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The future of the real estate brokerage is tech driven, Tamir Poleg, CEO and co-founder of the virtual brokerage, Real, told moderator Clelia Peters during an Inman Connect session on Tuesday titled “Trends to Watch: The Future of the Real Estate Brokerage.”
“There is not a single company yet in our space that attracts agents solely based on a great tech product that it offers,” he said.
Real plans on being the first.
Earlier this month, Inman reported that Real, which recently went public, brought in $23 million of revenue during the second quarter of 2021, a 790 percent increase compared to the second quarter of 2020.
A major reason for the growth is the usage of effective tech.
At the company, Poleg explained, technology is adopted to fit under four main pillars.
The first pillar: productivity
Productivity, Poleg explained, encompasses everything that helps agents save time and make more money.
Examples of the types of technology that fall under the productivity umbrella include CRMs, 24/7 support systems, and transaction management tools.
The second pillar: marketing
Poleg explained that at Real, marketing is geared to focus on how agents brand themselves in their communities.
Agents of the brokerage are able to get things like business cards, yard signs and flyers customized through the company’s app and marketing center.
“Every agent that joins Real receives a personal branded website, a personal branded app,” Poleg said.
Real’s goal is to eventually have agents and their clients handle the entire homebuying and selling process on their app.
The third pillar: community
“As a non-brick and mortar company, we don’t have offices everywhere, but we still have 2,600 agents who want to interact with each other, who want to exchange leads and ask questions,” Poleg said.
To enable that, Real created an online community where their agents can interact with each other, and the company is always looking for ways to improve that experience.
The fourth pillar: the operation of the brokerage
Poleg explained that this pillar is often not talked about in the industry, but one of the most important ones.
At Real, everything in the back office is automated. To put the success of Real’s back office into perspective, there are just 45 employees who are able to service 2,600 agents.
“In our industry, in our day and age, where margins are shrinking, it’s really imperative that a brokerage learns how to operate very efficiently,” Poleg said.
