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An interview with Angus Ferguson from Agent Solutions, Domain.
Angus Ferguson, Commercial Director of Agent Solutions, discusses the technological innovations that were utilised by the industry through some of the most challenging years in Australian real estate. Ferguson reflects on his personal contribution to the technology that powered and allowed transactions to continue seamlessly and his vision for the future.
Angus Ferguson heads up the Agent Solutions team at Domain and is passionate about bringing best in breed technologies that power and drive efficiencies to agent workflows. Previous to his role at Domain, Angus co-founded Real Time Agent in 2015 to simply save agents time, he meticulously reviewed agent workflows and looked for opportunities to design proptech solutions that directly addressed agent pain points.
Angus, the unprecedented disruption the industry has experienced over the past 18 months due to COVID could have never been predicted. What was your initial reaction to the impacts the pandemic had on the industry?
I remember feeling incredibly fortunate that I was in a position to look at what we could do for clients and work around the “could not do’s.” And this fortunate feeling was down to the fact that we were already driving technological advancements that were facilitating digital transactions. My second thought was where can we double down and add even more value and efficiency to virtual transactions. This is where I felt a little more apprehensive, we had multiple innovations in scope and we needed to ensure that right ones were delivered at pace for clients and the industry.
And what is one example of how you doubled down on supporting agents to transact virtually successfully?
Two things here, it wasn’t just about supporting agents through the pandemic via virtual inspections and transactions. It was about coupling that with that need occurring in the midst of a booming market and the rise of auctions as a popular method of sale. As the demand for auctions intensified, so did our focus on that part of the transactional workflow. My team and I focused on enabling and upskilling agents to run virtual auctions using Real Time Agent. From 1st of January 2021 to August 31st 2021, Real Time Agent was responsible for transacting 37.9 billion dollars in Auctions as well as facilitating over 25,000 virtual contract signings. I always say that our sales and marketing team get to take glory by being on the coal face with our customers when we deliver our solutions - but the important thing to remember is that our product and team tech teams were often burning the midnight oil to ensure we could assist the industry in providing solutions that were going to serve our customers not only in COVID but also into the future of what real estate and transactions will look like.
When you co-founded Real Time Agent did you ever foresee that it would become so critical? I could never have predicted this, the team's focus has always been on solving
problems for agents. I was an agent for eight years - what I've always tried to keep front of mind is putting myself in the position of the customer and making sure that before we embark on any new innovation that it's going to empower agents and help them to have a more scalable, connected and digitally driven transactional workflow.
The two things that I’m most proud of from a customer perspective is firstly, the resilience and flexibility that all our customers have shown through adopting new technologies at pace, ensuring they could still transact for their clients. And secondly was witnessing how easily our existing clients could shift to an offsite environment using our tools, it allowed us to observe the power of what we had built.
Want to find out more about Real Time Agent?
Visit www.realtimeagent.com.au
Follow Angus Ferguson's new podcast - Protech Insider, available to download here.
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