Who are they?
Hubbard Realty Group got their start as a fast-growing team within Keller Williams Realty, a real estate brokerage with offices around the world. In January 2022, the team broke off to create their own brokerage, with Jessica Hubbard at the helm as their CEO.
Today, Hubbard Realty Group is a tight-knit independent brokerage dedicated to delivering a top-of-the-line real estate experience to each and every one of their clients.
"OpenPhone is definitely saving us time and the work-life balance is absolutely huge for us."
Jessica Hubbard
When Jessica and her team split off to form their own brokerage, Jessica was focused on building the company’s tech infrastructure intentionally.
“Our team is huge on creating something new that works for us, and not just taking the industry standard,” says Jessica. “We look at our problem and find the solution, no matter what that may be.”
For Hubbard Realty Group, one pressing problem was how they dealt with calls. They tried using both Google Voice and RingCentral in the past. Neither had been able to meet their unique needs as a brokerage. Jessica found RingCentral “extremely clunky”. Google Voice couldn’t meet Hubbard Realty Group’s two biggest needs: the ability to set business hours and auto-replies. This led to their team receiving late-night messages and calls without being able to set expectations on when clients or other agents could expect to hear back from them.
Jessica Hubbard
Once Jessica discovered that OpenPhone could solve their problems, she realized they had to make the switch. And while real estate agents can be hesitant to switch numbers — since clients know them by their personal cell phone numbers — Jessica knew exactly how to convince them.
“We sold it to the agents on the factor that it gives them their lives back,” she says. “That’s where we got the buy-in.”
Hubbard Realty Group started off by moving their operations team onto OpenPhone, where Jessica and her colleagues experimented with the software to ensure it met their needs. Once her team realized OpenPhone was the perfect fit for their brokerage, they introduced it to their agents — and haven’t looked back since.
Hubbard Realty Group has numbers for each agent, their main office, and a line for listings. They’ve also since expanded to Kansas City and were able to easily add an 816 number so that clients there recognize the area code. Using OpenPhone, Hubbard Realty Group can quickly sign up for more numbers as they expand to additional markets.
As Hubbard Realty Group grows, Jessica knows how important it is to be able to have multiple phone lines and the ability to share access to them.
Using OpenPhone, Jessica can easily assign multiple teammates to phone numbers as needed, ensuring that clients are never waiting long.
“We have multiple people on the office line who can answer at any time,” says Jessica. “On my end, I can look at it and say, ‘Oh, Tiffany said this to that client, and then Clint followed up with this, and then Tali followed up with that information.’ From the client’s end, it looks like the same person is responding. On the client side, it looks seamless.”
OpenPhone’s shared numbers allow Hubbard Realty Group to split the work of answering inquiries or taking over a colleague’s number while they’re on vacation.
When team members need to understand what communication has taken place with a client, all they need to do is look at a client’s contact history or a phone line’s history in OpenPhone. Contacts can be easily shared across users, and call recordings, voicemails, and text messages are all saved in one place.
With OpenPhone, Hubbard Realty Group’s agents can set custom business hours for their work numbers. Once business hours are over, notifications are silenced and voicemails are saved within OpenPhone, so they can be reviewed when the team returns to work.
OpenPhone’s auto-reply feature also lets agents get back to clients immediately, even when they’re far from their phones or sound asleep. Agents can set up unique auto-replies for different events, such as receiving a call, a text, or a voicemail outside of business hours. That way, clients know exactly when they can expect a response, and agents can actually relax and unwind after work. “OpenPhone is definitely saving us time and the work-life balance is absolutely huge for us,” says Jessica.
The best part of business hours and auto-replies, according to Jessica, is that agents can set it and forget it. “We love the fact that we can set our schedules and we don't have to remember to put our phones on out-of-office every day,” she says. “I haven’t found that on any other provider.”
OpenPhone allows Hubbard Realty Group to provide streamlined service to their clients across multiple cities, all while providing agents with the flexibility they need to feel supported and engaged long-term.
Join thousands of businesses already using OpenPhone to communicate better with their customers.
