REAL ESTATE TECHNOLOGY, AGENT
Businesswire | March 27, 2023
Cloze, an AI-based intelligence provider focused on the real estate market, announced today that Brown Harris Stevens (BHS), the premier privately held real estate brokerage, has successfully rolled out Cloze CRM as part of its market-leading BHSOne initiative. Within just six weeks, adoption of Cloze CRM has overachieved its initial targets, driven initially by a highly successful internal marketing campaign that itself used Cloze, and fueled further by agent-to-agent recommendations from early adopters.
“We looked at many different CRMs, and Cloze gave us three clear reasons why it was the only partner for us,” said Matthew Leone, chief marketing officer at Brown Harris Stevens. “First, there was no barrier to entry. We were amazed at how easy it was to log in, create an account, and get onboarded. Second, you can access all of its functionality through its mobile application—our agents are in front of their phones 100% of the time. And finally, the integration of artificial intelligence was a game changer. We’ve seen how it can as a virtual assistant suggest the proper prospecting steps and touchpoints with everyone in their sphere of influence leading to a higher engagement rate.”
In contrast to typical CRMs that expect agents to constantly update and log their activities and contacts into the system, Cloze silently manages that busywork in the background without disrupting an agent’s daily workflows. Through the insights extracted from agent communications, Cloze CRM flags action items and due dates and recommends how, when, and why to reach out to new and previous clients, highlighting special events, birthdays, or anniversaries, for example, or bubbling up contacts that could benefit from outreach.
“Cloze is by far the best CRM I have ever used,” described Holly Smith, an agent affiliated with BHS’ Palm Beach office. “The AI features are amazing. It reminds you each morning who you need to follow up with, logs and attaches all calls and emails to a contact, and even writes emails for you with AI.”
As part of an internal use case, BHS’ marketing team used Cloze to increase email engagement rates from 10-20% to 80-100% by delivering customized, relevant content to each of the brokerage’s 2,500+ agents. Such customization was made possible because Cloze combines a robust template library with automated processes and AI-generated insights, making it simple to provide highly customized content relevant to each recipient and to do so at scale. The result has been the ability to reach more people in less time with more authenticity.
“Our goal was to provide a tool that would make our agents and managers more efficient in communicating while helping them keep on top of tasks, even as they’re managing multiple deals at different points in the home-buying process,” explained BHS CTO Chris Reyes. “Cloze not only met those expectations, but exceeded them.”
For more information on how BHS agents are deriving value from Cloze CRM, check out the case study and video interview at https://blog.cloze.com/cloze-crm/cloze-the-ai-driven-game-changer-for-brown-harris-stevens/.
About Cloze
Cloze’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered real estate platform translates everyday communications into actionable insights that brokerages and their agents use to close more deals, drive higher revenue, and increase profitability. Cloze achieves this by strengthening relationships, reducing manual work, driving a more consistent lead-to-close experience, and improving both marketing ROI and overall closure rates.
Cloze’s full suite of real estate solutions includes Cloze CRM, Cloze Marketing, Cloze Leads, and Cloze AI Insights. To learn more, visit cloze.com.
About Brown Harris Stevens
Brown Harris Stevens (BHS) is one of the most prominent privately-held real estate firms in the world. Established in 1873, BHS has historically dominated the luxury, high-end market. With more than 2,500 agents across the East Coast, the company oversees the sale of marquee properties worldwide, including property management and new development marketing, from its headquarters in New York City and its offices throughout the Tristate area, Palm Beach, and Miami. Learn more at www.bhsusa.com.
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MORTGAGE AND LENDING, ASSET MANAGEMENT
Businesswire | May 12, 2023
First American Data & Analytics, a leading national provider of property-centric information, risk management and valuation solutions and a division of First American Financial Corporation (NYSE: FAF), today announced that its industry-leading FraudGuard® fraud risk detection and decisioning tool now includes enhancements that help lenders reduce home equity lending and compliance risk, and further improve loan quality and increase efficiency. The new features include the integration of the First American Procision™ AVM suite and the additions of a senior-lien review module designed for home equity lending and a military status verification module.
“In today’s lending environment, reducing risk, improving loan quality and increasing underwriting productivity are top of mind for lenders, and our latest FraudGuard enhancements help our lender clients address those priorities,” said Paul W. Harris, general manager, mortgage analytics for First American Data & Analytics. “These enhancements add to FraudGuard’s already robust capabilities. Now, FraudGuard’s smart analytics provide an even more effective, intuitive solution for critical underwriting decisions in first mortgage and home equity lending.”
FraudGuard’s integration with the Procision AVM suite provides users access to automated property values to help expedite lending functions, such as underwriting and collateral reviews for first and second mortgages, as well as home equity lines of credit. The Procision AVM suite uses a state-of-the-art blended ensemble modeling approach to deliver an exceptional level of accuracy. First American Data & Analytics runs Procision AVM valuations on every residential property in the U.S. every day and the company also updates the underlying data that fuels the Procision AVM suite daily. An automated surveillance system constantly monitors both data and valuation quality, and performs extensive testing to validate the accuracy of the valuations produced by the Procision AVM suite for various property types in various geographic markets.
Senior-Lien Review and Military Status Modules Boost Lending and Fraud Risk Detection
Designed to support home equity lending, the senior-lien review module identifies ineligible first liens that could prevent a lender from moving forward with a second lien. For example, the new feature will alert a lender to a private mortgage originated within the last 12 months, first mortgages with negative amortization, balloon loans with a due date before the second lien, or a reverse mortgage. The module can also identify payment deferrals and loans in forbearance.
The military status module verifies an applicant’s status – active, retired or a survivor of military personnel – under the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA). In addition to mortgage lending, the new module can be leveraged in credit and automobile lending. Both the senior-lien review and military status modules are available as standalone API integrations.
FraudGuard is the first fraud analytics solution accessible through the latest Encompass Partner Connect™ API platform. The integration allows lenders to leverage automation to systematically trigger FraudGuard reports and analysis based on customizable business rules.
About First American Data & Analytics
First American Data & Analytics, a division of First American Financial Corporation, is a national provider of property-centric information, risk management and valuation solutions. First American maintains and curates the industry’s largest property and ownership dataset that includes more than 8 billion document images. Its major platforms and products include: DataTree®, FraudGuard®, RegsData®, First American TaxSource™ and ACI®. Find out more about how First American Data & Analytics powers the real estate, mortgage and title settlement services industries with advanced decisioning solutions at www.FirstAmDNA.com.
About First American
First American Financial Corporation (NYSE: FAF) is a premier provider of title, settlement and risk solutions for real estate transactions. With its combination of financial strength and stability built over 130 years, innovative proprietary technologies, and unmatched data assets, the company is leading the digital transformation of its industry. First American also provides data products to the title industry and other third parties; valuation products and services; mortgage subservicing; home warranty products; banking, trust and wealth management services; and other related products and services. With total revenue of $7.6 billion in 2022, the company offers its products and services directly and through its agents throughout the United States and abroad. In 2023, First American was named one of the 100 Best Companies to Work For by Great Place to Work® and Fortune Magazine for the eighth consecutive year. More information about the company can be found at www.firstam.com.
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MARKET OUTLOOK, REAL ESTATE INVESTMENT
PRweb | April 13, 2023
Specialist rental accounting and management platform, Landlord Studio has announced the launch of a fully-automated expense management solution for real estate investors, ensuring they never miss another deductible expense.
The new functionality enables Landlord Studio users to fully automate previously time-consuming and error-prone accounting tasks. The app now imports their bank transactions in near real-time and automatically matches them to scanned receipts before categorizing them properly, which radically improves accounting accuracy.
Staying on top of expenses is key to running a profitable investment portfolio - whether you have one or 100 units. By doing away with manual data entry Landlord Studio makes keeping accurate and up-to-date financial records easy, giving investors complete oversight of their finances throughout the financial year.
When paired with Landlord Studio’s real estate specific reports, such as the Schedule E report (Form 1040), the new app enables investors to both reduce their end-of-year accounting task list and file a more accurate tax return. As a result, investors that use Landlord Studio are able to find more than $500 per property each year in additional deductions, whilst simultaneously saving hours or even days of admin time.
Charles Chan, CEO of Landlord Studio said, “This new bank feeds technology sets the standard for income and expense management and is proving to be hugely popular with landlords in all markets. It radically simplifies the process of tracking expenses and is integrated with Xero, to make tax time super easy for accountants too.”
About Landlord Studio
Landlord Studio is a leading provider of income and expense management technology for ‘DIY’ landlords with between one and 20 investment properties. In business since 2014, Landlord Studio is used to manage more than 40,000+ properties across the US and UK and is growing fast thanks to its full suite of property management functionality that includes online rent payment, Xero integration, tenant screening and property maintenance.
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