Since starting in 2009, Realty Group LLC has worked to revolutionize the client experience for thousands of home buyers and sellers. Because of that commitment, they’ve become the number one fastest growing real estate brokerage in Minnesota, with 10 offices across the state, one location in Florida, and plans to expand to North Dakota.

But with fast growth comes a necessity for organized training, especially since the brokerage works with a team of full-time employees and over 700 real estate agents. So, to provide their employees and agents with all the resources they need to be successful, Realty Group turned to Trainual as their solution for a streamlined way to document all their policies and processes.

A dedicated documentation platform to replace the chaos of Google Docs

Before implementing Trainual back in 2020, the Realty Group team was trying to document all their policies and processes in Google Docs. Their issue: They had a lot.

“We had a lot of stuff to train not only our employees, but also to educate our agents. And we just had no good way to do it,” shared Tabitha VanValkenburg, vice president of Realty Group. “We had a bunch of Google Docs. There were multiple copies of the same document, some were outdated — no one could really find anything.”

So, she decided to search for a learning management system to solve their Google Docs problem — and found a better solution in Trainual. “I did a demo and thought [Trainual] looked really easy to use. That was something important — I wanted to make sure the employees and our agents would have an easy time adopting the platform and maneuvering it,” said Tabitha.

Now, the Realty Group Trainual account not only trains and onboards new agents and team members, it acts as their main knowledge base — one that anyone can access for anything they need to know.

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“That’s a big functionality of [Trainual], too: to be our back office and resource center for everything that we do,” Tabitha said. “Our employees and agents are constantly searching and favoriting content [in Trainual] that they come back to quite a bit. I know I use it every day.”

“The [Trainual] search function is one of our favorites, because it was such a huge pain point before. No one knew where to find anything — they would search in Google Drive, but when there’s a million different things in there, no one could find the right one.”
<blockquoteauthor>Tabitha VanValkenburg, vice president of Realty Group LLC<blockquoteauthor>

A robust onboarding made easy — and creating Trainual fans

Because Realty Group has so many different programs and services that they offer to their agents, their onboarding process can be robust — and that’s something that has affected their new hires in the past.

“It’s very overwhelming for both employees and agents to come over to us because we have so much [information],” shared Tabitha. 

So, the Realty Group team loves that Trainual makes it easy to manage their new agent onboarding. They now introduce agents to groups of modules to complete, and point their new members to their progress completion score so that everyone knows where they’re at in their training. “The fact that we can break it down and they can see their progress bar and how far they are in learning everything has been huge. We love that.”

What’s even more surprising: Their agents don’t have to use Trainual if they don’t want to. But a lot of them keep using the platform regardless.

“Because we’re a real estate brokerage, we have two different kinds of users: We have W-2 employees and agents who are actually independent contractors, so we can’t require that they use Trainual,” Tabitha said. 

But, Tabitha and her team still use the platform to introduce new agents to who the brokerage is and all the services they can offer agents. And because Trainual makes it so easy to go through all that information and training, many agents stick with it. 

“Even though we can’t require that [agents use Trainual], we have a really high adoption rate anyway because it’s very easy to use.”

An investment that both saves time and increases program adoption

Considering that the brokerage has been with Trainual for over three years, they’ve gotten a lot of value out of the platform with documentation and training. But when it comes to the return on their investment, it’s the time saved that gets the most mention.

“Other staff members and I would spend so much time answering the same questions and directing people where to find the same information,” Tabitha said. “Now everyone has one central place where they can go.” 

And their documentation now is so comprehensive that often, when agents come to the team with questions, it’s because those answers haven’t been documented in the platform yet. And when that happens: “We should get that in Trainual!”

Plus, because Trainual makes it so easy to update documentation quickly and alert everyone about those changes, that automation means even more time saved. What’s a little surprising is that Trainual has also had a big impact on the retention of Realty Group’s services.

“We offer other programs (like lead generation) that have a lot of training content. And the fact that we have a place that can house all those different services and all their training content has made our agents use our stuff more,” Tabitha shared. “Because they can find it easier and it’s easier to understand [because of Trainual’s media integrations]. So, we find a higher adoption on our services because now there’s one central place.”

And with Trainual as their central knowledge base and easy-to-use training platform, Realty Group can continue the expansion of their brokerage. And as more agents and employees join their growing team, they’ll find that their jobs are made a lot easier with Trainual as their go-to resource.