Relevate One

Rather than starting with a feature roadmap, the team began with a fundamental question: where do associations and MLSs experience the most friction? Relevate’s client success managers identified power users for every major business unit (billing, events, education, member management, accounting) and grouped them into focused design sessions. These weren’t passive feedback sessions. The team showed early mockups, gathered reactions, and revised designs in real time with participants.

As Modern.tech’s Director of Design described the process: “With every feature designed, we’d ask for real feedback, and the clarity we gained from those sessions would sometimes change our entire perspective. It wasn’t enough to put ourselves in the shoes of the user. We had to walk miles wearing those shoes, so we could shed our biases and fully feel their pain.”

Accounting That Works for REALTOR® Associations & MLSs

The accounting engine in Relevate One is arguably the platform’s most technically ambitious component, and the one that solves the deepest pain point in the industry. Real estate associations have a uniquely complex financial structure: a single association may collect dues on behalf of the local board, the state association, and NAR simultaneously, with each entity requiring separate bank accounts, separate ledgers, and separate reconciliation. Many associations also manage an MLS subsidiary and a foundation, each with their own fiscal requirements.

Relevate One handles this natively. The system supports full bank splitting across multiple fiscal entities, so when a member pays a single invoice that includes local dues, state dues, NAR dues, and an MLS subscription, the platform automatically routes each portion to the correct bank and ledger. The accounting integrates with NAR’s eCommerce payment system for credit card tokenization, payment processing, and split settlements, including a step-by-step credit card reconciliation process designed specifically for how these payments settle, which differs from standard retail transactions.

Reporting is equally robust. Staff can run invoice reports, accounting activity reports, QuickBooks-compatible activity summaries, accounts receivable reports, and detailed invoice breakdowns, all scoped to the appropriate fiscal entity.

Unrestricted Business Rule Customization

The most persistent frustration with traditional AMS products is that they force associations and MLSs into the vendor’s assumptions about how things should work. Relevate One takes the opposite approach: the business rules engine is designed to be as unrestricted as possible, allowing each organization to build exactly the workflows they need for their specific use case.

This shows up everywhere in the platform. Member classes are fully client-defined, an association can create whatever classifications they need (Designated REALTOR®, Agent, Appraiser, or any custom class) and control feature visibility in the portal per class. Staff permissions are granular to the individual function level: one staff member can be authorized to add new members but not suspend them, or manage events but not access accounting. These permissions are entirely self-managed by the association or MLS.

Education requirements tracking is similarly flexible. The system can monitor compliance with Code of Ethics, fair housing, new member orientation, MLS training, and any custom requirements the organization defines, with automated drip campaigns counting down to expiration dates. Event and course configuration supports early bird pricing, late registration fees, automatic no-show fees, partial refund hold-backs, promo codes, ticket holds for specific members, sponsor levels, and per-course notification rules, all configurable by staff without developer involvement.

A Member Portal That Drives Engagement

The Member Portal is where Relevate One’s design philosophy becomes most visible to the people who use it every day. Built as a responsive, mobile-first SSO Dashboard, it serves as the central hub for an agent’s relationship with their association and MLS. The portal surfaces the information that matters most (i.e. outstanding balances, compliance alerts, upcoming events, and quick links to MLS tools and third-party products) all on a customizable home screen.

The design is intentional about attention management. Critical alerts appear as fixed banners that push other content down the page, leveraging the “muscle memory” that agents develop when they log in and immediately reach for the MLS button. As Richburg described it: “Three hundred and sixty days a year, they’re loading this page and going right into the MLS. Fine. But those five days a year when you really need to get in front of your members, there’s no better tool on the planet than this dashboard.”

Members can customize their own dashboard layout, rearranging widgets, toggling data cards, selecting themes including dark mode, and setting their preferred time zone. But the association or MLS retains control over critical elements: locked widgets, mandatory alerts, and the overall structure that ensures their value proposition stays front and center. The portal supports responsive layouts for five screen sizes, from mobile phones to 4K monitors, with each layout independently configurable by the association.

Perhaps most notably, the portal includes a persistent member inbox that archives every communication (email, text, and in-app notification) ever sent through Relevate One.

Communication and Segmentation Engine

The Communication Center is the platform’s member engagement hub, supporting email, text messaging, and in-app notifications through a unified campaign system. Campaigns can be one-time sends or automated drip sequences tied to any date field on a member record.

What makes this especially powerful is the audience builder. Staff can segment members by status, class, office location, committee history, communication engagement, and product adoption.

Telemetry and Product Adoption Insights

Relevate One tracks product adoption rates across every tool available through the SSO dashboard. Because all third-party products authenticate through the platform’s SSO, Relevate can report on which products members are actually using, even if they access them through other entry points. This data feeds directly into the audience builder and the executive dashboard, giving leadership visibility into which parts of their value proposition are resonating and which need more promotion.

Relevate One is in active use right now. Across the customer base, the consistent feedback is that staff finally have software that fits their organization rather than the other way around. This is the tangible impact of Relevate One:

For Association and MLS Staff

• Eliminates the need for disconnected tools by consolidating accounting, member management, communications, events, education, committee management, surveys and elections,and document management into a single platform
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• Reduces dependency on vendor support through self-service configuration of member classes, staff permissions, billing rules, event setup, and portal branding
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• Automates previously manual workflows: course cancellation refunds, member termination/transfer approvals, compliance tracking, drip campaign enrollment, and education certificate generation
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• Provides executive-level dashboards with real-time metrics on revenue, member counts, business unit contributions, and product adoption

For Members

• Modern, consumer-grade portal experience with secure SSO access to all tools, events, and resources through a single login
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• Self-service account management: profile updates, subscription management, payment processing, and event registration without calling staff
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• Persistent communication history that follows them across brokerage changes
• Streamlines online application and onboarding process for new members

For Brokers and Office Managers

• Self-initiated agent transfers and termination requests through the portal, with association approval workflows
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• Office-level communication tools for sending announcements directly to their agents
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• Ability to pay invoices and register for events on behalf of office members
• Unlimited office admins with granular, customizable permissions

Modern.Tech has been Relevate’s design and development partner since the project’s inception in 2023, bringing both deep technical expertise and real estate industry knowledge to a platform that demanded both. The engagement has spanned the full product lifecycle:

• Product Design & UX: Led the design process alongside Relevate’s focus groups, translating decades of accumulated user feedback into a modern, intuitive interface that meets the design expectations of a consumer-app audience while handling the complexity of enterprise association management
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• Full-Stack Development: Architected and built the entire platform from the ground up—three interconnected applications sharing a unified data layer, identity system, and multi-tenant infrastructure
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• Complex Domain Engineering: Implemented the multi-entity accounting engine, configurable business rules system, audience segmentation engine, and RESO-compliant data integrations that differentiate Relevate One from every other platform in the market
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• Deployment & Migration Support: Supporting the phased rollout across Relevate’s customer base, including data migration, configuration, and validation for each association’s unique setup