Ray White has a rich history. The company’s been around for over 120 years, and is into its fourth generation of family ownership.
Ray White has a rich history. The company’s been around for over 120 years, and is into its fourth generation of family ownership.
Despite its longevity, Ray White is determined to continue to grow while getting younger. With a focus on innovation, technology and curiosity, the company consistently outperforms its competitors and grows its market share.
Investment in technology is one of the key aspects of Ray White’s success. Its partnership with a small, agile start-up exemplifies its willingness to collaborate and take risks in the name of innovation. The Ray White-NurtureCloud story is one of potential, teamwork and investment.
Masters of our fate
In the early 2000s, the corporate team knew that in order for agents to be trained effectively on real estate technology, they needed to be streamlined in the products they were using. This resulted in the birth of One System, which in 2024, has grown into a platform that harnesses the network effects of 15,000 members to provide world class technology to all Ray White members at prices not available to the rest of the industry.
Under our build, buy and customise model, we’ve been able to be in control of the direction of our technology offering.
NurtureCloud’s inclusion in our One System was one that required foresight and courage to invest heavily in a small business. For context, in 2019, the group wide CRM was in the hands of a third party and the ability to innovate at pace was stifled. The company knew it had to migrate away due to decisions beyond its control.
Jason Alford, Ray White Chief Systems Officer, said the group had been reviewing whether it should bring control of a core application like a CRM in-house at the same time industry forces were impacting the group’s innovation speed.
“Watching from afar we knew we had to take control of our data and technology future,” Jason said.
“But the news was a brutal reminder to us that so much of our technology is in the hands of others. We are an important customer of nearly all of the tech providers on our platform, but we don’t have any more influence than that.”
Enter NurtureCloud.
Investment
In 2019, Ray White was approached to invest in a fixed fee real estate business which had a model of investing heavily in lead generation, with no agent prospecting, promoting a low, fixed commission. This model proved to be too expensive, and the agency pivoted to agent prospecting supported by in-house productivity software called NurtureCloud.
Matt Gay, Ray White Chief Technology Officer, was impressed with the burgeoning business.
“We found NurtureCloud to be a nimble startup with good leadership, demonstrating success with testing and learning their way through a challenging model”, he said.
“NurtureCloud was very much in line with our technology future”, explained Matt. “ Some of its features we had at the time, some were in development, some were in our roadmap – but the cohesiveness of their platform was far ahead of where we were. And they seemed to have a well set team that was moving fast.”
Discussing the agreement Ray White entered into with NurtureCloud, Ray White Managing Director Dan White said the group knew this relationship would be more than a partner supplier / customer dynamic.
“We realised that we weren’t just buying some advanced technology, we were becoming partners with a strong team that were totally focused on the success of the product,” Dan said.
Ray White acquired a 51 per cent interest in NurtureCloud, with the balance owned by the founders.
Scale
NurtureCloud was originally built for a small team. Both Ray White and the NurtureCloud team understood that in order for it to work with a large franchise business, it needed to be scaled and adapted.
The growth of the platform from 2020 to now has been underpinned by Ray White and the NurtureCloud team working together in the ‘bunker’ – a term coined for the weekly meetings that take place to discuss developments and updates, scaling the product, and agent adoption.
The team was determined to move fast, and quickly established a dedicated “NurtureCloud Bunker” that deliberately focused on clarifying scopes of work that we knew our network members would see as valuable.
“Feedback loops, pilot programs and agile pivots enabled us to scale into a much larger set of agents than the NurtureCloud development team had been used to,” Jason Alford said.
As software was developed and released, it became clear that office data and behavioural change was going to be the largest challenge and take the longest time. Forward planning allowed Ray White to scale up its “Virtual Assistant” program, partnering with REAssist and expanding its team of Digital Performance Specialists, who devote all their time to helping members leverage the technology applications within the group’s One System.
Where to from here?
As it stands, the Bunker team meets every Monday, working on upgrades, changes and production decisions.
As of March 2024, 790 offices across Australia and New Zealand are using NurtureCloud, with over 490,726 calls made from the Smart Calls feature on the platform, 28,194 appraisals logged and 2,530 listings won – in the last 30 days.
Courtney Martin, General Manager of NurtureCloud, is optimistic and excited about the direction of the NurtureCloud / Ray White partnership.
“For the first time, our core operating system for agents is providing them with an unfair advantage in their marketplaces. We do this by leveraging our network effect – enriching data, and sharing insights that predict future listings in our agents databases.”
“Our network feels like they’re part of this journey with us – we listen to their feedback and can make swift changes to the product because we have control, something we were missing when in the hands of a third party.”
