Dear Placester customers,
Over the past 20 years, our industry has thrived after multiple challenges, including 9/11 and the financial crisis of the late 2000s — and now we all face a new challenge. Who could have imagined when we were ringing in the New Year that a pandemic would be threatening the health of our businesses and our loved ones before the quarter closed?
All over the world, brokers, agents, and staff are dealing with the immense impacts of COVID-19, and we know the stakes are incredibly high for all of you. Your lives and your livelihoods are intertwined with your businesses, and the future of those businesses now feels threatened. As a technology company devoted to serving you, that means our future is threatened, as well. So we not only feel enormous empathy for you and this situation — we also know that we are all in this together.
There is much we can and will do to help you weather this storm. Here’s what we have planned so far:
1. Maintaining our industry-leading technology and support
Your website is critical to your business and our dedicated team is working around the clock to maintain the highest levels of reliability, security, and customer service.
2. Accelerating the release of our new code-free customization platform
We kept hearing from brokers and agents that they wanted more design control and were tired of being gouged for custom websites, so we developed a code-free website customizer. Now you don’t have to be a designer or developer to create a beautiful real estate website. Our goal is to help you do more with less.
Initially, we were planning a Q3 2020 release for this new platform. When the magnitude of this crisis became apparent several weeks ago, our development team redoubled their efforts and are now aiming to release the first version of this product in a few weeks for existing customers. When we do, you will be able to use these product improvements with no additional fee for 2020. Stay tuned for more information in the coming weeks!
3. Waive fees for brokers adding new agents to their subscription
To reduce the expense of providing website and marketing tools to their agents, we are waiving the fees for existing Broker Pro customers to add agents to their subscription for all of 2020, starting on April 2. Our hope is that by making it free for brokers to provide tools to agents, we can help your brokerage (and your agents) with the technology to build for the future during these challenging times. This offer only applies to customers not already receiving subscription discounts.
4. Growing the Placester community
We need connection now more than ever. When the code-free customization platform launches, we’ll invite you to a private Placester Facebook Group so you can add your voice to a community of Placester users, all striving to build and survive through this difficult time. We hope this will be a place where we can solve problems together.
We are committed to helping you through these challenges in the ways that we can and we’ll keep you updated as we go. Please continue to take care of yourselves, your families, your colleagues, and your clients. We will get through this together.
Sincerely,
Matt
