The New New Thing
I just returned home from our Warburg Realty retreat: two full days in northwestern Connecticut with our terrifically smart and dynamic new team. There has been a lot of change here at Warburg in the past two years, and now we have an engaged and forward-looking group of professionals with the experience and vision necessary to execute our ambitious goals. It is as exciting for me as it could possibly be.
And what a time to be in this industry in this city! Not only do we have a multi-layered, highly complex set of micro-markets to navigate, but we are navigating them during a time of greater upheaval in our internal brokerage marketplace than at any time in my memory. Our market for talent, always competitive, has reached new heights (or depths) of poaching, with the managers of companies on the phone all day long trying to tempt top agents to desert their current employers for the (supposedly) greener pastures around the corner. Hand in hand with this race for talent, technology is finally recarving our marketplace, as many have predicted it would, although not in the anticipated ways.
When I first came into the real estate market some 35 years ago, there were many fewer firms, many fewer listings, and an essentially old fashioned code of conduct and good behavior. Recruiting agents from a competitor was almost never done, and the leaders of the industry at that time frowned upon it as being undignified. That perspective held throughout the balance of the 20th century, even as the practice of poaching talent became more prevalent in the financial world. Agents made changes, but they were almost always self-initiated. With the entry of some of the newer firms into the market, that reality altered. These new companies wanted to scale fast and they recruited aggressively, promising agents beautiful offices, great technology, better splits, and a better agent experience. Regardless of whether they were able to deliver on those promises, the paradigm was irremediably changed. Now everyone recruits constantly from everyone else and the past year has seen an exponentially greater migration of top agents than any other year in my professional memory.
At the same time, the market’s appetite for good data as an aid to decision making has been revolutionized by technology. Sellers are looking for cogent, well presented spreadsheets on comparable sales to aid with pricing decisions, and buyers want the same when deciding how to bid. While there are no online venues which offer a really reliable data-centric experience, consumers can find websites which enable them to do some of this analysis on their own. But by and large they still want an agent to guide them through their transactions. So the revolution which is taking place in real estate technology is NOT, as many imagined it might be, about rendering the agent obsolete. Quite the contrary: the revolution in technology creates tools which empower the agent, making her a more effective advocate for her client by empowering her with better access to the knowledge she needs about activity and demographics within the marketplace. And as a firm, the better your tools, the better your shot at recruiting top talent, especially among Gen Y-ers and Millenials.
As ever, the challenge is to rise to the requirements of the changing environment while remaining true to our essential vision of the company. We remain a values based organization, and we will not behave in ways, no matter how seemingly lucrative in the short term, which do not adhere to those values. We are committed to excellence in what we do, which requires that every work product leaving our office must pass under several pairs of eyes. This guarantees that we will never be a giant company, where such quality control is unachievable. And we will not trash the competition. But we can continue to try to lead by example, to create and provide the best possible tools for our agents and clients, to care more about relationships than commissions, and to grow by attracting like-minded people who feel an affinity for what our brand represents. I am proud to say that’s what emerged from our retreat; in this whirlwind environment, our center is holding!