As technology progresses, we see its impact on reducing workloads for many business owners. Reduced workloads allow business owners to spend more time focusing on the most important aspects of their business, such as generating revenue. This is particularly true for industries where most of the money is made by meeting prospects and closing deals without much administration.
An excellent example of one such industry is the real estate/mortgage industry. Rather than closing deals, real estate and mortgage professionals often spend significant amounts of time managing their marketing, cold calling, billboards, and lead generation, often to no avail. Instead of wasting time on these things, they should be focusing on meeting with prospects, which is where the money is made.
Two entrepreneurs who have been building a company that uses technology to offer digital marketing and other services to real estate and mortgage professionals are Yaman Abuibaid and Joseph Ierfino. These two men are the founders of Deluxe Realty Marketing and RECODemand.
Early Beginnings
Yaman Abuibaid, one of the co-founders of Deluxe Realty Marketing, took an unorthodox route into the world of real estate. Growing up, he was a prodigy in computer programming, winning various national competitions throughout his years in high school. As he got older, he started to realize the commercial value of the skills he had developed. As a result, he began developing websites for companies.
On one such project, he met Joseph Ierfino, a digital marketing professional. Joseph received a brief from a real estate company to work on their digital marketing. The duo was very young and had never taken on such a high-profile job before. However, they decided to take on the challenge.
Abuibaid and Ierfino worked tirelessly, using their technical knowledge to implement unique digital marketing processes different from the traditional forms of marketing the team had implemented in the past. After a few months of running the new campaigns, while consistently optimizing by reading data and A/B testing the demographic targeting, their client said that out of all the companies they had worked with, Abuibaid and Ierfino were by far the best, by a longshot. In addition, their marketing strategies had yielded a ten times return on investment for the real estate team. This validation gave them the impetus to focus on the niche of digital marketing for the real estate and mortgage industry, in which they founded Deluxe Realty Marketing.
Growing the Business
The early days of the business were tough. Finding initial clients required a significant amount of cold calling and sending emails. Ironically, this was the very kind of time-intensive activity they wanted to help their future clients avoid. They utilized their digital marketing expertise and, over time, developed a strategy to fill their calendars with appointments booked weeks in advance. They were able to automate this process and slowly build a commission-only sales team while maintaining a high close rate.
Similar to their first real estate client, they continuously got feedback from new clients that their digital marketing strategies were bringing in significantly more leads than other methods. After some time passed, demand got to a point where they knew they had to streamline operations, so Yaman asked his older brother, Ahmed, to come on board as head of operations.
Ahmed has a background in information technology and has extensive experience in this field. After spending months mapping out the processes and building systems, they were able to offer a full suite of digital marketing services and service a significant number of clients without reducing the quality of their offering. This approach paid significant dividends as they continued to grow.
Expansion
Today, Deluxe Realty Marketing has a team of 47 employees, including marketers, data analysts, copywriters, and growth specialists managing ad campaigns for mortgage and real estate professionals. These professionals utilize their clients’ monthly marketing budgets to drive real growth by running optimized & hyper-targeted ad campaigns on digital advertising platforms.
While the core digital marketing offering has had significant success over the last few years, the guys had plans to enter the education space in their niche. They realized that teaching their highly effective digital marketing strategies would be an incredible offer to introduce to the marketplace.
So, they incorporated a new company, RECODemand, which stands for Real Estate Commissions On Demand.
The team spent approximately nine months developing the curriculum. The program pairs the client with an expert in the marketing department for 1-on-1 training. The curriculum includes training on how to use advertising platforms, automation tools to reduce time spent on tasks, access to their top-performing ad campaigns, top-performing offers & marketing techniques. To date, they have had hundreds of real estate and mortgage professionals complete the training program with outstanding results. RECODemand is now one of the fastest-growing education tech companies in North America.
Now, Abuibaid and Ierfino run RECODemand and Deluxe Realty Marketing together. The companies complement each other and work synergistically. So, whether a company wants to have the real estate/mortgage marketing done for them, or whether they want to learn how to do it themselves, Abuibaid, Ierfino, and their companies are able to help them.
The Future
Looking to the future, the company is focusing on adding services that go beyond a full suite of marketing services to make real estate and mortgage professionals’ lives easier. For example, after working with their clients, they noticed other time-consuming and tedious activities they can help their clients with. One such activity is customer service; Many real estate agents spend a significant amount of time on phones reaching out to and following up with prospects. So, they slowly hired, trained, and built their call center, which acts as a client’s assistant on a monthly subscription. This allowed real estate and mortgage professionals to have a highly-trained virtual assistant on their team for a fraction of the cost of an in-house assistant.
As a result, their new offering reduced an average of 7 hours of work per week for each client. Thus, allowing their client to focus on critical aspects of their business and increase growth. At the same time, this new offering increased Deluxe Realty Marketing’s revenue by 30%.
Listening to customers, implementing processes, and offering new services to retain customers and get referrals has been how the guys have built up this business with no funding. They have big plans to effectively become the entire back office for real estate agents, which makes them a company to look out for in the industry.
Through hard work, creativity, innovation, and a dedication to mastering critical technology, Yaman Abuibaid and Joseph Ierfino were able to create two businesses that were game-changers in the real estate and mortgage industry. Many companies and professionals in these industries have benefited enormously by working with Deluxe Realty Marketing and RECODemand.
Abuibaid and Ierfino plan to keep disrupting the real estate and mortgage industries with unparalleled service and training program offerings. They are true innovators and are constantly working to stay on the cutting-edge.
‘The Bidding War’ is a play skewering Toronto’s real estate market via a story about a one-day bidding war over the city’s last affordable home. The cast and crew say it exposes how the housing crisis brings out “the worst in people.” (Nov. 12, 2024)
TORONTO – The Toronto Regional Real Estate Board says home sales in October surged as buyers continued moving off the sidelines amid lower interest rates.
The board said 6,658 homes changed hands last month in the Greater Toronto Area, up 44.4 per cent compared with 4,611 in the same month last year. Sales were up 14 per cent from September on a seasonally adjusted basis.
The average selling price was up 1.1 per cent compared with a year earlier at $1,135,215. The composite benchmark price, meant to represent the typical home, was down 3.3 per cent year-over-year.
“While we are still early in the Bank of Canada’s rate cutting cycle, it definitely does appear that an increasing number of buyers moved off the sidelines and back into the marketplace in October,” said TRREB president Jennifer Pearce in a news release.
“The positive affordability picture brought about by lower borrowing costs and relatively flat home prices prompted this improvement in market activity.”
The Bank of Canada has slashed its key interest rate four times since June, including a half-percentage point cut on Oct. 23. The rate now stands at 3.75 per cent, down from the high of five per cent that deterred many would-be buyers from the housing market.
New listings last month totalled 15,328, up 4.3 per cent from a year earlier.
In the City of Toronto, there were 2,509 sales last month, a 37.6 per cent jump from October 2023. Throughout the rest of the GTA, home sales rose 48.9 per cent to 4,149.
The sales uptick is encouraging, said Cameron Forbes, general manager and broker for Re/Max Realtron Realty Inc., who added the figures for October were stronger than he anticipated.
“I thought they’d be up for sure, but not necessarily that much,” said Forbes.
“Obviously, the 50 basis points was certainly a great move in the right direction. I just thought it would take more to get things going.”
He said it shows confidence in the market is returning faster than expected, especially among existing homeowners looking for a new property.
“The average consumer who’s employed and may have been able to get some increases in their wages over the last little bit to make up some ground with inflation, I think they’re confident, so they’re looking in the market.
“The conditions are nice because you’ve got a little more time, you’ve got more choice, you’ve got fewer other buyers to compete against.”
All property types saw more sales in October compared with a year ago throughout the GTA.
Townhouses led the surge with 56.8 per cent more sales, followed by detached homes at 46.6 per cent and semi-detached homes at 44 per cent. There were 33.4 per cent more condos that changed hands year-over-year.
“Market conditions did tighten in October, but there is still a lot of inventory and therefore choice for homebuyers,” said TRREB chief market analyst Jason Mercer.
“This choice will keep home price growth moderate over the next few months. However, as inventory is absorbed and home construction continues to lag population growth, selling price growth will accelerate, likely as we move through the spring of 2025.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 6, 2024.
HALIFAX – A village of tiny homes is set to open next month in a Halifax suburb, the latest project by the provincial government to address homelessness.
Located in Lower Sackville, N.S., the tiny home community will house up to 34 people when the first 26 units open Nov. 4.
Another 35 people are scheduled to move in when construction on another 29 units should be complete in December, under a partnership between the province, the Halifax Regional Municipality, United Way Halifax, The Shaw Group and Dexter Construction.
The province invested $9.4 million to build the village and will contribute $935,000 annually for operating costs.
Residents have been chosen from a list of people experiencing homelessness maintained by the Affordable Housing Association of Nova Scotia.
They will pay rent that is tied to their income for a unit that is fully furnished with a private bathroom, shower and a kitchen equipped with a cooktop, small fridge and microwave.
The Atlantic Community Shelters Society will also provide support to residents, ranging from counselling and mental health supports to employment and educational services.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 24, 2024.
