On this episode of Real Estate Insiders Unfiltered, CEO and co-founder of Cloze, Dan Foody, shares his journey from a master’s in electrical engineering at Cornell to becoming a leader in long-term relationship software, initially serving lawyers and ministers, and dives deep into the data behind agent communication failures.
Foody explains his vision for the future, where AI uses customer data to identify what’s important to them in the moment and warns that agents risk losing their sphere to the “Zillows of the world” unless they master personalized outreach and transform their relationships into a sustainable differentiator.
Highlights
Foody’s entry into real estate in 2019 led to a stark realization about agent efficiency: Nearly 88 percent of conversations agents have never make it into their database. Furthermore, only about a third of the contacts in a typical CRM have been contacted within the past year.
He attributes this failure to a fundamental flaw in traditional CRM design, which forces the agent to enter data manually. Cloze solves this by mining communication history (email, phone, text, WhatsApp) to create a comprehensive “shadow view” of every contact in an agent’s extended network, ready for immediate action.
He warns agents about the crucial concept of the “five-day window”: If the average sphere agent contacts their people every 10 days, Zillow has a five-day gap in which to identify a potential buyer/seller and sell the lead back to the agent. To counter this, communication must be frequent and personalized. A simple, empathetic text has shown a conversion rate 200 times better than a generic newsletter.
The future of CRM is in AI-driven personalization, Foody says. AI’s core role is to identify what is important to a customer in the moment — be it a life event or a property issue — allowing the agent to reach out with topical, relevant content, which is a massive advantage over the “nurture spam” of institutional competitors like Rocket.
On the competition, Foody views Zillow and Rocket’s “closed ecosystem” attempts as insidious but beatable. His final advice is that the most critical, sustainable differentiator for any agent or brokerage is their personal relationship data.
The highest defense against competition is maximizing that human relationship, which technology must facilitate by removing complexity and constantly reminding the agent of opportunities. Agents should also be aware that they retain 100 percent control over their Cloze data. If they leave a brokerage, they keep their database.
Connect with Dan Foody on LinkedIn. Learn more about Cloze on X, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube or online at ai.cloze.com.
Real Estate Insiders Unfiltered is now exclusively on Inman. Tune in for agent- and team-focused content on Mondays and leadership interviews on Wednesdays each week. Listen on Apple or Spotify.
James Dwiggins is the Co-CEO of NextHome, Inc. and co-host of Real Estate Insiders Unfiltered.
Keith Robinson is the Co-CEO of NextHome, Inc. and co-host of Real Estate Insiders Unfiltered.
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