Nathan Daniel (00:00):

Hey, what's happening to everybody. In this episode, we're going to be diving in with Michael Mosseri with total brokerage, and he's going to be talking about the power of data, and I wanted to talk to him about this because of an article that I saw that was done by real trends, talking about how data is so important to the broker and who owns that information. So get ready. Here we go. We're going to dive right in.

Nathan Daniel (00:41):

All right, well today we are going to be talking to Michael, the CEO of total brokerage. Michael, welcome to the show. Why don't you tell us a little about yourself.

Michael Mosseri (00:51):

Thanks Nathan. So my name is Michael Mosseri. I'm the CEO of total brokerage. I've been doing this for about five years. We love the software space I've been in software for about 30 years. Won a couple of awards and just so happy to be on your show today. Thank you.

Nathan Daniel (01:06):

Yeah, absolutely. So Michael, let's talk about data real quick. Like, you know, it's, it's the buzz word. It's, it's the thing going around in our industry right now. And when we were talking a little while ago, we were like, what do we want to talk about? Like, let's, let's come up with a word. Let's figure out the topic of the day. And we both kind of settled on data because that's the space that you live in. And so tell me about big data. What's going on with that in the real estate industry,

Michael Mosseri (01:35):

In the real estate industry, we're seeing it time and time again, day after day, these companies are coming out and saying, Hey, we're going to change our terms of service and make it so that we can use your data to do what we want to do with that data. So they're saying you forgot to check this checkbox on Tuesday. We can now use your CRM data to mine. For buyer leads in your zip code. We're gonna use your transactional data to find out who's who needs a mortgage in your zip code, and those things are digital gold. They are worth so much. People don't realize that a single mortgage or a single customer contact is worth so much to them and need, they need to protect their data from big tech from everyone else. So whoever has access to their data, you need to make sure that they have an ironclad terms of service so that they can't use it against you.

Nathan Daniel (02:29):

Yeah. Well, and you mentioned a couple of things right there. You mentioned a big tech, and that's the thing like I've noticed and seen in so many articles, how much money is being invested in technology inside of real estate right now, right? The industry is truly evolving and with everything that's gone on this year in COVID technology, inside of our space, we're seeing tons of real estate companies, software companies, everybody moving into this sector. And it's always well, it's what you just said. It's not always a good thing whenever the data's being used for other things, right? And I go back to you know, there's companies out there, right? They say, Hey, come use our program. And like, we're going to pay you a little bit. We're going to kind of do all this stuff. But in the long run, what they they're up doing is they're going to get a phasing out.

Nathan Daniel (03:22):

The people that helped them build the company right now. Am I saying that agents are going to go away? No, I always think real estate agents are going to be there as a part of the transaction, all that stuff. However, could commissions potentially go down from it because the tech is building so much that through artificial intelligence and other things, they can actually they can justify that, right? If it becomes harder for an agent to prove or show value, because all of a sudden the software system is doing a majority of the heavy lifting.

Michael Mosseri (03:55):

Absolutely. So there's a saying in tech if you don't know, if you don't know what the product is, you're the product. So whether it's advertising, showing you ads, or if they're not showing you ads and they're not charging you, they're doing something to make money. So big tech loves money VCs. They want to see that successful exit. They want to capitalize that company. They want to grab all that data and use it to do what I don't know. I mean, they need to make money somehow. They're not in it. They're not 501-C3 corporation. I'm sorry, a501-C3

Nathan Daniel (04:34):

Nonprofits.

Michael Mosseri (04:36):

Thank you. So they are in it to make money. They're going to use that data and they're going to enrich themselves somehow. So the question is what are they going to do with it?

Nathan Daniel (04:47):

Yeah. And that's a good point because in, so often we're seeing now that companies are getting gobbled up, whether it's by a large national franchise, whether it's by VC tech company, whether it's by one of the national portals and platforms where consumers go to search, you know a big part of is how do I continue to add value inside of my company? So that way that consumer stays on my site or in my world longer,

Michael Mosseri (05:17):

Exactly. You need to control your own destiny. Even the big real estate companies who are coming up with these, Oh, I'm going to spend a billion dollars on tech or whatever it might be. They can use that data against their own franchisees against their own agents, because they want to keep all of that money in house. So they're going to use their own leads to find their own, you know, to make sure their buyers are going to their own mortgage, to their own preferred vendors or whoever it might be. But they see that data as essentially as a free revenue source and they're going to use it.

Nathan Daniel (05:52):

Okay. So then that leads me to the, the conversation of artificial intelligence, right? I mean, a big point of this data is to have you know, and I'm not sure it's actually artificial intelligence. I think that's just a term. However, looking at the artificial intelligence, isn't it supposed to help the agents jobs become easier.

Michael Mosseri (06:14):

It should theoretically, but the question is what are you feeding into that artificial intelligence machine to make it more intelligent data, right? Whose data is it? Is it your data to start with? Well, there's only so much you can glean from your own data now, is it everyone's data? We'll hang on a second. Does that mean I have access to my competitor's data? Who's working in the same neighborhoods I'm working, you know, w we have to have these questions answered as to who has access to what data, because at the end of the day, all of this artificial intelligence, all of this machine learning needs to be driven by something. And that source, that fuel is data.

Nathan Daniel (06:52):

Okay. So then from if I've got questions, obviously you can go to any of the real estate news sites and search the term big data. And you're going to come up with hundreds and hundreds of articles coming out almost every single day. If I'm a broker and I want to educate myself on this, and this is like the initial, like, this is the first time I'm hearing about this. Or I'm like, maybe it brings it back up and, you know, I really should be looking into this. Where do I start? Like, where would I start looking for information on is my data protected? And if not, how do I take the steps to start protecting my data?

Michael Mosseri (07:31):

So great question. And obviously looking at those new sources, they do a great job investigating these types of things, going to the, the realtor face group, Facebook groups, asking their peers. But additionally, you can go to the source. You can go to the terms of service and start reading that you don't have to be a lawyer to actually digest the terms of service. You can just say, who are their affiliate partners who has access to my data, who has access to these things that I'm putting into their platform and for what purposes they need to disclose that.

Nathan Daniel (08:02):

Okay. So places you may go is, is somewhere like if you are a part of a national franchise, obviously going to the national franchise, a terms of service and looking there, and the looking at their vendor partners, right? The, the people that they are in business with and partner with that also leads me back to even local MLSs have affiliate relationships with national portals and systems, basically the, that the MLS will then turn around and provide to agents as a tool as well. So then we need to start looking at the local level as well as at the national level with the affiliations that we currently have.

Michael Mosseri (08:41):

Absolutely. So when you log into your local MLS and you see that they're providing you all of these shiny tools, hopefully your MLS is either paying them and it's being disclosed that it's a paid for service, or if it's a free tool, why is it free? Are they doing it for all that data so that they can gleam and turn around and resell it? Well, that should be disclosed in the terms of service. And we, we need to know those things because that transactional data that's CRM data, all of that data is so precious and people don't realize how important it is.

Nathan Daniel (09:13):

Yeah, absolutely. Well you know, th this topic that we can be continuing to talk about data forever, and I think this is some really good highlights and good nuggets that people can take away and start investigating on their own. So is there anything else, like before we transition just a little bit on how a broker can protect their information by using a program like total brokerage is there anything else that, that you can recommend or give advice on?

Michael Mosseri (09:43):

You know, we just want our, our brokers and our agents to be vigilant because even agents within brokerages need to be vigilant of where that data goes. So you mentioned total brokerage in our platform. Agents can actually segment out their customer. So the brokers don't have access to it because of these types of things. If the broker wants to allow that. So it just needs to be a conversation that people are starting to have saying, where is all of this going? Is it feeding some AI machine or is it going to my own pocket?

Nathan Daniel (10:14):

Okay. So let's transition a little bit. So like we talked about artificial intelligence and there's programs out there to help brokers with stuff like this. And now you're, you started a company called total brokerage, and let's talk about total brokerage for just a few minutes. And I, and I actually have your website pulled up and and I got some stuff over here looking at it, and it looks like you'll have a lot of things going on at total brokerage, as far as, I mean, CRM, lead management, marketing texts. I mean, just back in forms, libraries, signature, all that stuff. So w Y you know, w and you said you've been in software for what? 30 years? Quite a long time. And you've been in total brokerage for five, correct. Okay. So what was the transition like to this, like, to this platform? Why would you open this up?

Michael Mosseri (11:05):

Th there was a need, essentially my co-founder and partner. He had a need when he was running his brokerage and I said, Hey, I'd be happy to help you with this. But once we solve this problem I'm going to basically go out into the marketplace and sell this product. So this massive need was there where, you know, nothing was talking together. No one had their own data, no one had control of their own destiny. And we, we saw that and we filled that need. And then we have customers come into a say, Hey, we have the same need. So, you know, total brokerage is essentially that full end to end platform on the back office. So from contact through close, from cradle to grave, whatever you want to say about it, we do everything on the backend for the brokers and for the agents, and we maintain that data for them. Okay.

Nathan Daniel (11:53):

So as Far as your terms of service, let's just go there and talk about it. Since we've been talking about big data, as far as your terms of service, what does it say about if I decide to leave total brokerage, what happens to my data?

Michael Mosseri (12:05):

Your data is your data. And in addition to our terms of service, we actually contracted with a fairly lawyer, large national law firm to give us a separate letter that evaluated ours. It's a shorter letter than in terms of service, basically stating the same that your data is your data, whatever you want to do with it. It's fine. In fact, in total brokerage, whenever a customer signs up to our platform, we don't have access to their data. We can't log in to their brokerage whatsoever. So we have all of these independent reviews of our terms of service from these larger law firms saying, yes, this is indeed the case. And according to everything that we've spelled out, we can't just change our terms of service and say, Hey, you forgot to check this, check this box. So once again, the person who comes to total brokerage and signs up, they own their data.

Nathan Daniel (12:55):

Okay. So they own their data. And like you said, there it's an end-to-end platform. Absolutely. And as far as integrations, I see QuickBooks on here. Like, so you're, you're integrating really with everything. Now, can you to disbursement authorizations, DA's tracking commissions, do it, all that kind of stuff out of it.

Michael Mosseri (13:15):

Yep. So just to kind of walk through our quick features, you have fully capable CRM on par with something like Salesforce. We provide a digital email and text marketing platform. So MailChimp, constant contact replace those as well, your full transaction management. So your transaction, your compliance, your document storage, your e-signature. So we've replaced sky slope, DocuSign dot loop, all right there. Then you have your reporting, your analytics, your commission disbursement. So you're replacing something like broker Sumo, and then you have everything in that one single source location. Hypothetically, if you find a new lead and it comes directly into your platform, and then you go all the way through, you would never have to type their name because it's an end, end single source solution all the way through that purchase agreement or that contract for that customer. So we keep everything in a single location. And once again, it's theirs. Yeah.

Nathan Daniel (14:09):

Okay. Well, that's awesome. So I'm going to ask some of the, some of the questions, right? So as a, as a broker, if I'm like, okay, this sounds interesting, right? And you've got your pricing very transparent there on the website. So anybody could go to a total brokerage.com and check that out. However, if I'm a broker and I've got a decent size office, and, you know, I've had a program for a couple years, that agents are used to, and I have to make a transition. And I, you know, I'm like, cause it's it's, I can see value in this. What does that transition look like?

Michael Mosseri (14:47):

Fantastic question. So I like to say that we like to pick up the, and the reason I say that is because not everyone does like the pickup, the phone, because everything starts with our customer success team. We are going to train all of their agents, all of their brokers, everyone who's involved, who's a stakeholder, or using the platform for that company. We're gonna train them all. Additionally, if they're adding new agents, they have unlimited access to our customer success team to get additional training. So they don't just pick up the phone and get someone who's going to take a ticket and call them back. Our customer success team has direct access to our engineering team for any issues that might crop up. So we're trying to make sure that our customers, our brokers, our agents are foremost, and we take care of them as quick as possible.

Nathan Daniel (15:32):

Okay. So you pick up the phone, that's a good thing. So as far as training is concerned, you know, and you say you have some training and all that stuff up front, you know, and maybe it's training that, like say I have 15 agents in my brokerage right now, and six months from now, I ended up growing and bringing some people on. And now I'm at 30. I don't want to train that. Like, do you have training videos? Like

Michael Mosseri (15:57):

One better. That's fantastic that you grew from 15 to 30. You're just going to send them over to us and we're going to train them for you.

Nathan Daniel (16:03):

Okay. So you're actually taking off of my plate as a broker. You're now training my agent on how to use the platform. And how long typically is that training process for an agent,

Michael Mosseri (16:14):

For an agent there's typically two webinars that they're going to attend. And those webinars are going to be anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes to get a very good overview of the platform. The brokers get an extra webinar. That's going to show them a little bit more of the backend and how to do things like QuickBooks or anything else.

Nathan Daniel (16:30):

Okay. Now, and you said webinars. So is that one-on-one or is it one on a few? Is it a national call where I get lost or

Michael Mosseri (16:38):

It's it's for the brokerage only. So it's for the team and for the agents so that everything is specific to them. It's not for 50 agents from different brokerages. It's individualized for that brokerage

Nathan Daniel (16:50):

For that specific company. Okay. That's great. So let's talk about workflows a little bit, because that's, that seems to be the big thing right now. It's like, okay, I want to, from the moment I get this lead in my CRM, I want to be able to plug it in. And then I want to be able to create this process because as an agent, I'm so busy and I've got to keep up with everything. What is the workflow process look like? And how do you develop those? And are they customizable?

Michael Mosseri (17:18):

So everything in total brokerage is customizable period. Now how does that workflow work? So we call them action plans when you're dealing with an actual contact or customer, and we can program them for your agents, for the offices, so they can share with the agents or for the brokers, so everyone can use them. And they can basically do everything that you're going to want to do. They can send you reminders, they can send your admin reminders, they can send automated emails on your behalf or text messages on your behalf and make sure that you're engaging with your customers. And always think top of mind, they can fire off drip campaigns. So anything that you could do in the platform it can do on your behalf.

Nathan Daniel (17:58):

All right. So it can do it. It's customizable, and then you can, and then y'all would help if there's something I'm like, I I'm, one of my agents is having a challenge with this. I can pass them off to you, somebody on your team, and they'd be like, they can get on the phone and be like, okay, like as soon as I get assigned call or a text that comes into the CRM, I wanted to send this message. But as soon as it does this, then I want it to do this. So like, if then statement, right.

Michael Mosseri (18:25):

We, we have a lot of basically programming available inside the platform, everything across the board that you can do. I mean, from a lead routing to, you know, these action plans to just task lists, you know, I need to make sure I do these things.

Nathan Daniel (18:38):

Okay. So from a, from a broker or brokerage level, so like looking at back office a little bit, and the let's talk about the document review process, because, having agents inside of an office, we have to make sure we're doing compliance and we make sure we're overlooking and supervising the agents that are doing deals on our behalf. Right. So how does that work?

Michael Mosseri (19:03):

So we start that process a little bit earlier than the actual review. We want to make sure that your agents actually have the right forms. So we help you when you onboard create what's called our transaction wizard. So you're going to be basically be able to answer a couple of simple questions that we help you. And it's going to pull the right forms in the right form packs and add them to the transaction. So that's step one, making sure that your agents are actually using the right forms. And the step two, we have a fully customizable compliance task list. You can have as many check marks, as many document review stages, as many stopping points as you want. And also as many different types of task lists that you want so that when your compliance reviewers or your TCS or whoever, it might be, go into the platform, they know where they need to review. They know what documents they need to review, and they can approve or reject those transactions. And the agent will be notified. Additionally, we have a streamlined and unified place where they can put notes. So if they're working together on a document or transaction, they can actually converse back and forth on the activity and say, okay, this is what we're doing today. This is what we need to get accomplished. And they can notify each other directly through our platform.

Nathan Daniel (20:10):

Okay. All right. So then there's a communication piece internally there as well. So that's, that's good. I mean, that's really good, especially if your staff is in different locations or virtual or something like that, like we all are right now. Right? Absolutely. So as far as like getting into you know, from compliance obviously comes DA'S . So we've talked about that and the program does do that. Does it also track the ability? So say my company has a split and a cap. Does it track that information as well?

Michael Mosseri (20:43):

Absolutely. If you can come up with a commission split that we don't configure in our platform, then by the time you wake up the next morning, we're going to have it in there. So basically any type of commission split, whether it's the tiers, whether it's the flat, whether it's those clever ones that reset every year on your anniversary date, or just on January 1st, whatever it might be, we can put it in the platform,

Nathan Daniel (21:05):

You can build it and you can put it in the platform. And so I would imagine then let's go into reporting, you know, 1099's, you know, as a broker, I love seeing closed reports and you know, volume and all these other things, you know, what's, what's the reporting like

Michael Mosseri (21:22):

Great question. So we have a comprehensive analytics and reporting and you can basically slice and dice your data any way you want. So while the agents actually filling out those contracts and all the important transactions documents, all of that data is actually being pulled off of those documents and being synced up into the transaction. So you're not losing it as soon as you send it out for a PDF and all of that rich data is available to you for that reporting. So you're able to do all these different types of reporting. You can even export that reporting to excel, if you need a massage a little further. The only thing that we do a little bit differently is we don't actually generate those 1099's. Although you could, with our reporting, we actually push that data over with our sync into QuickBooks so that you can generate it that way.

Nathan Daniel (22:07):

Okay. So then it will, the system itself will take the information, put it into QuickBooks and then run the 10 99 through QuickBooks. Absolutely. It's how you do that. Okay. All right. So what am I not asking that, that a broker needs to know about total brokerage?

Michael Mosseri (22:25):

You know, we're, we're the complete end to end solution? So the only question is, you know, where's that data going, and we're trying to tell you, this is where it's going, and this is how you can use it. So we're going to make sure that our brokers are always going to be successful using our platform. And unlike other platforms out there who seem to be really successful. And then all of a sudden become a brokerage. We're not doing that. We have no plans of becoming a brokerage virtual or otherwise. Just the other day I saw another one another agent platform that was doing really well. And they're like, Hey, why don't we become a brokerage and see if we can compete with exp you, since we have so many members, the great way to lose all your members. And it's a great way to lose the trust of your members.

Nathan Daniel (23:08):

Yeah. I mean, that's like what? It's like pulling the curtain back. You'd be like, wow, hold the phone. Like, I'd liked it until a certain point. Now it's like, okay, now I got to go find something else, which you know, to your point, just then it's, you know, now it's causing me pain versus a program that I was invested in. Right. And I enjoyed it. I was working it. And then all of a sudden it's like, Nope, not the direction anymore. Now I'm going to have to pivot and go through some, some growing pains to find something else.

Michael Mosseri (23:34):

And it happens time and time. Again, there was a really loved CRM product in the marketplace that got bought by one of those big box brokerages. Everyone has to get off. I mean, you don't know what they're going to do. I mean, hypothetically, there should be great and say, Hey, we're not going to do anything with your data, but we're not going to promise you that. But the question is, are they actually going to follow through with their promises? And hopefully they do. We don't, we don't want to take someone's business because they're threatened or whatever it is. We just want people to be aware of the problem and that it's happening in the market.

Nathan Daniel (24:04):

Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Cool. Well, great. Well, I, you know, I, I really appreciate you coming on the show because as a part of what we're doing here is we want to make sure that we are interviewing and talking to people that are making a difference in, in brokerage lives, right. And, and inside of our companies. And we want to make sure that we have all the facts. We have an introduction one. So if somebody does want to reach out to Michael all his information is going to be in the show notes and you're going to be able to reach out to them, or where can they go to get more information,

Michael Mosseri (24:39):

Totalbrokerage.Com (mention Nathan Daniel and this episode)

Nathan Daniel (24:42):

All right. So Michael, thank you so much for being on the show today. I really appreciate it. And I appreciate you telling us about total brokerage and talking data with us. That's, that's the important thing from this is making sure who who owns your data and what's happening with it, right? So we need to be aware.

Michael Mosseri (24:59):

Thanks for having me so much. Absolutely. Talk to you later.

(25:03):

Thank you for tuning into this episode of the broker to broker real estate podcast. If you liked what you heard, make sure you subscribe to the channel for more information, tools and resources. Go to www.brokertobrokerpodcast.com and always remember be you and be real. We'll see you on the next episode.