New real estate community for brokers
Founded by Colorado Realtors, Nathan Froelich and Eric Sachs, Breakthrough Broker has launched as a comprehensive online resource center for fellow real estate professionals, seeking to solve any problems real estate professionals may face in their careers.
Site visitors can use professionally-designed templates to create customize marketing materials, and the community offers guidebooks filled with best practices, as well as video interviews with industry leaders, with an emphasis on agents collaborating with fellow agents.
As described in the edgy video above, the founders say they saw that the web had a handful of expensive, subscription-based tools for agents, but they envisioned a site that was free for all users, required no registration, and provided high quality content.
“The ah-ha moment really came when we thought, ‘Let’s take advantage of the most exciting business model out there and make this site free for all agents,’” Froelich said. “We love free sites like Facebook, Pandora, and WebMD, and thought our industry needed something similar.”
Geocoded = relevant information
BreakthroughBroker is geocoded, meaning that when visitors come to the site, it recognizes their location and offers content that is relevant to that specific market. Site visitors also have the option to view content for other markets by manually submitting a different zip code, a major differentiation from dozens of sites that offer generic and outdated information to brokers.
“We’ve got lots of national content online right now that can help all agents, and we’re also creating local content for Colorado agents,” Sachs said. “We’ll continue to expand our local content throughout 2012 to include as many markets as possible.”
Sachs told AGBeat that the biggest challenge to getting the site launched was obtaining financing. “We came up with some of our own and we were able to find a financing partner after several tries,” adding that it is a “tough economic time to go out and find someone willing to invest in an idea.” Having obtained financing and procured advertising partners, the site is now public and seeks to be a better interactive community than what was available to them as agents.
