Jun 1, 2010 31
As a longtime watcher of real estate and technology, but still just a consumer in every respect, I have a question for the technology-savvy realtors.
What does it matter to me, as a consumer, if you’re a tech-savvy agent?
It’s a real question, actually, because at this point, I’m not sure what the answer is. Let me explain.
Apr 13, 2009 2
One of the most valuable pieces of data in our industry, I think, is the annual Power Broker Report and Survey conducted by RISMedia. The 2008 edition is no exception, and is available here. I highly recommend it if you’re interested in our industry as a whole.
I like to play with the numbers as soon as I can get my hands on them. I’ll probably be writing about one or more aspects of this over the next few weeks, but thought I would share some interesting tidbits.
I only looked at the top 750 brokerage companies in the survey report because the numbers started getting wacky. For example, the #961 company did 13 transactions totalling $70,000 in volume in 2008. That just doesn’t sound right — either there’s a data entry error, or that company ain’t in business no mo’.
Plus, I excluded the top three companies: NRT, HomeServices of America, and Long & Foster, simply because they are such outliers that they really skewed the results. For example, #3 Long and Foster more than doubled the sales volume of the #4 company, Prudential Douglas Elliman.
In any case, here are some numbers to chew on:
There are more interesting tidbits, and there are conclusions to be drawn from the information. But for now, I thought some of the above was pretty interesting.
More to come.
-rsh
Dec 18, 2008 20
I’ve been engaged in much discussion of late on the future of real estate, and we’re having a debate right now between those who believe that the future is made up of numerous independent agents (or small agent teams) operating in low-cost, low-service brokerage models and those who believe that the future actually belongs to Big Brokers who come to their senses and start investing in their future.
Let’s call the former camp Kristians, and the latter camp the Robnecks. Fact is that the Kristians are much nicer, better looking, and have invaluable perspective as on-the-ground practitioners of the craft. On the other hand, the Robnecks have the laws of economics on their side….
But this post isn’t about either one of those Grand Debates. This post is… well, I don’t know what it is. Whimsy, probably — which also happens to accurately describe 95% of the posts on this blog.
Basically, I wanted to offer a bunch of free, unsolicited advice to brokers of all sizes, varieties, and business models. Being that this is free and unsolicited, the approximate value of this advice asymptotically approaches zero on a relatively steep curve. But hey, when has ‘value-free advice’ ever stopped me before?
So… rather than grand theory, here are the top three things I would do if I were running a real estate brokerage in 2009:
Let’s get into it, shall we? Read the rest of this entry »
Sep 12, 2008 2
I thought Glenn Kelman’s latest post on Yammer was a treat — it’s rare for those of us in the management ranks to get management insights and thoughts from a CEO that aren’t prepackaged and heavily worked over by a legion of editors. The post is ostensibly about Yammer, the new corporate Twitter, but it’s really about how to manage people to be productive:
While I am glad to try a new technology — Dan is such a fearless pioneer — I worry that Yammer might be worse than work, and worse even than no-work. At least when you’re browsing ESPN.com, you feel bad about it. Yammer happens at work, and it sounds like work — you can always tell when someone is writing an email, IM or Twitter, because their typing is so much faster and noisier — so people think it is work, with one crucial exception: it may not get work done.
I’m not sure I buy the talk about collaboration. I’ve seen passive-aggressive arguments happen over email and (less over) IM — Skype’s workrooms are the exception; they’re awesome — that could have been avoided or settled in a few minutes face to face; will Yammer be much different?
As it is, I have elaborate fantasies about outlawing the whole Internet for hours at a time, or even for an entire workday. When I marvel at how a historical colossus like Theodore Roosevelt (definitive naval history of 1812, four-volume history of American frontier, a staggering number of slaughtered animals, U.S. President) or Honore de Balzac (dozens of coffee-fueled novels, written from midnight – 3 in the afternoon, while standing up) had time to accomplish so much, I usually attribute it to talent, servants — and no Internet.
I have to struggle with this issue as well, on a daily basis. Especially when overseeing the corporate blog is part of my responsibility, and a task for my team. The product management team has to be on the Internet constantly, looking at developments, reading blogs, interacting with people both inside and outside the company. And now, we’re in week two of the NFL season, which means fantasy football will undoubtedly eat into my productivity (and my team’s productivity).
Thinking about Yammer, about Twitter, about blogs, about all these “is it work?” type of tools reminds me of David Ogilvy, who built Ogilvy & Mather into an advertising giant. One of his observations has to do with brilliant creative people:
There are very few men of genius in advertising agencies. But we need all we can find. Almost without exception they are disagreeable. Don’t destroy them. They lay golden eggs.
He writes about how he always thought better and more creatively after a few drinks. He talks about how he has to coddle the borderline-unstable personalities of his best copywriters, because they are the ones that produce the best work.
I think managing people is by far the most difficult thing that any person can do. I have enormous respect for great managers, whether they be Jack Welch or David Petraeus. It is so difficult. But there appears to be a common thread among the great managers: insistence on results.
That’s the nature of business, at the end of the day. It is what makes business fun: you have winners and losers, and a scoreboard. Is Yammer going to destroy productivity? Perhaps. But then the work of your people will reflect that destroyed productivity. Are my people wasting too much time on the Internet? Then they will not be able to deliver what I expect.
In my management philosophy, I find that I am more and more going with the following approach:
Do whatever you want, whenever you want, however you want — but I don’t want to hear any goddamn excuses.
I’m not all that great at enforcing this, but I’m getting better. If you need to take a day off, take it. If you need to leave early, leave early. Come in at noon, that’s fine with me. Spend half the day playing video games? That’s okay too. But miss a deadline, or fail to deliver results, and it’s your ass. I am not interested in excuses. At all.
I have never seen an excuse raise revenues by a dollar, or cut costs by a penny. Never. I have never seen excuses get a product to market. I have never seen competitors willing to wait on us because we have a great excuse why we didn’t do what we needed to do.
I suspect that at the end of the day, this is the key to productivity: the absolute unwillingness to entertain excuses coupled with freedom to let people be productive in their own way. Some people concentrate for an hour, but then need to take a breather. Others need to maintain a low-level focus for the whole day. Still others might need to get stinking drunk to be creative. Each individual is different.
What remains the same are results.
So my unsolicited, probably horrid, advice to Glenn is to let people Yammer away, check ESPN, play fantasy football, do whatever it is they gotta do. But never, ever accept an excuse for failure. Ever. I think the unproductive people will hang themselves on the rope provided, while others will make lassos out of the rope and bring in more business.
-rsh
