In my first job as a real estate agent, in the 90’s, the company I worked at had zero exclusive listings. We had a listing manager in the office whose job it was to call every landlord – every morning – to find out what apartments they had available for that particular day. The market moved at a lightning pace. She would write down the listings and pin them up on a board in front of the office so the agents could see what was available. The sales operation worked in a similar way. We had all of our listings on index cards in a box. For an agent to be successful, they had to remember every apartment and have seen them before showing them to their buyer. One thing that was true back then, in order to be a successful agent, you had to know every listing and do your homework. Agents who made money back then were very educated. Midway through my second year, cell phones became accessible to the mass market so I abandoned my beeper and payphone. That new tech was a game changer.
In my second job, two years later, I found myself at the largest sales company in the city. Every agent had a personal IBM XT personal computer (run on DOS) on their desk. It was a fancier way of having our index cards accessible on a screen, but not much more than that. The learning curve for half the agents precluded them from adapting so they kept the index cards. When we upgraded from DOS to Windows 95 (in 2000) we started working with email. Another game-changer! Again, some agents resisted, but those of us who adapted, found this tech to be a valuable tool for communicating with our clients. Those early days of email were entertaining and a challenge for everyone in every industry. Almost everyone I knew had fired off an email they regretted sending. This new tech made us think very carefully about exactly how and what we communicated as we quickly became aware that an email was a legally binding communication.
Flush with cash, the company I was licensed with invested over $1M into a proprietary listing system that would aggregate all our listing information and make it readily accessible through a single portal. This new tech would give our company an edge. Once the competition got wind of this, they created a similar platform and in short order, most agents at large firms had the same tools. The smaller firms suffered because this tech was prohibitively expensive. The agents at large firms benefitted. This intranet became a valuable tool and made me more efficient. Almost overnight, we could access a listings database, ad budgets, and the internet in one place. Once again, a lot of agents resisted adapting to this new tech and obstinately held on to their index cards. These agents would ultimately adapt, or be flushed out of the industry.
In 2003, our company bought our first CRM. This allowed me to access all of my clients, calendars, marketing tools, and documents in one place. CRM’s changed the way we worked with all of our past, present, and future clients. Almost twenty years later, most agents still do not use a CRM for their business.
In 2006, Michael Smith started Streeteasy. Up until last year, the NYC brokerage community was still working on a multiple listing system. There hasn’t been much innovation on the listing front in 15 years. In fact, there hasn’t been much tech innovation in real estate data since then. Our websites, CRMs, and Intranet portals are prettier and have a few more bells and whistles, but there has been nothing substantive or innovative.
When I started CORE in 2005, Barbara Corcoran publicly stated that the future of real estate lay with boutique agencies. She said that small firms would have the edge because they had equal access to technology but had the ability to be nimble. She was right. Every agent at every firm of any size had access to the same tech. The absence of bureaucracy and politics allowed small business owners to make fast and creative decisions allowing them to leap ahead of the competition. Almost all marketing initiatives came out of the small firms.
When I met Seth Godin 15 years ago, he told me that the real estate brokerage model was antiquated and ripe for disruption. He contended that artificial intelligence would ultimately replace the agent. He proposed that with future tech advancements, the consumer would be able to save money and not have to pay an agent or brokerage commission. We are a very long way away from this ever happening, although we will see this in some markets at some point. For a multi billion dollar industry, real estate underperforms its peers in innovation. There’s a lot of chatter from companies who call themselves real estate tech firms, prop tech innovation firms, and blockchain application firms, but at the end of the day not enough has changed from the days when my beeper alerted me that I had a voice message on my landline.
We have a long way to go...and this presents us with boundless opportunities.
Let’s do this!
-Shaun