At the Lamacchia Realty annual company kickoff meeting on January 16th, 2020, John Remby, the company’s Business Systems Engineer, made several exciting announcements about the company’s custom-built Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, which is now so custom to the company that it’s now called LamacchiaHub, This proprietary Lamacchia system was originally built on the Salesforce platform back in 2014. Since then, John Remby has been hard at work consistently improving the functionality. Additional engineers were hired over the past 6 months under John’s direction to help finalize these massive advancements in time for 2020.
One of the first major steps in creating LamacchiaHub was getting the CRM updated and onto Salesforce’s new Lightning platform. LamacchiaHub is a new, improved, and more sophisticated version of the Lamacchia Salesforce CRM that is already in place. The improvements that were made over the last six months specifically had a deep focus on making the system easier to navigate and more user-friendly. By switching to the latest version Lightning, the agents and staff will have a more modern view as well as a faster and more simplified user interface.
“Over the last 5 years, we have invested over a million dollars into customizing the CRM we built on the Salesforce platform. I admit, it has been more of an expensive endeavor than I anticipated originally but it has been incredibly valuable for our agents and staff to run the company. I am very excited for everyone in our organization to work on this new and improved system.” stated Anthony Lamacchia, Broker/Owner Lamacchia Realty
LamacchiaHub will also include the two new tools below to help increase the agent’s ability to sell homes.
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LamacchiaLinks Launches
At the same event, Dave Karoly, Vice President of Sales, announced a sophisticated new home buyer and seller matching system within LamacchiaHUB. This system will enable agents to match buyers and sellers in Lamacchia’s database of leads. Over the last five years, Lamacchia has generated over 50,000 buyer and seller leads between its Television and online advertising. This database of leads, as well as the new LamacchiaLinks system, will dramatically improve the ability of Lamacchia agents to plug in a buyer’s criteria and receive matches back on the seller’s properties that are already in the system. This means agents also have the ability to enter their seller’s property location, type, and characteristics into the system and receive matches back with potential buyers who are looking for a home with a similar profile.
“On any given day there is at least one Realtor in our company, in at least one community, who is signing up a buyer who is looking for a property that we likely have as a seller lead in our system. The potential seller may have called at one point over the past couple of years and possibly hasn’t made the move to sell yet. We want to make it easy for our agents to find these homes that wouldn’t otherwise be on their radar,” said Dave Karoly.
It will also remind and notify agents when they have clients that may match one another’s criteria by sending them a notification. In time functionality will develop further, but they will be rolled out in well planned out phases starting with this one today.
This custom system was built with Lamacchia agent’s databases, as well as buyer’s and seller’s privacy, held in the highest regard. The system was designed with firewalls to separate each agent’s leads and clients from other agents guaranteeing each agent’s privacy and security for their data. Ensuring these protections while simultaneously permitting agents and inside sales staff to collaborate without violating confidentiality extended the development timeline and financial commitment but was well worth the investment.
“I credit Dave for this brilliant idea, and I thank John for making it happen! I am excited to see our agents work it. This will put our advertising and technology investments together and give our clients and agents a massive advantage that neither of them will find anywhere else. No company generates more buyer and seller leads than we do. Now our system will help us match them up through LamacchiaLinks like no brokerage has ever done!” stated Anthony Lamacchia, Broker/Owner Lamacchia Realty
Another change that was made to help consolidate systems into LamacchiaHUBe was its connection to the RealScout system. RealScout, which the company has been using for the past few years, is a tool Lamacchia agents offer their buyer clients where they can set up searches and get newly listed properties emailed to them in real-time. In this new initiative, the two systems have been synced. What this means is an agent can set up a client in RealScout from LamacchiaHUB with the click of a button with a default search to leverage the search criteria entered from LamacchiaLinks. This now gives buyers more selection as they’re notified in real-time of potentially matching Lamacchia seller properties that are available as well as new listings on the open market, and price adjusted properties that have shifted into their preferred price point.
LaunchPad
To simplify the user experience, Lamacchia Realty now offers Launchpad, which is a menu of all websites and apps Lamacchia provides to its agents. Agents will log onto their LamacchiaHUB account and from the Launchpad will be granted access to all their frequently used apps without having to log in with every use, saving time for busy, on-the-go agents. This idea came from Gerry Bourgeois in the Leominster office when they had an innovation meeting about what improvements could be made to better the company. Gerry was the winner of the 2019 innovation that Lamacchia launched at its summer event on Thompson Island.
Lamacchia has spent over one million dollars in the last 5 years on research and development of several products services and technologies. This research has resulted in the company being able to produce the most advanced and user-friendly Customer Relationship management system in the Real Estate business, now available only to Lamacchia Realty agents.