Let’s face it. 2023 was not the best year for the real estate industry. Mortgage rates. Lawsuits. The lock-in effect. Inventory challenges. After a phenomenal run over the last couple of years when many industries were hurting, this year felt like working in the hospitality industry in the middle of 2020 –lots of people wanted to go places, and yet no one could.

When things get slow, there are essentially two schools of thought: first is to shut down the factory and send everyone home. Often, that’s the economically prudent choice. No one wants to be producing widgets if people are not out there to buy them.

The second is that the slowdown is an opportunity. You use the time to re-tool the factory. Upgrade your assembly line and your process. Make your widgets even better so that you can step ahead of the pack when things do come back.

I’ve always looked at slowdowns as the corner of the racetrack. It’s the time to accelerate and pull ahead. I’m proud to say that that’s the approach the Union Street Media took this past year.

Over the past 12 months, our team has deployed more new software than in many previous years. A combination of an excellent team of veteran engineers, phenomenal product leadership, digital marketing experts, and a great group of beta testers has brought forth upgrades to Accelerator — our platform — that we’ve wanted to do for a long time and deployed new digital strategies to help our client’s businesses grow.

A few of our highlights include:

• Call Ads
• Local Services Ads
• Our new Map Search
• Forced registration strategies that produced a 425% increase in leads
• A total overhaul of the user interface of Accelerator. It looks a lot better in blue!
• Deep integrations with several CRMs including Follow Up Boss, Cloze, and more.
• A new page builder (coming soon to a website near you) that will empower clients to modify the vast majority of the content deep within a website
• Real-time New Listing Notifications
• Our new Lead Management System
• An integration with Local Logic

And lots of simple yet impactful additions, such as

• Google single sign-on for user registrations
• “Guess who’s back” lead activity notifications
• The ability to create custom ads on your real estate website to promote mortgage brokers, lawyers, and other members of your sphere of influence

As an entrepreneur, you have to be an optimist. Part of what I love about working with real estate brokers is that you’re all entrepreneurs. To paraphrase Neil Young, although the meaning of the song was much different, we are looking forward to “24 and so much more”!

Most of all, we are looking forward to doing it together.

Have a wonderful holiday break and Happy New Year!