Office-less Future
Issue 47 - August 27th, 2021
Agent offices are no longer a necessity for residential real estate brokerage firms. Real estate agents are constantly on the go meeting clients, showing homes, and working a lot in their cars and coffee shops. The real estate brokerage office is a relic of the past and a “feature” that legacy brokerage firms tout as an advantage in their sales pitches to agents. The pandemic only accelerated a trend that was already in the works with agents using offices less and less with technology empowering them to do their jobs from anywhere.
The office only serves to drag down the overhead on these firms throttling back their investment in more important tools, services, and support items for their agents. The legacy firms cannot outright admit this because they have spent their entire existence opening branch offices or selling franchises to expand their physical footprint. The tides are turning as I type this in favor of a cloud based operating environment which benefits agents in a positive way.
The future of the entire real estate brokerage industry is in the cloud, and the industry leading companies making big changes in the market are all cloud based. It is my hunch that legacy firms will begin to shutter offices beginning this year and move slowly like a turtle but surely towards a more office-less future.
Reducing overhead on things agents barely use like offices enables firms to pass along savings in the forms of better commissions and also allows more investment into tools and support which help agents close more deals and make more money. The writing is on the wall for the way this trend will go in the future, but it will be interesting to see how quickly the office-less landscape changes and becomes the “go-to” business model in the residential real estate brokerage industry.
Newsworthy Links To Share
The apartment market is on fire. Analysts expect more than 330,000 units to be delivered nationally this year, the fifth consecutive year this has happened. (CRE Daily)
Lone Wolf acquires PropertyBase in 5th acquisition of the year. Lone Wolf Technologies announced in a press release its fifth proptech acquisition in nine months by purchasing Boston Logic-owned Propertybase, a large-scale sales support, marketing and operations solution. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.(Inman)
(Pacaso) A Startup Is Turning Houses Into Corporations, And The Neighbors Are Fighting Back. (NPR)
Second-largest U.S. mortgage lender will accept payment in bitcoin. (MSN.com)
Bungalow, a San Francisco-based residential real estate marketplace, raised $75 million in Series C funding. Deer Park Road led the round and was joined by investors including Atomic, Founders Fund, Coatue, and Khosla Ventures. (Term Sheet)
Famed mutual fund investor, Nuveen, is buying up farmland as an inflation hedge. (CNBC)
Toll Brothers CEO says the drop in ‘crazy high’ lumber prices will save $40,000 per home (CNBC)
Visa enters the NFT market ad buys a cryptopunk! (VISA Blog)