In the next installment of the Future of Real Estate series on Union Street Media’s YouTube channel, Rachel Allard, Senior Vice President of Strategy, spoke with Tamia Scott, Director of Marketing at Dilbeck Real Estate. Tamia is a marketing expert, having spent two decades helping companies like @properties and Dilbeck Real Estate grow their brands. She’s also whip smart and generous with her time, having mentored others in the industry as well as dedicated countless hours to community and volunteerism. Click the play button above to watch the full interview with this talented leader. 

Before getting her start in the real estate industry, Tamia Scott was working in the startup world. When the company she worked for ran out of money, her mother suggested that she find a more stable industry. “Well I said ‘I like real estate, I think. I like pretty houses, let me look into real estate,’” Scott reflects. 

She then started working for McGuire Real Estate in San Francisco, but eventually moved back to Chicago where she worked for @properties for over a decade. “So I was there, I was VP of Marketing, I managed their foundation, and then I decided I wanted to come back to California,” Scott says. Through her various roles, she’s always been attracted to marketing and brand development.

“I like being challenged to come up with a creative ways to achieve a goal or objective.” —Tamia Scott

Scott was presented with the ultimate challenge in 2020 when the pandemic began, forcing everyone to work remotely and pivot their strategies. Dilbeck Real Estate made some big changes, quickly. Scott cut their print advertising, which had primarily focused on open houses. She also leaned on a program called Workplace to keep their agents engaged. Scott posts on it every day with news or helpful resources to keep everyone up to date on what’s happening. 

They also ramped up their training to get all of their agents comfortable working with technology and social media. Scott focused training on what the agents could do to stay productive and varied the platforms she used, sometimes featuring live panels and sometimes providing other training content to agents. “The agents need to have content to post to keep their clients and sphere engaged with them. We create content and provide content for the agents, but any marketing content that we provide to the agents is not personal to that individual,” states Scott.

“When an agent is able to drill down and really create content that is personal to them, that really connects them to their sphere [and] is where real engagement happens.”

—Tamia Scott

Especially with inventory so low, Scott emphasizes the importance of empowering agents to stay ahead. “We’re trying to help our agents communicate with their sphere of influence, especially those within their sphere who are homeowners [and] were thinking about selling their home let’s say a year and a half ago or you know this time last year,” says Scott, adding “because it’s a seller’s market right now and so this would be a great time.”

Coaching agents on how to personalize their marketing has earned Scott positive feedback from the team, and the live panels, which she called Dilbeck Discussions, were particularly successful. “People got to hear from their peers and to hear real life examples of what their peers are doing to stay busy and stay productive and successful,” Scott says. She took advantage of the panels to feature all women and then mixed up the panelists, which she’s also proud of. 

Dilbeck Real Estate also recently implemented a new CRM and part of Scott’s job is to look at the platforms they use to identify what’s working and what’s not. She monitors engagement regularly. “We take that information to be able to make decisions on ‘okay the agents seem to really like X so maybe we should do more. And it looks like they’re not doing much Y and maybe we should look at A, why are they doing that? Or maybe we should just let go of that altogether,’” Scott explains. 

She also closely tracks what the agents are using from the marketing department and their designers. “We have designers within the department, we have services, and how much of our services are people using, which services are they using, what are they doing more or less with our services?” she states. Whereas a good portion of her role has been brand development and marketing for Dilbeck Real Estate, including redesigning their logo and brand strategy, Scott describes her role as really leading an in-house marketing agency that’s there to support their agents. 

In looking ahead, Scott says that the key for brokerages who want to grow is “having really good technology and internal support and training that you know will help the agents build relationships and maintain relationships with their sphere and new people, as well as help them provide really good superior service.”

To learn more about Tamia Scott and Dilbeck Real Estate visit: https://www.dilbeck.com/

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