Why Corcoran is quickly expanding Nexkey to over 9 real estate offices to simplify access

Corcoran Global Living is quickly becoming the fastest growing privately-funded real estate business ever. To keep up with this growth, Dimitri Hallerbach, VP of Sales for Corcoran Global Living for the Nevada and California Sierra region, traded in his ring of many keys for all the different offices for one unified, keyless experience with Nexkey. With the hundreds of agents, cleaning crews, and various people coming in and out, keys were just a waste of time and money to manage and keep secure.

Now with Nexkey, only 3 admins are needed to manage access to hundreds of peoples across 9+ offices, from wherever they are. The process of sharing and revoking access is instant and simplified, and they now have a full real-time log of who has access to each space and when.

Hear how Nexkey’s smarter access control platform allows this real estate office to run its business more efficiently and has become more of a perk to all who are welcomed into the space.

Can you introduce yourself and give a quick overview of Corcoran Global Living? 

My name is Dimitri Hallerbach. I'm the VP of Sales for the Nevada and California Sierra region. So we have multiple offices in our region. Our region was the first to join Corcoran Global Living.

We were also the first rollout for Nexkey, which is great. It's just consistent with what we're trying to do as a company. We've been growing dramatically in the last 16 months since we started to over 50 offices and I think we're up to 1800 or 1900 agents now. Over 7 billion in gross sales volume.

So we're growing fast and according to some media outlets, we're the fastest growing real estate company that's privately funded, ever. One of the biggest pieces of the company is being a family, it's all about the people.

Part of that is being welcoming and letting everyone feel part of every office we're in. That was the impetus behind having a unified solution to get all our agents into our offices. 

What were you using before Nexkey? 

Keys. I had a ring of keys for the different offices that I go to check on.

It was always like, "Okay, which one is this key for? Is this for the front door or the back door? What's the alarm code? What's this, what's that?” It was always a little bit of a juggle. 

And then of course if someone actually needed to get into the building urgently, we had to find someone nearby who had a key or they were out of luck.

So that is no longer the case. 

One of the features I especially like is the ability to unlock offices remotely. 

How many different people have access?

All our agents have access to our offices and since we know who has access, it makes it very easy to manage all of it.

We have about a hundred agents across nine offices. Most people don't typically go to other offices very often, but I do, and our admin folks do. I think it's just a really big benefit even for those who don't typically go to other offices. 

It allows clients to have a little bit more flexibility. They can say, "Hey, let me grab that, or let's print this here because we happen to be closer to this office." We can do that with Nexkey. 

What were the main challenges with keys that you were trying to solve with Nexkey? 

Sometimes these key copies aren't quite right. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. The lock itself was a little finicky so that if you didn't do it just right, you weren't actually locking the door. A number of issues were just with the physical nature of the key itself and the locking mechanism.

But also managing who has keys, who doesn't have keys, and getting them back when someone leaves was a challenge. If you're worried about it, it means changing all the locks and then redistributing all the keys. I only had to do that once, but it was a pain. 

At the end of the day, you really have to trust everybody when you're using keys because you don't know who's coming in and out of the office. 

When you finally got Nexkey, what was your first reaction? 

I thought I'd died and gone to heaven, haha. No but seriously, it is great. It just works. It's simple. With the app, our admin staff can easily set people up.

When I was set up with access, I just walked to the door, tapped the digital key in the Nexkey app and it opened. It just works. 

What are the biggest benefits for you using Nexkey while managing access? 

Oh, it makes it so much easier. Especially because I've got admin folks working with Nexkey for me and with me.

Again, you know who's coming in and out, you can grant and deny access depending on who it is, and whether they're only supposed to be there during certain times, like our cleaners for example. We're just able to manage all that stuff.

First of all, it's easy to do. And second of all, you have an idea of who is coming and going. If something got stolen and the alarm didn't go off, you can see who used the Nexkey app. 

By using Nexkey over keys, can you measure any improvements with productivity or time-savings?

Nexkey does save time on any management tasks associated with keys. 

At any time when I'm worried about access, or staff or agents having to do extra things to go find a key or get someone to get a key, that's all obviously wasted time that we don't worry about anymore.

Would you recommend Nexkey to other real estate offices and why? 

Oh, I definitely would. Even if it's just one office, but especially if it's multiple offices. If you're trying to build that family feeling where each office is just part of the whole, as opposed to these different little fiefdoms across your region, where the feeling is “Well, I'm in this office, so stay out.” We actively cultivate the opposite of that. I think Nexkey is very helpful for that. 

Nexkey is also certainly something I bring up and mention as a value to agents who I speak to when we're hiring, and we're always hiring.

Is there anything that you didn't mention that is useful when using Nexkey? 

I've touched briefly on it at the beginning, but just that ability for myself and for the other admin folks to be able to let people in remotely. For other people, like cleaners or the one-offs, the sign guy who needs to come by to install a decal on the wall.

You can simply say, "Hey, when you get there, give me a call and I can let you in,” which is much, much, much easier than having to physically go somewhere because we don't have admin folks in each of our offices. 

We have three admins for the nine offices. So, you know, rather than that person having to drive around or leaving lockboxes everywhere, remembering the codes and all that stuff, which is what we used to do. It's much, much, much easier.