I was recently reading a good post by Kris Berg. Kris has been a real estate agent for a long time with Prudential in California. She and her husband recently left to start their own brokerage.
Large real estate brokerages are powerhouses in the market, including here in Salem Oregon. As training grounds for new agents, they are advertising machines that can train agents into slick salespeople. What large brokerages have difficulty with is adaptation.
Any consumer calling around asking about real estate fees knows this. The rates and services offered are all fairly similar. Adapting to new technologies and ways of doing business, moving from an agent-centric model to a consumer-centric model, is difficult.
Have you as a consumer ever thought about how much it costs to maintain those large buildings? How often have you as a consumer stepped into one of those buildings? Every time you pay that brokerage fee you pay for all of the overhead associated with the business. This is true for all businesses, including mine.
What is different is the ability of small independents to embrace and quickly adapt to changing technologies and consumer desires. I don’t have to have a committee meeting to talk about blogging, or offering a new service. I don’t have to worry about what corporate says…I am corporate. What this offers consumers is a highly flexible, meet your needs type of approach.
Is it the end of big brokerages? We’ll just have to see whether or not they can adapt. The consumers will be the ultimate decision-makers in their survival or demise.
(c) Copyright, 2008. Melina Tomson, All Rights Reserved (ie…be nice and create your own content. Don’t steal mine…)