The week Jenny's client stopped sending consumer portal links

Jenny Carr's clients used to send her consumer portal links between conversations. Now clients are sending Perchwell links instead. This case study explains the change in behavior.

Clients tend to drift to consumer portals

Jenny Carr is a REALTOR® at Butler & Co. Realty on Baldwin County's Eastern Shore, with a business built on repeat clients and referrals. Jenny curates a client experience carefully, but clients still drift to consumer portals between conversations, and the portal puts other agents' profiles beside every listing it shows them. She could have a good talk with a buyer on a Tuesday, and by Thursday they could drift to another agent.

Since Jenny started sharing listings through Perchwell, her invited clients have found it much easier to discuss the listing in a dedicated listing thread. When you share a property in Perchwell, it automatically creates a thread about that potential home, so every message about it lives in the context of the listing itself.

At first, in-app messages felt like yet another communication channel alongside text and email, but it did provide clients with a web and mobile app that was truly in Jenny's ecosystem. For her clients, receiving a Perchwell notification clearly meant that Jenny had shared a new listing with them or finished the CMA that she was putting together.

Messages did not replace those channels, but it did create a cohesive home for the professional collaboration that moved deals forward.

Jenny puts it plainly:

"Perchwell is simple, but it's very robust. It blends together the tools I want to use, but in one place where I can best help my clients."

^{Jenny Carr, REALTOR®, Butler & Co. Realty}

Then her client stopped sending consumer portal links

One of Jenny's clients, Reagan, is a repeat condo buyer. For years he shopped portals between conversations and sent Jenny links to whatever caught his eye.

By July, the portal links had tapered off. Jenny attributes this largely to the Messages feature because it is much easier to share and discuss listings all in one place. Additionally, the MLS data is more robust than any of the consumer portals, so Reagan can search for listings across a wider range of filters, and receive notifications in his agent's app.

Nobody asked Reagan to stop sending links. He switched because the Perchwell thread was the easier place to have the conversation, and Jenny could offer a better experience.

What keeps a client from drifting back?

No technology can replace the attention, knowledge, and care that real estate agents provide. Like many good agents, Jenny adapts her communication style to her clients' personality and preferences. Some clients are more visual, and prefer to analyze properties with photos and visual reports. Other clients want to dive deep into market data. Jenny has been using different tools in Perchwell to cater to these different personality types. Jenny uses Tags to pull the exact condos she is tracking into one live, branded page that her clients can react to.

"This is so much better than what you were sending me before."

^{Reagan, relayed by Jenny Carr, REALTOR®, Butler & Co. Realty}

^{Sample workspace: This is a preview created for demonstration purposes.}

Now Jenny is the center of the home buying journey, not a portal

Jenny gave her clients a better place to do the work, and as the conversation moved there, they moved with it. On a consumer portal she was one profile in a grid of agents. In her own ecosystem she is the only one, and Baldwin's members have that ecosystem because their MLS gave them Perchwell. The attention that used to drift to consumer portals is finding its way back to the agent.