Connecting Real Estate and Gen Z: An Interview with William Senné

Senné CEO William Senné was recently interviewed by Banker & Tradesman about the company’s focus on new marketing channels and leveraging NIL and sports team sponsorships. If you enjoy this excerpt, be sure to visit the B&T website for the full interview.

Q: What was Senné’s original business model when you founded the company?

A: In 2009, I was a hothead and I thought I could figure it out and decided to go out on my own as a broker. I had been working with Century 21 renting apartments, and it was trailing the recession and I’d had a lot of success, renting apartments in the evenings as a college kid and making some money. I remember thinking, “I’m pretty good at this,” and I went to my boss and asked for a small raise. he said no, and I said, “I quit.”

Our company really has been an evolution. When I started, the vision was I loved the Cambridge market. I lived in Cambridge at the time. I was your average real estate agent. What ended up happening is I started to learn all of the inefficiencies that exist in the industry. Most of them have to do with the segmented nature of it. Your real estate agent doesn’t know what property management is. The property manager doesn’t know how financing works. I realized this is kind of nuts. I was an economics student at Boston College, so I was very curious and trying to apply all of these theories I’ve had in the real world. There’s an opportunity to develop something where the different services help each other.

Q: What was the strategy behind some of your recent sponsorships?

A: Brand partnerships have to feel right. Sports and teamwork are very easy analogies for us. Camaraderie is a theme for us. So, a sports team alignment is very logical. Boston College was an easy one for me because that’s where I went to school and I loved it, and there’s a tremendous amount of local appreciation. Everybody knows somebody who went there or went to a game there. And the Bruins are the beloved gritty team of Boston. We’re jumping into the NIL [names, images and likeness] space and trying to get ourselves in front of the younger generation.

Q: How does a business find potential partners for this type of NIL endorsement?

A: We reached out to Boston College and they referred us to a company that gave us a list of people who might be in the budget, and Belle was perfect. She’s working with us mostly on social media stuff, and some TikTok videos. There’s been a couple of posts about how to rent an apartment in Boston. I would say it was an opportunistic increase to our marketing budget. We saw it and we said, “That sounds really cool, so let’s find a way to do this.”

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Senné is redefining real estate, attracting the best and brightest to join us as we move this industry forward. To find out more about what Senné has to offer real estate professionals, visit our careers page or contact us at 617.314.9400.