I recently had the opportunity to spend a day with the “chiefs” of several large real estate companies in a well appointed and quiet conference room. Before the day began we had the pleasure of having dinner together the evening before and enjoying some of California’s Cabernet, loosing up for an open exchange of ideas, need, wants, threats, you get the idea.
Since the topic of the meeting was centered on new services for real estate brokerage operations, a litany of needs soon began to flow quickly as the session progressed. Technology seemed to be the dominate centerpiece. During the meeting I found myself having to bite my tongue as I listened to what so many wanted in their tech tool box.
I was so excited to learn that we have and continue to enhance our technology based tools that accomplish the goals our competition is seeking and some are not sure what is over the horizon at all. By lunch (with little reading between the lines), I became more confident about our franchisees positioning for success in this new market and information and consumer driven age. Our technology investment directly supports the real estate business enterprise model of this time.
Don’t read this the wrong way either; these companies are very well established and run by broker/owners that have years of experience and several of them have invested millions into their operations and they work smart. Seemed like all had heavy brick and mortar expenses and technology that resembled patchwork at best or off-the-shelf basic online tools that run as separate applications, and a few that might integrate with high levels of technical knowhow.
The bottom line here is that our integrated systems for brokers and associates provide outstanding efficiencies in terms of operational, marketing and advertising procedures at less cost while simultaneously creating an increasing amount of new listings and sales through growing amount of online channels and consumer oriented propositions.
Lunch was served in the conference room and we continued to talk and enjoy a good spread. I sat and thought to myself about the true value of our programs and our franchisees success. Now more than any other, I knew that if they use our systems to compete they wouldn’t be eaten for lunch. I’m not sure the others felt that way.