ShowingTime President Discussed COVID19 Real Estate Showings Data

Brokerage Insider

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ShowingTime made publicly available the data showing the swift drop off of real estate showings when COVID19 struck. But then it also showed, over 60 days in advance that real estate would come out very strong. Listen to the president of ShowingTime talk about the data.

TRANSCRIPTION

Jen Goodhue (00:00):

Welcome everyone to the Brokerage Insider. This is the podcast where real estate professionals come to learn how to grow their business and use tomorrow solutions for today's problems. I'm your host, Jen Goodhue. And today we've got Michael Lane who is the president, and one of the founding members of ShowingTime. This has been a fantastic interview. We talk about COVID-19 trends in analytics. What data is showing us about how the real estate market is bouncing back. It's been a very interesting conversation and I hope all of you take something away that is valuable for your own business approach.

Jen Goodhue (00:38):

I'm here with Michael Lane, who is the president and founding partner for ShowingTime. Many of us know ShowingTime in the industry. I'll let Michael speak towards that a little bit. But part of why I wanted to bring him on the podcast, if you all haven't seen it, they did a phenomenal piece of content. As we're kind of moving out of the heels of the COVID crisis and pandemic right now, they had put out a chart that was showing state-by-state demographics as to what showings were doing. And I think it was just such an impactful piece of data and impactful piece of content. And we'll get into that a little bit more here in a minute. I want Michael first to introduce you and welcome you on our podcast.

Michael Lane (01:16):

Hi, Jen,

Jen Goodhue (01:18):

Happy to have you, and I'd love for you to give us a little bit of background on yourself and your company. For those of you who don't know ShowingTime, they have been around as such a force in the industry for so long, and we are so happy to have Michael here today.

Michael Lane (01:31):

Well, Jen, thank you again for inviting me to participate in your podcast this afternoon. And happy to be here. Just a little bit about me and about ShowingTime where we are in our 20th year in business. So that's impressive. And it's the cargo. About 20 years ago, I'm one of the I joined the founder of our company, Scott Woodard shortly after he started the company. So I considered myself a founding management team member. And as president, I had most of our new business, certainly all of our sales and marketing, I participate heavily in partnerships. Any of the acquisitions that we've done over the years and just kind of growing the business overall, we what else can I tell you? You know, just what we do. I think people know us the most for providing, showing service technology and call center services to the real estate industry that is made up of a, kind of a family of products, including pure software as a service technology that's implemented into MLS is throughout the U S and Canada.

Michael Lane (02:43):

That's on one end. And then we also have call center services, which is really a tech enabled service where humans help the appointment scheduling process, wherever technology can't do it entirely on its own. So sometimes that means we're. We have appointment specialists who are calling people who did not answer an online appointment requests, or they leave messages. People are, they just create a convenience for agents who are driving in their car and they can't get on their mobile app, but they want to call in, cancel a bunch of appointments or reschedule a bunch of appointments or whatever it might be. It's kind of a, a high end customer service element, which is very popular to our subscriber base.

Jen Goodhue (03:26):

I certainly remember that product, when it came into my market, when I was managing a handful of residential and commercial offices I had to have extra bodies to give out lock box codes and do all of the concierge support that you have. And it was such a brilliant idea to bring in that human element and mix it with software. And I think that, you know, any more, you look at showings compared to what they used to be 10 years ago, or even 20 years ago when you founded the company and it has drastically changed. So I'd love to hear a little bit more on just the evolution of ShowingTime and what your customer reaches and, and some things like that.

Michael Lane (04:00):

Well, we started out as a pure technology company when the company was founded here in Chicago and Chicago is one of those kinds of outlier markets where it's really hard for agents brokers needed to make appointments with each other, because for a long time, there were no electronic lockboxes in the city. And in downtown Chicago, there are still no electronic boxes. So that means that the listing agent typically will go to the showing to open the door buyer's agent and the buyer. So it's, you know, scheduling a showing is finding the combined availability of four different participants, which is, you know, requires iteration. It requires a lot of phone tag and it was screaming for technology to help make the workflow easier. So we started in that space in it grew. We actually, I know you're from Colorado, Colorado is one of our early markets.

Michael Lane (04:57):

And our first acquisition was a really small company based out of Colorado called the Rocky mountain consulting company. And they provided a, an office software called Showing tracks. And you remember, you probably remember it, a popular re max product back in the early days. We so that company joined us in, I think it was 2001 and that product we grew through 2008, we rebranded it as ShowingDesk and then ShowingTime front desk. And we were for a long time, the most widely used provider of office software for offices that had an appointment, a secretary at the front desk who prior to using us would probably have been using no cards or a three ring binder to keep track of appointment

Jen Goodhue (05:50):

That agent's always yup. And we'd have to re I I'm totally dating myself right now for the record, but those darn binders, those four ring binders. Oh, that's it. Yup.

Michael Lane (06:03):

So that was a, a very popular solution until around 2008. And I should, I shouldn't say it until it's still obviously, but in 2008, with the recession, we have many longterm loyal clients say, you know, we love you guys, but we've got to let go of the appointment. It doesn't leave us with anybody to use your software. Boy, if you guys could provide the people, in addition to the software, we would keep using your, you know, your services. And we partnered with one of our major software clients here in Chicago who told that to us. And that was when the ShowingTime appointment center was born. And there are other companies that have been doing that for years, but we got into that end of the business with the, you know, the human assisted service in about 2008.

Jen Goodhue (06:56):

Okay. What an interesting way to pivot through that recession, what a brilliant idea to take your customer feedback and truly take it to heart. That's what makes us companies, in my opinion,

Michael Lane (07:06):

Well, we were, we knew we were going to lose clients if we didn't do it. And we'd been trying to not get into the call center part of the business, because the economies of running our call center are so hard. It doesn't, you know, if you think about having 20 people helping on the phones, you know, two or three of those people call in sick, or they need to go on vacation, it just turns the business upside down. So

Jen Goodhue (07:30):

I can't tell you how many times I would have to cover for my weekend staff because that's when they're most important. And if they called in sick, it was on me.

Michael Lane (07:38):

Yeah. And that's the type of job. People don't plan to do that for their whole life state come and go, you know, and it but it wasn't until we got into the hundreds of, or, you know, around a hundred people that we started being able to do it efficiently and kind of fast forward to now we've grown that that business just through sales and through position of a couple other companies in the space to realize the scale that we wanted to. So we now have about 500 appointment specialists that is our, probably our most popular offering. We have, you know, our, our rough coverage of kind of the U S and Canada, we have, we support about 70% of homes that are sold in North America. And about a third of those are maybe a little bit more than a third have the human assistance kind of upgrade.

Michael Lane (08:34):

So we call that kind of our, our premium service offering alongside of our office software, which companies still use that original product. We have an appointment secretary doing it themselves if they don't want to outsource it. And we kind of offer an in between package to where they do it by day. And we covered them after hours, if that's the preference, the goal, you know, essentially to try to get systems that would cover every different way that people like to schedule showings and we've you know, added to that and refined those products over the years to kind of get the number of clients that we have.

Jen Goodhue (09:12):

Interesting. So I'm going to take you back to something that I think you said that was really relevant. I'm actually back in 2008 fast forwarding into 2020 on the heels of the coronavirus in what COVID has done to real estate you know, with essential services and challenges with that and ask you a very direct question. Do you, I've heard a lot of murmurs from people that they're concerned that there's going to be as much of a market crash as there wasn't a wait. I personally don't see that. I think markets are rebounding. You guys have data that's pointing toward that, so I'd really be interested for your perspective on that.

Michael Lane (09:48):

Well, I'm an optimist, you know, and as as entrepreneurs tend to be, you know, and I have looked at what's happening, you know, I think there will undoubtedly be some prolonged effects of what the country's been through in the last couple of months, but I will tell you, when I look at the number of markets tonight, you know, we, we talked a little bit about the content that we're posting in our webs website that shows the showing trends in each state of the U S and we update it nightly that I see markets where they're showing activity is, has exceeded the activity of 20 in year over year, which would indicate that you know, there's pent up demand in markets. Those buyers that stayed home in the months of March and April are now out shopping for homes. And the big question is, will the increase in activity of the next, the forward-looking 90 days compensate in sales for the last activity of the last two to three months.

Michael Lane (10:50):

And I think there's a good, in many markets. It will you know, there, there may be an economic cycle in front of us. It's hard for me to know for sure, but I'm optimistic based on, at least on the showing activity that companies are gonna have very strong brokerages are going to see excellent third quarter results. I think they'll find that the seasonality of sales this year is unlike any other, there'll be agents who were planning to have a enjoy, maybe the second half of the summer being a, you know, time when they would do other things where they would, you know, re be post, you know, second quarter sales. So, you know, unusual year, but I, I, I am optimistic that there'll be many companies that make up for lost time in two, three. Now, whether there's a recession, it had, I can't say that for sure. I think there are a lot of positive things going on in the economy, and I think there are many and several incentives that the government is putting place to help people buy homes and how, you know, help small businesses recover. But it's, it's hard to say I'm not a professional economist, so I wouldn't, I wouldn't,

Jen Goodhue (12:05):

We certainly will hold you to your optimism and looking at your data. And if for those of you that have not looked at this piece of content, it is one of the better pieces of content I've ever seen a real estate tech firm put out in the midst of a crisis to kind of start putting minds at ease because Michael is exactly correct when I pull it up every day, depending on the state or the region or whatever, I'm making calls to high level brokers and CEOs that day. And I will reference it. For example, in Minnesota, they have been stronger year over year. We have other places, unfortunately, Colorado fell off the map. We were down 95%, but now we're almost back up to met year over year. I, so for those of you that have not seen this piece of content go to ShowingTime.com and its impact of coronavirus, it's a really well done piece. I think it's very encouraging and I think even real estate agents should be using it to show their sellers. Hey, there's, there's promising things coming. And like you said, Michael, I really think that the, the aftermath of this will change the seasonality that we're used to in real estate from being such a strong spring market, into being a very strong summer and fall market. And that's what my hope is.

Michael Lane (13:19):

Yeah. I, you know, on top of everything else and working from home my family, we are in the process of selling our home and looking for a new home right now. So we are under contract. We did a bunch of showings that were conducted by video.

Jen Goodhue (