by high interest rates as well. Because even though you’re in the luxury space, and you’re your audience, our top Realtors mostly who are doing just fine. This year, we have a lot of agents in a down market currently who are struggling. I know that this is a little bit outside of your purview necessarily. But are you hopeful that the that interest rates will change in the next year? Do you have any any insight you could share about where you see trends coming for, for what real estate agents might expect? You know, in the next year or so?
Malte Kramer 48:33
Yeah. I am hopeful. Although I think it’s it’s gonna get a little bit worse before it gets better. Yeah, my best guess is six months of things getting worse. And then as slow recovery. The numbers I’ve seen all have a two plus year recovery to get back at least to get back to historical averages. And it’s not the best news. And obviously it’s you know, it’s a tough market right now. But I think it’s better to be realistic about how long it’s going to take and to buckle down and find a way to be successful in this market environment because it may last for a while. But yeah, that’s my best guess is probably two years of recovery.
D.J. Paris 49:23
I think you’re probably right. And I did remember my last question. It was about recruiting. So this is a huge opportunity. Right now we are seeing a flight to teams in the brokerage world in the agent world really I should say agents are either joining teams creating teams this is I mean Maltese business is pretty much all teams for the most part. A lot of his these big producers, our teams, not all but a lot of them are and these are also great recruiting sort of magnets for agents because agents are always looking to see what teams might be a good fit And they’re going to look up the website. So even if there’s two sort of components, there’s the consumer part of it that you want to attract. But it’s also if you’re looking to build your team, you really need a beautiful looking website to also attract those other agents. Are you seeing some of your some of your agent clients using them as recruiting tools?
Malte Kramer 50:18
Yeah, it’s a great point. And you mentioned Dawn McKenna earlier, she is actually a great case study for this. She launched with us back in 2016. At the time, she had four agents on her team was doing about 120 million in annual sales. And since then, she has scaled to 20 agents, six markets, she’s now in Naples, she’s in Salt Lake, all over the place. And if you ask her, she’ll say it was the brand she created. And it was the website, those two things have helped her the most. And she gets a lot of her agents through just organically, they there, see the brand does see a social, they see the website. So it definitely helps in that regard. And one thing I’ve seen, some teams do is create dedicated recruiting pages on their website that speak to agents who may want to consider joining them.
D.J. Paris 51:03
Yeah, that goes back to the idea of creating specific landing pages for different people who are visiting the website. So driving somebody just to the homepage, it gives them a general overview of what that agent is all about, or the team is all about, but having a specific, dedicated page that you drive somebody to maybe through either organic work, you know, best real estate team in Silver Lake, for example, or looking to join a real estate team in Silver Lake. Those are longtail keywords that people do search now. And they might not get more than, you know, 10 to 50 searches a month, like multi was saying earlier, but wouldn’t you like to be number one for those 10 to 50 searches, I know I would kill to be number one for those, even if it’s just a handful of people a month. So creating those individual landing pages is really, really critical. So please reach out to luxury presidents, they have all of these tools and guys, the best. The biggest plug I can give to them is the top agents in the country use it. Almost everybody I’ve interviewed on this show. That’s a bit of an exaggeration. But the vast majority of people I interviewed today on the show us luxury presents, so I am not a paid spouse spokesperson for them. I am literally just telling you what I witnessed. And that’s why I had multi on the show today to talk about sort of what makes them different. And boy, they are they different. So check them out luxury presents.com. Follow them on Instagram and LinkedIn links to all of that in the show notes. And on behalf of our audience. Malte thank you so much we know you were you know you are a you know, a mid sized company of 600 employees this is this is you don’t have time to just basically jump on a podcast for an hour. Every every every so often. So you do this. You did this as a favor. I appreciate that. Thanks from our audience to you. And then of course, we from our audience we want to we we also multiday, I want to thank the audience for sticking around to the very end, please help us in a couple of ways. One, if you know an agent that’s looking to build a website, shoot them over to luxury president.com presents calm or maybe they probably already have a website and they want to maybe improve it, shoot them over to luxury presents. And also please tell a friend about this episode. Think of one other realtor that’s looking to up their online game in 2024. And send them a link because this might actually give them some information about how they can improve their web presence. And also, please leave us a review wherever you’re listening to the show. Let us know what you think of the show. Leave us a review. Tell us we read every one of your comments. And it always helps us to improve as well. Marty, thank you so much for being on the show. And we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks
Malte Kramer 53:38
for having me. This was a lot of fun. Thank you
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify