Real Estate Brokerage and High Tech

Real estate brokerage and the entire real estate industry is in the middle of a massive transition from the old traditional bricks and mortar business model to the world of high tech in the clouds. Of course, many other industries are in transition, too, and none of them have been handling the transition very well. It has been a long slow transition, and painful for the real estate industry. There’s no question that the rapid changes we have seen since the public launching of the Internet in 1994 started a revolution that is far from over.

I would argue that changes of this magnitude have not occurred since America’s Industrial Revolution. Even that comparison falls short, because the Industrial Revolution built momentum and leveled out for decades. Our real estate brokerage virtuality is not slowing down at all, and there’s no end in sight for the new inventions, new technologies, and gigantic paradigm shifts that happen almost constantly now.

The technology news cycle is only 24 hours, and it’s hard to keep up with all the news broadcast every single day on Youtube, X, Facebook, and on independent journalists’ sites. The main street media is so far behind, hardly any of us are reading the print newspapers or watching CNN, MSNBC, or ABC anymore. In the midst of dramatic changes in business, in the processes and in the technologies, few business owners have been prepared to address the changes in real time.

Real Estate Brokerage is Changing

It’s usually after the fact that the vast majority of real estate brokers start to comprehend what has been happening and what they need to do to survive and thrive. Just like politicians, traditional real estate brokers and especially the corporate franchises will kick the can down the road as long as they possibly can, and even while business models are collapsing all around them, they will still kick the can down the road until they suffer from their own implosion. Traditional brokers who are in the business development end of the brokerage are not very intelligent, and they have never been proactive. In fact, the big real estate brokerage is like the Titanic and cannot turn and adapt quickly. Instead, just like the Titanic, they are more likely to go down in this rapidly changing environment.

It’s like we’ve had a massive earthquake, but no one wants to talk about it. When people don’t understand a massive underlying sea-change, they will pretend it didn’t happen and forge ahead as though its business as usual. But it’s not. If brokers don’t adapt quickly, they won’t be around much longer.