Realtors of the Future

As a Realtor of the future  I began operating my business a lot different than my competitors last year. I split my base of operations between my centrally located luxury office and my homey state of the art home office. I knew that the days of big offices with 50 Realtors was over. They only exist to skew the statistical numbers of their own success.

PUBLISHED BY INMAN REAL ESTATE NEWS

Within two years, the edgiest indie brokerages will not resemble anything you have seen before.

The brokerage of the future (BOF) will still have a 1,000-square-foot office space (or something close to that size) in the coolest part of town, but it will look a lot more like the sharpest Starbucks locations than an office. There will be a strict “no cubicle zone” rule, and this will also apply to private agencies. This space will serve about 100 brokers who cover a larger metro area of 1 million to 2 million people.

Of course, they’ll seldom use the space — just enough to let their clients know exactly how different their philosophy is than that of the typical franchise brokerages. Interviews, often including videos with the media and bloggers, will be held in the office, always driving home the “cool factor” of the brokerage.

But there is far more to the BOF than demonstrating a new attitude regarding real estate. The brokerage will discuss how and why their proprietary technology meets the needs of sellers and buyers better than anything else on the market, and how this allows them to charge smaller fees for quality service. The reporters will be doing all the talking about how cool this real estate company is.

The brokerage company will spend about 10 times the money per year on technology than on office rent. All proprietary technology will be based entirely on meeting the desires of sellers and buyers. Support functions like customer relationship managers (CRMs) will be licensed or purchased. There will be no full-time staff members to take calls or set showings.

The brokerage will actually be far less of a brokerage than an amazing local portal. They will create technology to meet the needs of home sellers and buyers. They will provide an automated valuation model (AVM) superior to Zillow’s, and they will provide the ultimate tools for truly marketing sellers’ homes. This proprietary software will burn through about 70 percent of gross income for the company and will be the best investment they possibly could have made.

The portals’ proprietary buyer search technology will allow a homebuyer to click on a home they love and instantly find other homes offering the same amenities and emotional triggers they seek. Homebuyers never have chosen a home solely based on square footage and bedroom count, and are no longer forced to search for homes this way. This proprietary software will find homes based on the buyer’s emotional triggers. It will be based on artificial intelligence built around the emotional benefits consumers seek. Buyers will love this, thus creating a perpetual flow of Internet leads, plus personal and social referrals.