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In this week’s episode of the RealTrending podcast, host Tracey Velt sits down with Eric Elfman, CEO of MoxiWorks. During the conversation, Velt and Elfman discuss the delicate art of balancing technology and artificial intelligence (AI) usage with developing client relationships.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. To start the discussion, Elfman and Velt briefly explore MoxiWorks’ upcoming goals for 2025.
Eric Elfman: I come from a SaaS business, and I’m a growth-oriented type CEO. Obviously, the real estate industry has had a challenging couple of years. Four million homes sold last year, compared to 7 million in 2021. Our sponsor was interested in getting a growth-oriented transformation underway at MoxieWorks.
Tracey Velt: What overarching technology trends have you seen among real estate agents and brokers?
Elfman: I’m probably different than a lot of technologists. The technology is not going to solve the problems in the real estate industry. What we’re seeing in our successful customers today is getting back to basics and tackling what it took to be a successful real estate agent 10 years ago. It’s just the hard work of filling the database and nurturing your contacts.
Elfman explores how MoxiWorks prepares agents for success in the market.
What MoxieWorks does is sales and marketing software for real estate agents. If you put in the hard work as an agent and pick up the phone when it’s not calling — and all those things are sometimes distasteful — along with applying technology, you have an edge over the competition.
Velt: What are some of the other roadblocks? How is MoxiWorks easing people into adopting a technology?
Elfman: A lot of the adoption issues are because of the relationship between an agent and a brokerage. They’re contractors, and they can pick up their contact database and go somewhere else almost overnight.
There might be distrust among the agents themselves to use the broker’s technology — especially because most vendors make it difficult to move your data.
MoxieWorks is trying to make that transition easier. Brokerages are still our customers, but agents are end users as well. We’re making information portability easier while not breaching the confidentiality of your data.
We’ve been making a big investment in not only technology, but also in the whole go-to-market motion. This summer, we’ve got a big launch of the next version of our software. We’re working with a bunch of our customers today in the beta program, so that’s huge.
To end the conversation, Elfman and Velt discuss how MoxiWorks plans to succeed in a market where agents or brokers may be less willing to pay for technology.
Elfman: I mentioned the go-to-market, as well. I’m just stating facts here instead of criticizing the industry. As brokerage margins have gotten smaller, whether it’s through agents getting a bigger portion of the commission dollar or just lower home sales, the ability and willingness to pay for software has also gotten smaller.
We’ve visualized a world where we deliver base capabilities to agents through brokerages, alongside a paywall where agents that want to use the advanced capabilities, and can afford to do it, have access.
