Marketing and Managing A Fast Growing Brokerage with Corcoran Global Living Brokerage Insider

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Melody Foster, The Chief Experience Officer of fastest growing brokerage in the US, Corcoran Global Living, joins this episode of Brokerage Insider to discuss managing their growth over the past year. The company went from 400 agents to over 1000 in just 11 months - during COVID no less!
Listen in as she also discusses tech and marketing for luxury brokerages.
TRANSCRIPTION
Thanks for listening to Brokerage Insider, this week's episode was recorded live during the Explode Virtual Conference on Thursday, September 24th. We look forward to returning to our regular schedule program soon, but until then, enjoy this session. In this episode, our VP of product, Katie Ragusa, interviews Melody Foster, the chief experience officer in charge of marketing and technology for Corcoran Global Living in the California and Nevada area.
Melody Foster: I'll give it a nice to see you, Brenda. It's like I'm like, oh, I get to follow Brenda.
Katie Ragusa: That's a tough act to follow. But nice to see you, Yes, we are. We've got some powerful women here talking this afternoon. So a little background on Melody if you're not familiar with who she is. So far, she is the chief experience officer at Corcoran Global Living, which is actually the first ever Corcoran franchisee and chief experience officer. So as CXO you handle, let me see if I can get this mouthful. Branding, marketing, advertising, Lead, nurturing, PR communication, web development, all things tech. So pretty much every manifestation of the brand and marketing it in any medium. So that's a lot and you've got a ton of experience. So what brought you here and how did you become the lead on all things experience at Corcoran Global Living?
Melody Foster: So you know, my background prior to Corcoran GL or CGL, as we call it, because it's a mouthful to say. Right. Right. But prior to that, I mean, Katie and I go back several years at this point.
Now, I was with Zephyr Real Estate, which was the number one indie {brokerage} in San Francisco.
And even prior to that, I was at Paragon Real Estate, which was also a boutique firm in San Francisco and then at Pacific Union, also based at San Francisco, which became California wide prior to becoming part of another larger company we all know about. But most of my background was in marketing. And at this point, I don't think there anyone can truly say that there is a real dividing line between marketing and technology.
We leapt over that hurdle a long time ago, and I think there was just the understanding that there's a difference between technology as far as where the cable. Go into the wall, which is the technology that users use on the day to day basis. And so we do still, of course, have people that manage all those sort of systems, but really need to have someone that is looking at it from the marketing, the brand perspective, the usability, what our agents are actually using and the platforms that we're developing. And when you start going down that road, it becomes clear that you can't look at the marketing and the technology without also looking at the operational aspects and how it impacts the day to day. And that's when Zephyr actually decided to let's blend this all together. And rather than just making this so marketing specific, we decided to do the whole CSO role. And when critical, what happened when we launched that in February, Michael Mahon, who is our CEO, agreed. He definitely is vision forward with that and sees that as critically important to have that level of integration so that we are presenting the right tools in the consistency to our...