My first exposure to The Realty Alliance was in 2017 when Delta Media Group® first partnered with Coldwell Banker Howard Perry & Walston. At the time, I had only been with Delta for two short years, and HPW's partnership with Delta marked the first partnership we had ever forged with a brokerage that belonged to The Realty Alliance. As we are a quarter of the way through 2024, I am happy to say that I have personally partnered with an additional 15+ Realty Alliance members over the years. 

Brokerages belonging to The Realty Alliance are some of the most forward-thinking brokerages I have had the pleasure of working with in my professional career. As I noticed the sheer talent that belonged to these brokerages, I had the idea of bringing together the brokerages who were Delta Media Group partners but also belonged to overlapping networks like The Realty Alliance to form what would become our Brokerage Advisory Committees.

The idea was simple enough: take the talented Marketing & Technology Directors from the nation's largest brokerages and put them all together on bi-monthly calls with our product development team and facilitate an open dialog about what each brokerage was hearing from their agents that they needed to be more successful. It also was an avenue to share new feature ideas, provide early alpha testing of new features, and get feedback about the things that were working — or not working — in the business for our clients. 

One of the first advisory groups founded was what we called our Enterprise/Leading Real Estate Companies of the World® committee. We held our first meeting together in October 2021 with just six brokerages. Over the years, these groups grew to three different sets of brokerages encompassing over 40 altogether. The original group, however, is made up exclusively of brokerages that meet the following criteria: 

• They have ranked in the RealTrends Top 500
• The brokerage is a member of Leading Real Estate Companies of the World®
• The brokerage is a member of The Realty Alliance 
• The brokerages cannot directly compete with other members of the committee

Pictured on this page are the current members of this group. These meetings have proven to be extremely valuable for all of the clients. At Delta Media Group, we develop industry-leading technology, websites, and marketing strategies. We're engineers at the end of the day, not REALTORS®. Having the pleasure of bringing together such a large group of industry thought leaders means that we get "boots on the ground" insights into exactly how the nearly 50,000 users of The DeltaNET® are utilizing our technology to make a difference in their business. 

I believe strongly in collaboration with the actual end-users of any technology. After all, it's important to build something you're passionate about; however, it's equally important to build something people will enjoy using. It's easy to fall into the trap of wanting to build something that seems cool personally but will not seem useful in the mind of a real estate agent.

One of the very first projects we worked on with our advisory groups was the development of our DeltaNET® 7 platform. Early development began in late 2021, with the overhaul officially launching in March 2023. DeltaNET 7, as a CRM/marketing platform, had two key goals. First, take 30 years' worth of features and functionality and rebuild it from the ground up to be the industry's easiest-to-use CRM. Second, it needed to support full modular customization and be real estate's first truly customizable intranet program. 

The end goal of more than 18 months' worth of development was what I believe to be the absolute best bang for your buck in the real estate software space. None of that would have been possible without more than a dozen meetings with our advisory committees every step of the way to show them in-development builds of the platform and gather their feedback on which features were shaping up to be a hit and which features we needed to take back to the drawing board and start fresh with. 

Another example was our Creative Studio program that we built and launched with DeltaNET® 6 in 2020. It was developed entirely in-house and proved to be too technical of a product for the average agent to take full advantage of. We heard the feedback from our customers, and as development began on DeltaNET 7, we knew we needed to rebuild Creative Studio from the ground up. What emerged, thanks to our advisory committee feedback, was what ultimately became known as Delta Create. 

Gathering user feedback is just one of the many things we look to do within our advisory meetings. Our meetings are typically structured so that one hour of the meeting is focused on gathering feedback and previewing new in-development features — but the second half of these meetings are all about having an open forum for our customers to share ideas. 

I'll take a moment to pause and share a story about how this meeting structure came to be. It all harkens back to my first-ever Realty Alliance meeting in the spring of 2018, which took place in Cincinnati, OH. I had been invited after bumping into The Realty Alliance CEO, Craig Cheatham, at Inman Connect San Francisco. I maintained a good relationship with Craig following that 2018 meeting and was thankfully invited back several times to present in front of their members. Fast forward to April 2023, and I had the honor of participating in their MarTech exclusive meeting in Charleston, SC. 

The insights I gained from that meeting in Charleston were enormous. I want to be conscious of not oversharing too much of their meeting structure; however, I will share that they provided an opportunity for attendees to provide topics in advance to be discussed inside a safe space for brainstorming. The idea of members driving the meeting resonated, and I decided to implement the concept into Delta's Advisory Committee meetings. 

Since implementing this change, I have been able to participate in conversations related to developing new agent recruiting tools that brokerages are clamoring for. These conversations allowed me to find out how to better get agents to upload their contact databases into their CRM through a great idea like "CRM for Dummies, hear about other third-party vendors like Local Logic who provide amazing data insights and APIs to further expand functionality on brokerage websites, and so much more. 

I'll conclude with one more anecdote from a recent meeting. AI is the hot topic for 2024; you can't attend a single real estate conference without being bombarded with hours of content about how AI is going to change the world. My personal opinion is that AI, like any other technology, can be beneficial in making your business more efficient. But nothing will ever be a replacement for excellent customer service and human professionalism. 

That may sound strange coming from a representative of a tech firm that has been building advanced AI engines since 2018; however, I believe that there is a fine line between AI as a positive in your business and AI as a liability to your business. A recent discussion in one of our advisory meetings revolved around new technology that's been touted where certain CRM providers can have an AI trained using the agent's voice and make automated phone calls to customers and hold full conversations with customers as if they are the agent themselves making phone calls to the contacts in their database. On paper, the idea sounds amazing, right? The agent is on the golf course while the AI calls all their customers and schedules appointments, and the customers are none-the-wiser that they are talking to a robot. 

The reality is that we are living in the wild-west of AI. Everything is so new, and nothing is regulated yet. Tech companies have raised millions of dollars to rush to market to be the first to bring out the next best AI voice tool, and similar to the internet itself, eventually, regulations will catch up. There was a time when ADA compliance, GDPR compliance, and a variety of other regulations were not yet developed. Once these ordinances began to be implemented, vendors needed to clean up their act to ensure they weren't violating the law. 

There was a long discussion related to AI specifically following the FCC ruling on February 8 that made "The use of voice-cloning technology in robocalls illegal." If you're a brokerage looking to engage with anything AI-Voice related, I highly caution going all-in as it's just too early to tell where the laws will land with this new tech, and the overall opinion of our advisory group was quite similar. The tech is intriguing, but is it worth the gamble of signing up for something that may be shut down as new regulations are put in place? Or worse, letting an AI run wild with your brand unmonitored and say something that breaks already established fair-housing rules. 

Brokerages looking to truly make a difference in their business through websites and online technology should be working with a vendor who values their opinion and offers opportunities to collaborate in developing the product that you, as the brokerage, are paying to use. I am continually grateful for the great partnerships we have forged at Delta and the continued collaboration from these fantastic partners.