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Despite our longevity, we are determined to continue to grow, while also getting younger. With a focus on innovation, technology and curiosity, we have continued to build market share and enhance the quality of the platform we provide our members.
Investment in technology is one of the key aspects of our success. Our partnership with a small, agile start-up exemplifies our willingness to collaborate and take risks in the name of innovation. The Ray White-NurtureCloud story is one of potential, teamwork and investment.
Masters of our fate
In the early 2000s, we realised that we had a responsibility to lead our network in technology. We started by selecting, and then fully integrating, the best products in the market for our members. We ensured that members not only had the best technology product suite inside their business, but also that we would be able to negotiate strong financial deals with suppliers and also recruit and develop our own technology team to enhance adoption.
This commitment resulted in the birth of our “One System”, which in 2024, has grown into a technology platform that integrates over 20 products, supported by a specialist team that drives engagement and implementation. Our One System has created network effects via the day-to-day use of over 12,000 members that in turn creates value for our members and customers, whilst continuing to provide technology savings for our members.
Our OneSystem includes many products which have been built by our own software development team. Our Pulse suite was released in the late 2010s, bringing together all our data to provide members with real-time benchmarked information to enhance performance. Refer automates referrals, and their processing, across our network. We also continue to rely on some critical third-party products in the One System. These are products that are world-class, and there is both no need, nor little prospect, for us to to make them better (eg. Google Workspaces). Under our build, buy and customise model, we’ve been able to be in shape and direct the evolution of our technology offering.
Whilst our CRM, Vault, is a third party product and handles very well many of the core functions inside real estate businesses, we realised that we had to keep innovating around the CRM. Jason Alford, Ray White Chief Systems Officer, said the group was constantly reviewing the OneSystem to ensure it embodies what we believe is pivotal to operating a high performance real estate business.
“Watching the industry continue to change at speed, we knew we had to invest ‘in and around’ the CRM to ensure we have a system that reflects our opinions,” Jason said.
“Furthermore, the continued change in ownership of many of our providers was a brutal reminder to us that we couldn't leave the future of our One System in the hands of others. We are a very happy and important customer of many of the tech providers on our platform, but we realised that for some things we should build rather than buy”.”
Enter NurtureCloud.
Investment
In 2019, Ray White was approached to invest in a fixed-fee real estate agency which was established with a business model very similar to Purple Bricks. It invested heavily in lead generation (i.e. customer marketing), hoping that such investment would require limited agent prospecting. It also marketed a low, fixed-fee commission). This original model proved to be ineffective (like Purple Bricks) as it did not attract productive agents and the return on lead generation made it unviable. Given these challenges, it pivoted to become a technology-based agency, developing its own technology systems to enable agents to prospect effectively, whilst also giving vendors an entirely new level of transparency on agent activity. It remained a low, fixed fee business, but they gave their in-house productivity software a name - NurtureCloud.
Matt Gay, Ray White Chief Technology Officer, was impressed with the technology that underpinned the business.
“We found NurtureCloud to be a nimble startup with good leadership, demonstrating
success with testing and learning their way through a challenging model”, he said.
“NurtureCloud was very much in line with our technology future”, explained Matt. “ Some of its features we had at the time, some were in development, some were in our roadmap - but the cohesiveness of their platform was far ahead of where we were. And they seemed to have a well set team that was moving fast.”
Discussing the opportunity that Ray White saw when it met the agency business and its NurtureCloud team, Ray White Managing Director Dan White said that whilst the low fixed-fee agency model did not resonate with him, NurtureCloud was very exciting. “We passed on the opportunity to invest in the agency business, but we pursued the separation of NurtureCloud as its own entity and the possibility of investing in it” he said. “Fortunately we were able to separate NutureCloud and invest directly in that”. Ray White acquired a controlling interest in NurtureCloud in 2020, with the balance owned by the development team.
“We realised that we weren’t just buying some advanced technology, we were becoming partners with a strong team that were totally focused on the success of the product,” Dan said.
Scale
NurtureCloud was originally built for a small team. Both Ray White and the NurtureCloud team understood that in order for it to work with a large network, it needed to be scaled and adapted.
The growth of the platform from 2020 to now has been underpinned by Ray White and the NurtureCloud team working together in the ‘bunker’ - a term coined for the weekly meetings that take place to discuss developments and updates, scaling the product, and agent adoption.
The team was determined to move fast, and quickly established a dedicated “NurtureCloud Bunker” that deliberately focused on clarifying scopes of work that we knew our network members would see as valuable.
“Feedback loops, pilot programs and agile pivots enabled us to scale into a much larger set of agents than the NurtureCloud development team had been used to,” Jason Alford said.
As software was developed and released, it became clear that office data and behavioural change was going to be the largest challenge and take the longest time. Forward planning allowed us to scale up our virtual assistant programs and expand our team of Digital Performance Specialists, who devote all their time to helping members leverage the value of NurtureCloud.
NurtureCloud has now been developed into what we describe as an “agent operating system” in Australia. That is, it enables agents to do everything they need to do on NurtureCloud, from prospecting through to open-homes and vendor reporting, whilst leaving things like trust accounting and portal up-loading to the office CRM.
As of August 2024, 790 offices across Australia and New Zealand are using NurtureCloud. In the past 30 days, over 720,283 calls were made from the Smart Calls feature on the platform, 29,995 appraisals were logged and 8,941 listings were won. Interactions in August sat at 1,437,374. Business level reporting of agent productivity has changed the way many of our leaders provide support and accountability to their teams. Vendors log into their own property portal to obtain complete transparency on the progress of their campaign and the activity of their chosen agent.
“It has completely changed the way I discuss performance and improvement with our members.” said Mark McLeod, Ray White’s Chief Strategy Officer (Real Estate). “I’m shocked by some of the insights that NurtureCloud provides me, both the great and not-so-great insights! NurtureCloud is unlocking so much potential.”
AI powering improving experiences
NurtureCloud is using AI to personalise the experience for every property owner because it prepares our members for every phone call with data and information specific to that vendor (eg. what’s happening in their area of interest, and their digital activity). Propensity modelling guides agents to provide personalised communication cadence based on their stage in the real estate journey. It is also helping us connect the activity of customers across our entire group, enabling our members to get a complete picture of their interests. So AI helps us ensure we are getting the balance right in the level of communication with our customers.
AI is also helping us match buyers with suitable listings based on their activity across the whole group. That means we will be sending more relevant and targeted information to them, quickly finding the perfect match for buyers that are active in the market and ready to buy.
Where to from here?
As it stands, the bunker team meets every Monday, working on upgrades, changes and production decisions.
Courtney Martin, General Manager of Ray White - NurtureCloud, is optimistic and excited about the direction of the NurtureCloud / Ray White partnership.
"For the first time, our core operating system for agents is providing them with an unfair advantage in their marketplaces,” Courtney said.
“We do this by leveraging our network effect - enriching data, and sharing insights that predict future listings in our agents databases and giving vendors a transparency we haven't been able to previously deliver."
"Our network feels like they're part of this journey with us - we listen to their feedback and can make swift changes to the product because we have their support and engagement, something we were missing before NurtureCloud," Courtney continued.
“Now that the Buyer Module is in the hands of agents across Australia and a release in New Zealand is imminent, our plan is to circle back to the prospecting module and release a new, improved version of Smart Calls, this time with machine learning technology that will predict twice the amount of listings.
“Following this, we’ll look to better support agents “on the run” and we are currently considering what new features we should prioritise such as voice control, CarPlay, and digital solutions for listing presentations, offers, and contract signing.”
