Revolutionizing Real Estate Using Zenlist with Nolan Walker

Are you looking for a powerful option to streamline your real estate business? Then you need to listen to this.

In this episode, we chat with Nolan Walker, an experienced Enterprise Sales Executive with over a decade of experience working in SaaS/ Technology Sales and Consulting across numerous industries, markets, and client sizes. Currently with Zenlist, he brings a wealth of expertise in streamlining processes for agents and clients, leveraging cutting-edge technology to enhance user experiences in property transactions.

Join us as we get into the details of how Zenlist enhances communication between agents and clients by providing a unified platform with fast and direct MLS feeds. We cover the tool's key features, such as ease of use, seamless integrations with our existing tools, and premium options for advanced functionalities. We also highlight the importance of data standardization and the efforts to provide real-time data updates for better performance.

Learn how to leverage this powerful tool in your real estate business. Listen to the full episode now.

Specifically, this episode highlights the following themes: 

• Simplifying agent-client communication and relationship with Zenlist
• Providing seamless integration with existing tools for enhanced efficiency
• Offering optional premium features to cater to varied real estate needs

Links from this episode:

• Learn more about Zenlist here: zenlist.com

1ae5b43598204883b524f061d4880e6d10fca88c (for podfollow.com)

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 0:54 About Nolan Walker
• 1:35 Problems Zenlist Solves
• 2:28 Importance of Agent-Client Collaboration
• 4:18 Zenlist's Approach to Ease of Use
• 8:09 Integrations with Existing Services
• 9:32 Performance and Data Update Speed
• 13:27 Zenlist's Collaboration Features for Teams
• 14:47 Premium Services and Flexibility
• 16:50 Importance of Standardization
• 18:49 Value of Buyer Agreements
• 21:30 Significance of Standardized Data for Onboarding
• 23:14 Where to Learn More about Zenlist

Transcript

Nolan Walker [00:00:00]:
It's a natural evolution of this idea and this model of choice. With choice prompts, flexibility. There's a wide variety of agents at different experience, tenure, client level and needs in the industry. So a good vendor in the real estate space needs to be able to meet those goals. So Zenlist can operate and solve many, many needs of an agent at that base included level, to your point, but can also provide some premium features that may not be a fit for every agent out there or may not even be a part of that business model. By allowing those premium services to exist as an optional choice upgrade or to purchase, it gives the most range of accessibility for agents.

Matt Fowler [00:00:43]:
Hey everybody, it's Matt Fowler, the executive director of Doorify MLS again and we are coming to you today with a couple of special guests, Allan Nielsen and Nolan Walker. Say hello, you guys.

Allan Nielsen [00:00:54]:
Hey everybody.

Nolan Walker [00:00:56]:
Hey everybody. Thanks for having me.

Matt Fowler [00:00:58]:
You guys all know Allan. Allan's been around Triangle, now Doorify for a dozen years or so and Nolan is our vendor. To talk about a product today called Zenlist. And setting up the call, we were acknowledging the name and how zen the design looks and it's so smooth and clean and a great new product that you will have the choice of using on the Doorify platform. After the introduction, I'm going to turn things over to Vice president of MLS Allan Nielsen, who's going to talk to Nolan about some questions today and I'll probably have some of my own. So Allan, great.

Allan Nielsen [00:01:35]:
Thank you, Matt. So, yeah. Hey Nolan, good to see you. We are very excited about the opportunity to have your product on our dashboard. So what specific problems do you see Zenlist solve in our marketplace?

Nolan Walker [00:01:47]:
Yeah, and we're excited to be included. So I think we simplify the problem to communication. So with Zenlist, agents and clients can access the same private platform which gets a direct feed from the MLS. Ultimately, agents and clients have the same goal at with the home search process is to close on a house. So they're going to go about that a few different ways. During that search, clients are able to access through Zenlist, the search tool provided directly by their agent that they're otherwise seeking out on third party sites or public portals. And agents are getting the depth and breadth of data from the MLS that they need to be able to do their job. So in that way, with Zenlist, everybody's ending up on the same place within the same platform.

Nolan Walker [00:02:26]:
So solving both of those needs at once.

Allan Nielsen [00:02:28]:
Thank you. That is something that is very important that we hear all the time from our subscribers. They want that Integration or collaboration with their clients is so important to them. So making that as efficient as possible is extremely important to them. Of course.

Matt Fowler [00:02:43]:
Oh, and let me jump in real quick and point out to the subscribers that we're talking about an alternative client portal experience. This isn't something that we're suggesting. Everybody is going to have to change from the one they're using now. 76% of our users use the Paragon platform, which has the Client Connect piece. That is what you share with your client. What Allan and I are doing here is we're enabling you as the subscriber to continue to use that if you choose to, but to have a free evaluation of a product that's an alternative consumer experience. It's a search tool for you, but when you set up the tool, you can invite your customer to that and it might make you look a lot better to that customer than another one. And it's a really cool way to kind of evaluate these choices that you have.

Matt Fowler [00:03:33]:
You've got Paragon Matrix and Flex MLS on the platform. Coming fast is going to be the Zenlist platform. And we want you to put those next to each other, to take a moment to work on your business, not just in it, and to see if a tool like Zenlist might make you look better, smarter, faster to that home buyer. So it's a choice, it's an option that'll be coming in the first part of 2025.

Allan Nielsen [00:03:58]:
Yeah, very good point. This is not something that is being forced upon anyone to use. This is something that will be available on the dashboard, people to try out and see if they like it. Right. So ease of use is often talked about. So what's the approach of Zenlist in terms of ease of use? What kind of thoughts have you had as you designed Zen List?

Nolan Walker [00:04:18]:
Yeah, so I work with agents every day. So I've always heard the, you know, the notion that we prefer the, the old school ways, as I'm sure we've all heard many times. But what's really great about Zenlist is it's incredibly easy to use because our main use case is what agents are already doing every day, which is creating and searching for properties for either themselves or for their clients. So the vast majority of users who come to Zenlist for the first time are already finding it to be as user friendly as most modern and mainstream applications. So most of the time they don't even need any additional training to utilize Zendlist because it's familiar from the start. That said, there are many of our users that want to know about every single feature that's available in Zenlist. So we've got self paced support guides, videos, trainings, webinars, and a dedicated support team that exists within the application to solve any questions, typically within minutes for the agents.

Allan Nielsen [00:05:09]:
Yeah, and you mentioned it is so easy that training is not really needed. But could you speak a little bit more to how training will be made available for subscribers? What does that look like?

Nolan Walker [00:05:18]:
Yeah, absolutely. So in this unique case with Doorify, when we work with these type of relationships, we want to get as familiar with the local nuances of a market as we can. So that typically relies on working with the local associations, the MLS support team, the staff, and that way we can work closely to learn about those nuances. And from there we're able to set up and train our support team to learn about what is unique to this market. From there we can set up regional webinars, market based webinars, and in most cases even work with some of the larger brokerages, brokers and charges or even teams within the marketplace to help do dedicated trainings to familiarize their agents on the value that Zenlist can provide their clients. So, you know, many different routes to it, but ultimately we want to focus on making sure that it's the most streamlined path to adoption for your members, that they're utilizing Doorify in a way that's going to impact their clients locally.

Matt Fowler [00:06:11]:
Nolan, regarding training, just as an aside for our listeners, Zenlist is. Where is Zenlist based?

Nolan Walker [00:06:17]:
So we're remote, but we're based primarily in San Francisco and Chicago with most of our team members. I happen to live here locally in Durham, so that's a nice little bonus for me.

Matt Fowler [00:06:28]:
Sir, I wanted to mention that you were actually able to attend the board of directors meeting in person. And you know, training will be. We'll have some in person training opportunities. We really want to focus on adoption and make sure that everybody knows about this. Again, it's just an option, it's not something anybody has to do. But we really want everybody to make sure that they've, they've had a chance to see it. And you know, here, if this is not a question down your list, Allan, about the adoption in the other market, Chicago and San Francisco, maybe you can speak to that. Nolan, I know those were kind of specific use cases.

Matt Fowler [00:06:59]:
They weren't really launched exactly the same way as we're doing. But you've had really significant adoption in those markets, I believe.

Nolan Walker [00:07:05]:
Yeah, absolutely. So in San Francisco, one of our first sort of jumps into the MLS support system that we, we've kind of moved into what we're doing with. Doorify was with the San Francisco association of Realtors and their leadership team cites Zenlist as one of the quickest and fastest adopted tool by their members. And I think one of the main reasons why that happens is it's not just agents adopting the tool, it's the clients as well. So when clients are invited by an agent, we have some exciting stats about that. That 8 out of every 10 client that's invited by an agent into Zenlist immediately accepts that invite. And then from there, each week is uniquely signing into Zenlist 10 times and looking at about on average 17 to 18 unique listings per week. So when we think about adoption, agents are going to use a platform and a technology that their clients are actively using.

Nolan Walker [00:07:55]:
And when we have both of those in one place, that's why we're able to see such quick adoption between MLS is, as you had mentioned, as an option of choice for their members to utilize Zenlist to do their search and collaborating within their clients.

Allan Nielsen [00:08:09]:
Yeah, and that, I guess the proof is in the pudding, right? So when you see people keep coming back and using the application, that's really the best way to determine the success there. So with all our platforms, there are often heavy integrations going on with other platforms, other services. Can you speak a little bit to how Sendless integrate with other services like Showing Time, which is a very important product in our space?

Nolan Walker [00:08:35]:
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I always like to say probably the most adopted tool in any market is the MLS itself, and that's our main integration. We obviously work to get that data feed from the MLS, provide those results within Zenlist. But you know, when it comes to importance in this market specifically, we hear a lot about, you know, top of funnel lead generation. So we've built out some CRM integrations as well within Zenlist, recognizing the importance of lead generation tools for agents to continue to grow their business. We're also always listening to users on where they want to see those integrations go. So there's certain CRMs that we've built out as we launch into this market. We'd love to hear from users and members what other CRMs they would like to see added.

Nolan Walker [00:09:16]:
And Allan, to your point, Showing Time is one of our base integrations. So at launch, all Doorify members will have access to be able to book showing time, you know, schedule showing time directly through the listing pages within Zenlist without having to leave or overcomplicate the process.

Matt Fowler [00:09:32]:
Let me ask you a Question about. I don't know if you know the answer. No one about speed. So just for a. So we're probably going to talk to all the vendors about this. We are talking to our subscribers in 2025 about automation. And we want every brokerage, all 3,000 or so offices, to understand that they can be as fast as the fastest app on the App Store, depending on the infrastructure that they use from us. So there are multiple ways to get data from Doorify.

Matt Fowler [00:10:02]:
The best way to get data from Doorify is through the Source of Truth API with the new webhooks that are coming out. Talk to us a little bit about performance and maybe you're just getting up and running in Doorify markets, but tell us about performance and how you guys think about that.

Nolan Walker [00:10:16]:
Yeah, so obviously when you think about real estate, it's really a game of minutes and it's who can access the information efficiently, efficiently and quickly when it comes to an agent and a client. So we handle that within the app in terms of, you know, the passive notifications that can happen. So when a new listing arrives into Zen List, you know, an agent and a client can receive instant notifications, act and make an informed group decision on that, and then decide if they'd like to see put an offer on the house, whatever that would be. So by default, we streamline that entire process. But the reality is it all comes from where that data is being sent from. So what's exciting about Doorify, you know, compared to some of the other markets, is with this feed, to my understanding, we'll be able to receive information directly from the listing source. We don't have to rely on going through a third party or another area to get that information, which may or may not cause delays. So we've built Zenlist to be able to, you know, instantaneously provide a listing.

Nolan Walker [00:11:11]:
And the most perfect example, so your members, when on Zenlist, they're going to want to be able to use the platform, trusting that the information is going to be as close to real time as we can get it through that API and the webhook feed that you guys will be able to provide. So that's particularly exciting for both the clients, for the agents, and for us particularly, because that opens up a whole new world of applications for this market that I. I'm excited to see evolve for the subscribers.

Matt Fowler [00:11:38]:
Nolan, I think it's so important to understand two things here. The first one is that we're working closely with you with ice, with CoreLogic and with FBS to provide them access, all of them at the same time, these alerts. And Allan and I think of it as alert equity. Everyone should have the opportunity to get that update at the same time and it should be real time. What they do after that is up to that company. And we have a couple of vendors I won't call out on your podcast that update the data every 5, 10, 15 minutes. And then we have another set of technology that you're going to be using that allows subsecond updates. So both are possible on all platforms and we encourage the use of the very latest data for all vendors.

Matt Fowler [00:12:26]:
All new vendors are going to be required to use the latest data. So that's exciting for the subscribers because you can in fact be as fast as the fastest app on the app door. Maybe that was something that you'd given up on and that, you know, the thing with Nolan sells.com couldn't be as fast as the other ones on the on the app Store. And that's not true anymore. So through Doorify, through agile companies like Zenlist, that's why we did the renovation we did last year, so that we could make space for choices like Zenlist. Yeah.

Nolan Walker [00:13:00]:
And to quickly add to that point, Matt, just at an end use case scenario with this relationship, we just want to eliminate any opportunity. If you've decided to use Zenlist as your choice option, that a client's going to bring you a listing that has been somehow updated before you see it in the Zenlist platform, we want to remove that from the conversation and allowing you to access information you know to your point as quickly as you can to make those decisions as a group.

Allan Nielsen [00:13:27]:
Nolan, we hear a lot in our marketplace about teams, teams working together. And does Sendless address that problem or challenge that some teams have with collaboration?

Nolan Walker [00:13:38]:
Yeah, so I think as. As we were talking, I saw our website be pulled up. So Zenlist is specialty is search and collaboration. Collaboration can be between agents and clients, agents and client groups, meaning spouses, partners, roommates, investor groups, whatever that may look like. Allowing agents and clients to work together across multiple. And that can also apply to teams. You know, in this market, teams are a very popular endeavor. A lot of small brokerages, small teams.

Nolan Walker [00:14:05]:
And they may work and collaborate across different agents. Within Zenlist, you can work directly with one of your agents. If you're a listing agent working with your buyer's agent, you can invite them into that group as well. So we want to be able to allow communications both across the agent, the clients without it feeling disjointed. Or broken, everything will live within Zenlist. Multiple groups can communicate and collaborate back and forth and see the historical information on that communication. So it's a great fit for teams who want to be able to offer something that can be offered by all of their agent members, but can also be worked on in one location.

Matt Fowler [00:14:41]:
I think we have some brokers in our market that are already doing that already using Zenlist. Isn't that right, Colin?

Nolan Walker [00:14:46]:
Yes, I believe so.

Allan Nielsen [00:14:47]:
So, Nolan, you know, with our traditional platforms that we have or vendors that we have available, it's kind of you have access to the platforms and you get access to all of it. Right. And as we are moving forward, we are seeing more and more vendors coming out with premium services that kind of gives the basic access and then they can opt into kind of that plus more. How do you guys handle that? Do you have these options and what would that mean for the user if they chose a premium option with Zenlist?

Nolan Walker [00:15:16]:
Yeah, absolutely. So we do have that option and I think it's really, it's a natural evolution of this idea and this model of choice with choice prompts, flexibility. There's a wide variety of agents at different experience, tenure, you know, client level and needs in the industry. So a good vendor in the real estate space needs to be able to meet those goals. So Zenlist can operate and solve many, many needs of an agent at that base included level, to your point, but can also provide some premium features that may not be a fit for every agent out there or may not even be a part of that business model. So by allowing those premium services to exist as an optional choice to upgrade or to purchase, it gives the most range of accessibility for agents. So, you know, whether it's needing some features that may help a brokerage recruit new agents or help, you know, train new agents. Some of our premium features can do just that.

Nolan Walker [00:16:07]:
Within Zenlist, by and large, we wanted to create a product offering that can be accessible across all mediums of agents, from those who just got certified and just got their license, to those who've been in the business for 30, 40 years. With that range, they'll be able to find some value in whatever level of Zenlist this they choose to operate with.

Allan Nielsen [00:16:26]:
Yeah, and what's great for us is the MLS is it makes it possible to bring some of these services to our subscribers because we are not necessarily leveling the playing field, which is always a concern. We can bring in the base level of service and like you said, for the ones that have that additional need, those options are then made Available for an extra fee. Fits perfectly into that model.

Matt Fowler [00:16:50]:
Yeah, exactly. As Allan said, that's how we do everything. CMA Snap that's about to be released has a premium option. The AI listing manager that we're about to be, that's coming out late in Q1 is going to have an option to for a brokerage to buy the platform that gives them the ability to collect extra fields and do stuff that it actually has additional functionality. Tell us a little bit about Nolan while we're wrapping this up. I always like to ask software developers and proptech people about an anecdote, a case study, your favorite installation. We have the, you know, Rapatoni experience from the Bay Area that, you know, the proptech guys know about. But what I'm trying to do here is, is not rain on prep Tony, but to let our subscribers hear what you would consider kind of a success story with the use of your technology.

Nolan Walker [00:17:39]:
Yeah. And I won't make anybody relive the events of that summer and you know, we're happy that that was resolved.

Matt Fowler [00:17:47]:
Yeah.

Nolan Walker [00:17:48]:
When it comes to these types of use cases, I always try to stick to the most, you know, beneficial and grounded use case of the platform. And I think we all went through a very interesting year in the prop tech and real estate industry as a whole, especially around the changes in the summer. And consumers were impacted by that. And I think where I'm seeing these stories come from our users being shared with me almost all of the time is around leaving a meeting or reinforcing that education about the value of an agent, bringing that into the transaction process. A lot of agents are familiar with the big changes around buyer agency agreements, but a lot of consumers and clients aren't and that's a very unique new thing that they're learning about. So Zenlist allows the agents the opportunity to provide a sticky relationship through technology with that prospective client if in fact they're not yet comfortable or understanding that buyer agreement. So, long story, but a very successful and great ending is an agent using Zenlist wasn't able to secure the relationship. And the contractual agreement with that client set that client up on a search.

Nolan Walker [00:18:49]:
That client left the relation or left the meeting. Excuse me, was able to see notifications on the agent side. So that agent started to see that that client was interacting in Zenlist with listings with properties. Reached out through the Zenlist application within the chat system. Client responded immediately, said they love this house. Could we go see it? If there's any other houses like it, I want to be able to see it. So all within the Zenlist platform, the agent was able to see the listing, get the listing information, find all the similar active listings within that area, schedule a tour schedule with showing time, and send the client that tour, the map, the route, everything created a beautiful tight experience for that client. Now the client immediately understood the value an agent brings to this relationship and signed that agreement without hesitation.

Nolan Walker [00:19:35]:
That's a pretty common story we hear from our members. And it makes me excited because I think of the alternative that is also happening where that relationship ends at that meeting, that client goes home and happens to go to a site, for example, creates a search, clicks a button to learn more about that listing and the path to representing that client for that agent who did, again, mind you, all the hard work to generate that lead has now become a whole lot more complicated. So there's a lot of cool stories that Zenlist has been successfully involved in, but I think the common use case is the most successful and most exciting to talk about because that's the reality that agents are facing. And that use case resonates the most with me. And I think a lot of our leadership team is excited about those stories coming to us.

Matt Fowler [00:20:18]:
So we translated our 2 million record history to the new dictionary that is nationally standardized, which means that we, we define basements in a new way, we define crawl space in a new way, we define primary master in any way. Statuses, townhomes, there's a hundred and something examples. If you go to the help center and search for reso field changes, our subscribers will get a significant document that shows this. And we doing that caused the existing 15,000 users that were using Paragon to experience significant disruptions in Paragon because Paragon had to rewire everything to map the new fields. And we've gone through three different things that have impacted most users because Paragon had to do the translation, then they had to ingest data from the Spark API, then they launched new Paragon. All that happened since last November. So the Paragon users have seen, to be frank, nothing but disruption over that period. The reason that we did what we did clearly was not to make Paragon work better.

Matt Fowler [00:21:30]:
It was to allow new things to come in onto the standardized data, including Vinlist. So we have a bunch of things coming out in 2025 that are actually the first actual benefits that the most of the users will have seen from the work that we did last year. Tell us how Zenlist maybe is empowered by standards without making this too geeky and understand, like maybe. Here's this. Would you have been able to come into this market if we were pre standardization?

Nolan Walker [00:22:02]:
That's an easy question to answer. Yes, it would take us a while. So we lean in lockstep with the goal of standardization within the MLS community. Because the RISO Data Dictionary exists for a reason. We are also working with that organization in a way to help improve standardization long term and some really exciting ways. With Doorify standardizing the data, we've made this a much simpler onboarding experience for both Zenlist, but also for the members to go through. And with that standardization, they're going to immediately see an improved ability to navigate Zenlist as they would if we were relying on sort of the before, if you will.

Allan Nielsen [00:22:43]:
I think it's important to remind people that there's a significant investment and now we are starting to see the value of it.

Matt Fowler [00:22:50]:
Where can subscribers go to learn more about the product?

Nolan Walker [00:22:52]:
Nolan yeah, so soon enough you'll be able to go right on your Doorify dashboard to learn about Zenlist and sign up. But you can also be found, you know, find any of the information on Zenlist.com, which Matt and Allan pulled up. We're on all the expected social medias, LinkedIn, YouTube and then if you travel, you'll see us at most, if not all, of the major national and regional industry events.

Matt Fowler [00:23:14]:
And for the subscribers, you'll be seeing communications coming out from Andrea in our comms department. I think most of our subscribers have probably seen or met Andrea at an event before. Andrea used to be at Glide and then Compass and then we're fortunate to have her on our staff. She's got a town hall coming up, she's got all sorts of information and you will at some point in the first quarter see a try Zenlist button on your dashboard. That will be a trial that you can just click on like you did last year when you were trying the MLS front ends. It will single sign on you into the Zenlist environment where you'll get some, you know, onboarding help and we'll have classes, as Nolan was saying earlier. And we just want everybody to know about this option and at some point, we don't know when exactly, later in the year, certainly we're going to give you the opportunity to choose Zenlist at your primary front end. There'll be some impact on that if you're turning off another front end and turning on Zenlist to your account.

Matt Fowler [00:24:15]:
And we'll figure out the financing for that as we go through the year. So that's when will Zenlist be available to subscribers for quarter is our target. It's going to be a Tuesday. We're not sure which Tuesday, but we have a careful schedule for this stuff and we'll make sure that everybody knows about it well in advance.

Allan Nielsen [00:24:29]:
We're really looking forward to bringing this to the subscribers next year.

Nolan Walker [00:24:33]:
Likewise, we can't wait for the members here to get their hands on Zen List and start sharing feedback as soon as as it's available early.

Matt Fowler [00:24:39]:
Q1 thanks for being with us today, Nolan.

Nolan Walker [00:24:42]:
Thank you for having me.

Matt Fowler [00:24:43]:
Thank you.