MAIN IMAGE: Berry Everitt – CEO of Chas Everitt International Property Group
Partner content
‘The technology you use impresses no one. The experience you create with it is everything.’ – Sean Gerety
Eight years ago, Chas Everitt International was named the Most Innovative Brokerage in the World, ahead of more than 500 other Leading Real Estate Companies of the World® (LeadingRE) global network members.
This initially surprised us, considering that many of the other LeadingRE brokerages were bigger, longer-established, and better resourced than we were—and operating in developed economies with much easier and quicker access to new real estate technologies.
On reflection, however, we realised that the award was not about how much tech we had or how new and shiny it was but about what we were doing with it and about the strategic plan we already had for the part it would play in the continued growth and development of our business.
At that time, Chas Everitt was already known in SA as a leader in the use of technology, and our vision then, as now, was to create a continuously evolving tech ecosystem that empowers our agents to be more effective and have more time to build long-lasting relationships with their customers.
Our view has always been that having the best tech is not an end in itself, and that tech will never displace our agents, but that it must nevertheless be embraced and nurtured and become an integral part of who we are – like a healthy spine that holds a human body together and, while unseen, enables graceful, co-ordinated movement.
And this is exactly what we have steadily built over the years, not by cobbling together a series of off-the-shelf pieces of real estate, training and customer management software, but by carefully designing and fabricating our own unique “vertebrae”: the systems and applications that respond to the specific needs of our business and add real value to the lives of our agents and customers.
As a result, we now have a technology spine that is strong but very flexible and perfectly adapted to the very varied and multicultural SA real estate industry, in that it supports a whole range of users from those with old-school computers to those with the latest smartphones.
What is more, we have built our C3 business dashboard and AgentConnect mobile application to be highly user-friendly, in line with our aim of always making our technology easily accessible as well as obviously useful, and thus something that our agents welcome and get excited about, rather than something “difficult” that might be feared or resented.
Most people in the industry are familiar by now with how well this approach paid off for us during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, when our agents were able to switch within days to running their businesses online due to the fact that they were already familiar with the required technologies, while others scrambled to get up to speed.
But we have definitely not been resting on our laurels since then. Just a year ago, we were again recognised by LeadingRE for “exceptional achievements in technology innovation” when we won the coveted global Vanguard Award, specifically for our success in using technology to increase sales and boost agent recruitment and retention.
Then just a few weeks ago, we launched MyFICA®, an incredible, industry-first online tool that successfully addresses one of the biggest headaches currently facing estate agents by enabling them to send a FICA application to customers via WhatsApp or email, and then receive, validate and assess the required information entirely online.
FICA is an abbreviation for the Financial Intelligence Centre Act, which aims to fight financial crime such as money laundering, fraud, tax evasion, terrorist financing activities and identity theft – and the real estate industry and attorneys have come under heavy fire recently for being especially non-compliant with the legislation and hindering government efforts to get South Africa off the “grey list” of countries that are under scrutiny by the international Financial Action Task Force because they don’t have strong enough financial controls in place.
However, thanks to MyFICA®, Chas Everitt agents now have a streamlined way to achieve compliance and don’t have to worry about being fined by the Financial Intelligence Centre (FIC). Our groundbreaking tech means that once they receive a FICA application from an agent, customers can complete and sign it online and upload their supporting documents to our C3 system, where the agent can then validate the information and perform the risk assessment tasks required by the FIC.
This end-to-end digital solution eliminates the problems that frequently used to arise from incomplete paper applications, delays in printing out documents, and missing or lost pages – and it reduces the time for a transaction to become FICA compliant from an average of five days to just a few hours. As a bonus, it also overcomes customers’ fears about the security of their financial and other private information because, on our system, this is all encrypted and safely stored in the cloud instead of paper files.
More than 2000 FICA applications have already been successfully processed via MyFICA®, and we are obviously delighted to be doing our part to get SA off the grey list. But this is just one of the many ways in which Chas Everitt agents continue to be set free by our technology to focus their time and attention on really getting to know their clients and meeting their individual property needs. And that’s the proudest part of our technology journey.
