Make no mistake — the technology and real estate industries are stuck together like peanut butter and jelly. That won’t be changing any time soon; the two spheres are only going to be more integrated with each other moving forward. The real estate brokerages that invest in their technology, and provide it as support to their agents, are the ones with the best shot at large-scale success in this changing landscape. And, sure, obviously, TRIBUS (along with the 600-plus other tech vendors surrounding the real estate industry) has a vested interest in seeing a world where brokerages double down on their tech budget, so don’t take our word for it. A NAR survey in January found that about half of real estate agents are looking for more technology solutions from their brokerages. Meanwhile, the up-and-coming national brokerage Compass was recently valued at $1.8 billion, based largely on its promises for more sophisticated technology provided to its agents and homebuyers — a move more common for promising tech startups than brokerages. While there’s some doubt whether Compass’ tech is as trailblazing as that valuation indicates, there’s an important lesson lying in that story. Perhaps running a real estate brokerage like a tech startup isn’t a bad path forward for a pioneering broker.
Now, this doesn’t mean you need to put a ping pong table in your office and start wearing skinny jeans to meetings. What it means is you should be looking at your business practices and asking yourself: Am I doing this because it’s productive/profitable in 2018, or because this is how real estate brokerages have been doing them for a long time? Would a more tech startup-style way of thinking be more be fruitful here? That’ll take some time and a lot of number-crunching. But let’s look at a few possible tactics that tech startups frequently employ.
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BYOD, or: They’re Just Gonna Use Their Phones Anyway
The Bring Your Own Device solution to cutting down on hardware costs was maybe the biggest much-buzzed-about topic of conversation in tech a few years ago — its benefits and problems, the latter of which mostly centers on cybersecurity. In the years since, that conversation’s cooled off, seemingly after people realized that, well, it often doesn’t matter if you have a BYOD policy or not; people’s phones became increasingly like a third arm that they were going to be using in and out of the office. Particularly for real estate brokerages, that presents a huge opportunity. Brokers, if they haven’t already, should be cutting out their spend on in-office phone systems and instead using their agents’ probable iPhone addictions as assets. Reallocate some of those funds to making the most out of mobile: Branded agent app providers like HomeSpotter and Smarter Agent make great marketing tools, and services like CallAction allow for more integration between your agents’ phones and your real estate brokerage CRM.
Would a Tech Startup Have That Much Office Space?
Running a functional tech startup is all about cutting down on overhead to invest in elements that bring in a higher ROI. That’s why so many successful startups started in garages; that’s why the shared workspaces that companies like WeWork offer have taken off in such a major way lately. The aforementioned fact that every one of your agents probably carries a little computer around in their pocket all day means you have less of a responsibility to provide a fancy, decked-out office space for each of them. We’re not suggesting holding meetings in your garage, either — just start by figuring out what your square footage per agent is, and see if it’s too high (it often is). You should be shooting for around 50 square feet per agent or under, with shared offices and closing rooms, and it doesn’t need much more than a decent all-in-one printer and fast Wi-Fi. To help you calculate your square footage per agent (along with a ton of other considerations we won’t have the time for in this post), head over to our Resources section and download the Management by Guesswork workbook.
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Stay Hip
Startups are known for trying a little too hard to be the “cool place to work” — a tendency satirized constantly by the HBO show Silicon Valley — and, no, you don’t need to follow in those particular footsteps and start communicating by hologram or anything. Just stay curious and on top of tech trends that could be big for your business. Whatever new things you try, be it custom real estate brokerage websites, Facebook ads, Nextdoor neighborhood sponsorships, or the latest hot topic in tech, chatbots for your website, do your research beforehand and track its performance after launching it. If it’s not meeting your standards for ROI on it, it’s okay, you tried it out; see what worked and what didn’t and pivot to something better. Your agents are always going to be hungry for the new, hot thing in technology. Keep them satisfied by investing your marketing budget into tools that will work for your brokerage — just make sure you’re always pulling the data to see if you’ve invested wisely.
And that’s really what running a brokerage like a tech startup is all about: (a) keeping up on new productivity tools, (b) keeping on tabs on how they actually work and (c) not clinging to old ways of doing things. There are tons of ways you can do this not mentioned here — for instance, certain automations and cloud-based, centralized services can drastically reduce how much you spend on staffing — but these three principles will be key for keeping your business running like a cutting-edge tech company. For other factors that you should know for growth moving forward, we’d again recommend consulting the Management by Guesswork workbook.
