As real estate leaders confront the challenges of the 21st century — from technological disruption of their industry to issues of housing affordability, changes in government, crime, sexual harassment, diversity, natural disasters, and more — the task of building a successful business can seem daunting and possibly out of reach.
But there is a path to thriving in an age of disruption, and it begins with listening and learning.
Earlier this year, Inman surveyed its readers, specifically targeting real estate’s rank-and-file members, to ask them what they wanted from the leaders of the real estate industry. What are real estate leaders doing right? What are they doing wrong? What tools and tactics should they be using that they aren’t already? What shackles of the pre-digital world should they leave behind? What traditions should they continue to uphold? How should they address the larger challenges facing society — if at all?
After receiving numerous intelligent and thoughtful responses from real estate professionals, and conducting further interviews, we created Inman’s first-ever Essential Guide for Real Estate Leaders, originally published in five parts during our Leadership Week at the beginning of March 2018 (read all five parts below). It, and a larger series of articles, Q&As, and personal accounts of leadership have been collected in our new book, Leadership: How Real Estate Leaders Can Act Decisively to Change the Industry, which will be available soon for purchase.
The essential guide for leadership on tech disruption
This is one part of Inman’s five-part Essential Guide for Real Estate Leadership, which we are publishing throughout our first-ever Leadership Week. See all the parts here. Please send your feedback to leadership@sandbox.inman.com. If you’re a leader who wants to join us for our exclusive Disconnect in The Desert event on March 26-28, or want to recommend a colleague, send a note to brad@sandbox.inman.com explaining why.
The biggest threat to traditional real estate is neither a dearth of inventory nor a volatile stock market, but an ambush on multiple fronts from consumer-direct upstarts, on-demand apps and other data-driven tech disruptors, according to Inman’s inaugural survey asking the industry rank-and-file how their leaders could be doing better.
Jake Breen
Nearly 30 percent of 787 real estate respondents polled for Inman’s survey on real estate leadership in February said “technological disruption” remains the single biggest threat to the real estate industry, edging out other perils like shifting demographics, market fluctuations and global politics.
And while nearly 85 percent of real estate professionals have faith that leadership within their companies are up to the challenge, more than 15 percent said they’re less hopeful.
“Believe me, I don’t want to spit in the face of what I do for a living, but I believe [the real estate industry] has changed a lot in the last five years and it’s going to change drastically in the next five,” said Jake Breen, a Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices agent in Utah. “My worry is that it only takes one big conglomerate — Zillow teaming up with Amazon, or Google — to announce they’re starting a consumer-direct model, and it’s game over: no more real estate industry.”
What leaders need to know to stay ahead
Anxiety over tech disruption comes as venture capitalists are increasingly turning their attention to the real estate industry. In 2017, investors shoveled more than $5 billion into real estate tech upstarts like Opendoor, Compass and other would-be barbarians at the gate, up from $33 million less than a decade earlier, according to Pitchbook, the private equity research firm.
The renewed interest from investors also coincides with a new generation of millennial homebuyers entering the market, many of them tech savvy and unafraid to seek out information online.
More than 70 percent of real estate professionals polled believe their leaders are prepared for the new generation, while 29 percent worried their strategies need fine-tuning.
“[Leadership needs to] adopt a business model that better serves the needs of our demographic as well as millennials and gen-Xers,” one Florida agent wrote, adding she doubts executives at her company understand the latest industry trends. “One that incorporates more online interaction as well as a higher standard of service to improve the customer experience.”
Breen, a broker advisor for REthink, the millennial think tank launched by Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices in 2013, warned that young homebuyers are just now beginning to feel comfortable eschewing brokers for a consumer-direct rival like Opendoor and data-driven sites like Zillow and Trulia, both of which stoked fears when they launched more than a decade ago.
“My worry is consumer mindset — what they think about us as an industry — has finally caught up,” Breen told Inman News. “I have good friends, people who still won’t transact without my advice — but just my advice, not my services. Data is so easy for them now that we’re starting to see the millennials and Gen Xers becoming the big buying group. They’re finally comfortable enough to transact online. The tools are getting good enough for them to trust whoever connects with them on the phone — whether it’s a Zillow representative or a discount broker.”
Should real estate leaders spend energy resisting Zillow?
With Zillow in mind, real estate professionals overwhelming agreed that industry leaders, both within their company and at the helm of trade associations, should actively resist the Seattle-based online database, according to the Inman News survey. Nearly 60 percent believe leaders should take control of listing data from Zillow and other consumer-facing websites.
Sean Thomas
Real estate professionals also weighed in on other potentially disruptive shifts in the industry, including a divisive push for a national multiple listing service, to which nearly 60 percent of respondents were opposed. About 33 percent, meanwhile, were in favor of a national MLS.
“I can see the pluses and negatives for both,” said Sean Thomas, an agent with eXp Realty in California. “Canada has one national MLS and they love it, and the MLS looks out for the best interests of their agents and their population. If we were able to emulate that, and actually really follow that as a model, that would be phenomenal and I would agree to a national MLS.”
Thomas is among an emergent group of Realtors banking on the disruptive potential of technology in the real estate sector. In 2015, he launched “Show Me Now,” a GPS-powered on-demand real estate app he describes as “the Uber of real estate” that allows potential homebuyers to bypass slow-to-respond listing agents who aren’t immediately available to show nearby homes on the market.
By his estimate, the app currently boasts about a hundred cooperating agents across North America and elsewhere who have signed on to show properties to potential buyers when listing agents aren’t readily available, he told Inman News.
“Broadly speaking, on-demand technology is very disruptive right now, just because it’s putting a lot of agents in check,” said Thomas. “Real estate agents love their ability to make their own schedule, and clients more and more — it used to be just millennials — want things right now. And with everything that’s out there — Uber, [California delivery service] Foodjets, you name it — it’s turning more and more into that service-based industry. So why not real estate?”
The essential guide for leadership on diversity and hiring
This is one part of Inman’s five-part Essential Guide for Real Estate Leadership, which we are publishing throughout our first-ever Leadership Week. Read all the parts here. Please send your feedback to leadership@sandbox.inman.com. If you’re a leader who wants to join us for our exclusive Disconnect in The Desert event on March 26-28, or want to recommend a colleague, send a note to brad@sandbox.inman.com explaining why.
Real estate professionals are overwhelmingly satisfied with the job their leaders are doing in the face of fierce competition, calls for diversity, and major changes. Yet many denounced flawed hiring decisions and inadequate health care benefits, and called for more efforts to increase cultural diversity, according to Inman’s first-ever Real Estate Leadership Survey.
Rank-and-file are broadly pleased with leadership
Real estate professionals largely gave high marks to their leaders, with 49 percent reporting they are “very happy” with senior executives at their companies, another 35 percent saying they are “somewhat happy” and only about 15 percent saying they are “unhappy.” They believe the most important qualities in a leader are their communication skills (86 percent), integrity (84 percent), willingness to listen (78 percent), and creativity (56 percent). Meanwhile, about 40 percent said their leaders frequently rise to challenges in their businesses “very well.”
“I’m very happy with our broker,” said a Minnesota-based Re/Max agent, one of nearly 800 real estate professionals from brokerages big and small surveyed for the Inman poll. “He is providing us the tools to make our job easier and less time-consuming. He also listens when you talk.”
But among their concerns, many lamented leaders unwilling to adapt to industry changes or new technology — challenges for any executive, to be sure, but perhaps none more so than those in their 50s and 60s, the age group most likely to be in senior positions, according to the survey.
Ageism isn’t as big an issue as other industries
However, most leaders were equally willing to hire younger and older brokers alike, with more than 80 percent of real estate professionals saying their leaders supported all age groups. That’s an excellent finding compared to other industries such as tech, where age discrimination runs rampant.
Leaders were broadly commended for their commitment to diversity in the workplace, with 85 percent of real estate professionals giving senior executives positive grades.
Specifically, 55.4 percent of respondents reported that leadership at their company was “very committed to diversity,” and another 30.5 percent said it was “somewhat committed to diversity” in the workplace. Only 3.7 percent claimed executives weren’t committed at all.
Yet 40 percent of those polled said that even the most committed leaders could do more in terms of hiring.
Cultural diversity needs work
For Kathy Fowler, a broker associate with Coldwell Banker Select who serves as president of the Oklahoma Association of Realtors and sits on the board of directors for the Oklahoma City Metropolitan Association of Realtors, cultural diversity, while abundant in Oklahoma, is less visible among the upper echelons of the city’s realty associations.
“What I’m not seeing represented in Oklahoma as a whole — or at least not in the association world as far as people serving on committees and in leadership and things like that — is cultural diversity,” Fowler told Inman News. “And Oklahoma has a very rich, diverse culture, and from my own personal experience with sales transactions, I’ve experienced the diversity out there, but I haven’t seen that diversity involved in the association or in leadership, and that’s something I’d like to see us work on, especially on the 50th anniversary of the Fair Housing Act.”
Benefits, pay, and other qualms
Benefits and pay were also criticized by real estate professionals, with 31 percent claiming health care is too expensive and 10 percent admitting they don’t have insurance. With 85 percent of all real estate agents paid through commissions, according to the poll, about 7 percent of the respondents said they wished they were better compensated.
Others complained of poorly conceived recruitment quotas and an uptick in unqualified or unprofessional agents.
“Signing people because they have a pulse to meet signing quotas irrelevant of their qualifications,” griped one Minneapolis Realtor, when asked in the survey how local leaders could improve. “Keeping unprofessional agents on board because they are high producers.”
Recruitment-based brokerage models were cited as particularly problematic by Chip Steinmetz, a Re/Max broker-owner in Virginia, who said companies like Coldwell Banker and Keller Williams that offer agents compensation for recruiting new agents are a disservice to clients.
Seinmetz claims that sales agents may not have their clients’ best interests at heart if their priority is to recruit the buyer’s agent as a new potential colleague.
“Is there a conflict of interest here? Nope,” Steinmetz told Inman News in February. “According to all the laws, all the regulations, the NAR code of ethics, there is no conflict, and there is no disclosure requirement. But if your client, the homeowner, were to find out after the house closes that I went to XYZ Realty and that you just capitulated on $5,000 worth of home inspection issues and didn’t push back, could somebody reasonably assume that the recruiting activity played a part in that decision? I think it’s all in the eyes of the beholder.”
Email Jotham Sederstrom
The essential guide for leadership on sexual harassment and gender
This is one part of Inman’s five-part Essential Guide for Real Estate Leadership, which we are publishing throughout our first-ever Leadership Week. Read all the parts here. Please send your feedback to leadership@sandbox.inman.com. If you’re a leader who wants to join us for our exclusive Disconnect in The Desert event on March 26-28, or want to recommend a colleague, send a note to brad@sandbox.inman.com explaining why.
The allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct by senior leadership, lobbed against brokerages large and small from Washington state to the District of Columbia, stand in stark contrast to otherwise mostly positive depictions of real estate leadership nationwide. But it’s there — laid out bluntly in Inman’s first ever Real Estate Leadership Survey of more than 780 real estate professionals.
Stories of inappropriate behavior by leaders
“Constant partying and drinking,” one marketing professional in Orlando, Florida, claimed, referring to senior executives at her company. “Affairs with younger staff, who they fire when they become a problem for them. Refusing to accept responsibility for anything. Delusions of grandeur. Inappropriate use of office and corporate equipment. Wasting vast amounts of money on entertaining themselves.”
“[He] comments on my leather pants,” yet another Realtor, who is based in Long Island, New York, alleged, describing a senior executive at her residential brokerage firm. “[He] asks me who I would fuck in the office…. and so on. [He] interrogates people to get it out in a friendly way.”
“There is a culture of sexual harassment with our management,” a Seattle-based agent added.
The comments, tucked inside Inman’s wide-ranging, 61-question leadership survey and often submitted anonymously, were posted by a minority of real estate professionals who believe that sexual harassment and bad behavior run rampant in an industry led largely by older men.
Set against the wider, women-led #MeToo movement against sexual harassment and misconduct, brought on in the aftermath of dozens of allegations of sexual assault leveled against movie producer Harvey Weinstein, the claims against top-level real estate executives are unsubstantiated for now, but aren’t so easy to ignore nor explain.
But most say leaders act appropriately
Asked if leaders within their companies engage in inappropriate behavior, only 7.9 percent said “yes,” with a whopping 88.2 percent voiced a resounding “no.” Another 10 percent said they were “unsure” if senior executives engaged in bad behavior, according to results of the survey.
Meanwhile, 76.8 percent of real estate professionals characterized their company’s position on sexual harassment as “fine as it is.” Another 4.7 percent said company policy was “not strict enough” and, somewhat curiously, a little under 1 percent said their policy was “too strict.”
“This is an old-school industry,” wrote one marketing associate for a lender in Washington. “It’s a boys club. Us women have to play the game, be like one of the boys, to succeed.”
Women remain scarce in leadership
The conversation comes as a renewed effort to elevate women in leadership positions is gaining momentum from initiatives like the California Association of Realtors’ Women Up campaign, which aims to lift women into the highest echelons of the real estate industry.
In states like California, where only 14 of the top 100 brokerages are owned by women, the lack of diversity is conspicuous. But across national franchises, too, the numbers are problematic.
Between 2011 and 2015, the most recent year in which comprehensive industrywide numbers are available, executive leadership positions among women remained unchanged at 26 percent nationwide, according to Real Trends, the Colorado-based real estate consulting firm.
Globally, the number of senior level positions held by women stands at 10 percent, according to a report release in October by Preqin, an alternative assets data provider headquartered in Manhattan and London. The report, “Women in Alternative Assets,” also found that, globally, only 5 percent of CEO positions in real estate are held by women and only 5 percent of presidential positions are held by women. At 18 percent each, the executive leadership positions most widely held by women are “chief financial officer” and “general manager.”
Chart showing women in top-level positions in various industries around the world. Credit: Prequin
“We actually see real estate firms doing slightly better than, say, hedge funds in getting more women through the door and working in those companies,” said Amy Bensted, head of hedge fund products at Preqin, who co-authored the 2017 report. “We see higher levels of C-level representation. But the real picture is that females are still grossly under represented within the alternative asset world and there’s no real parity in terms of 50-50 split. What you are seeing is that these firms are actually doing better at getting women through the doors in junior levels.”
Other respondents to Inman’s survey echoed the sentiment that they would like to see more women in leadership positions.
“The leaders are all men,” one female-identified respondent wrote in from a leading real estate franchise Iowa. “They have one female broker, but she’s not an owner and I’ve never heard a word from her at company meetings. And, some of the men are silly when it comes to women–one broker wanted to “protect the ladies boobies” and have a mammogram truck visit the office. While the sentiment is there, let’s be more grown up about it. And I would question if that’s what women actually want from their broker. So, they could incorporate more women . They could listen more. And, if they could put their egos away, that would be great.”
Reasons for hope and celebration
In the Inman survey, 55.4 percent of respondents reported that leadership at their company was “very committed to diversity,” and another 30.5 percent said it was “somewhat committed to diversity” in the workplace. Only 3.7 percent claimed executives weren’t committed at all.
For Kathy Fowler, an Oklahoma City broker associate with Coldwell Banker Select who previously worked in the insurance industry, her transition into real estate was a breath of fresh air — especially with regards to equal footing among her male and female colleagues.
“I was with an independent agent that wrote a lot of commercial and oil and gas insurance, and the females in that industry were expected to be the secretaries and the customer service reps and take care of everything,” said Fowler, who also serves as president of the Oklahoma Association of Realtors. “And then the guys went out and wined and dined all the clients.”
“In real estate,” she added, “I can wine and dine just as much as my male counterparts.”
Email Jotham Sederstrom
The tech real estate leaders should be using
This is one part of Inman’s five-part Essential Guide for Real Estate Leadership, which we are publishing throughout our first-ever Leadership Week. Read all the parts here. Please send your feedback to leadership@sandbox.inman.com. If you’re a leader who wants to join us for our exclusive Disconnect in The Desert event on March 26-28, or want to recommend a colleague, send a note to brad@sandbox.inman.com explaining why.
In Texas, one Coldwell Banker franchise has shifted nearly all of its $150,000 marketing budget from newspaper advertising to social media while retaining a sizable expenditure for staging open houses — an old-school move they still believe to be invaluable for generating business.
At another Coldwell branch in Oklahoma, a top-producing octogenarian couple have thrived as sales agents, in part by embracing the company’s Customer Relationship Management tools despite having no computer at home, and refusing to let go of that aging relic: the fax machine.
“What fascinates me personally the most about technology is that we’ve got these tech tools that automate things for our lives, but at the same time it still comes back to the relationships and relationship-building and keeping in contact with the other humans,” said Kathy Fowler, an Oklahoma City broker associate with Coldwell Banker Select, who said her octogenarian colleagues have succeeded through a savvy combination of sales skills both old and new.
From the Midwest to the coasts, in fact, real estate professionals are successfully integrating new technology with traditional sales strategies — even as they call on leaders to more quickly embrace cutting-edge digital platforms, apps and lead generation tools to stay competitive. These and more fascinating results emerged from Inman’s inaugural Real Estate Leadership Survey of 787 industry professionals, conducted online in February 2018.
What leaders understand about tech, and what they don’t
One thing that was apparent: despite some of the aforementioned examples of how pros are incorporating new technology, leaders have room for improvement.
A total of 39 percent of respondents to Inman’s survey said the leadership within their companies is “very techie,” while another 46 percent reported that top executives are “somewhat techie.” At the same time, 36 percent worried that not adapting quickly to new technology, or a lack of technology altogether, are twin elephants in the room that executives are consistently failing to address.
Among the trends most widely embraced by senior executives, social media, digital marketing and lead generation tools are the most prevalent, while more sophisticated innovations — like artificial intelligence, augmented reality and virtual assistants — have yet to take hold despite scattered interest from rank-and-file real estate agents, according to the survey.
However, Google Apps, advanced Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, and drones were also relatively highly-adopted categories.
But not everyone in the rank-and-file is thrilled with such a wide embrace of technology, according to the poll. Many agents reported lackluster products and long-term contracts, not to mention a flash-in-the-pan lifecycle for some tools that fall out of favor at lightning speeds.
“Adopting poor technology and then being tied into a long-term contract compounding the poor decision,” a Tahoe City, California, Realtor wrote, balking at questionable tech purchases.
“Jumping around to the ‘next best thing,’” added a Virginia-based listing agent, citing a gripe among colleagues. “Too many tools and too little intensive instruction on how to use them.”
The value of focus
When it came to technology that leaders should be using more of, respondents to Inman’s survey were split. Over 24 percent of respondents said they would like to see more use of CRM software. The next highest category of votes was “none of the above,” at over 23 percent, followed by artificial intelligence and virtual assistants, at over 21 percent (which should bode well for Keller Williams’ recent tack).
Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, cryptocurrency — which has gotten a lot of buzz in the media (including at Inman) and among the startup community–was one area of technology that most respondents did not want to see their leaders using more of. Just over 8 percent of respondents said they wanted to see leaders using more cryptocurrencies (only the category of “email” received fewer votes).
Jake Breen, an associate broker at Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Utah Properties, said a common misstep among real estate firms is the tendency to spread resources across multiple trends and platforms, rather than focusing on one strategy and executing it with precision.
For years, his team has honed in on high-definition video, regularly producing tours, testimonials and market reports from an in-house studio with the help of a dedicated tech expert, and publishing the content across multiple platforms, he told Inman News late last month. He spends under an hour a day on the origination of data and content for his team’s daily videos.
The strategy for real estate leadership, he said, should be to identify the technology that best positions the company’s message in front of the consumer — and to hell with the rest of it.
“There’s so much noise out there,” said Breen, who serves as a broker advisor for REthink, a millennial think tank formed by Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices in 2013. “Leaders need to choose one or two of the top things that they know are working, or that they’ve seen work for other brokerages, and go all in. There’s so much noise out there. Do one, and do it really well.”
Email Jotham Sederstrom
The social causes leaders should rally behind
This is one part of Inman’s five-part Essential Guide for Real Estate Leadership, which we are publishing throughout our first-ever Leadership Week. Read all the parts here. Please send your feedback to leadership@sandbox.inman.com. If you’re a leader who wants to join us for our exclusive Disconnect in The Desert event on March 26-28, or want to recommend a colleague, send a note to brad@sandbox.inman.com explaining why.
Lean into social causes, including disaster relief — but keep your political views to yourself.
In a political climate fraught with anxiety over issues ranging from gun control to civil rights, that’s the complicated, albeit conflicted, message to real estate leaders from the 787 industry professionals who responded to Inman’s inaugural Leadership in Real Estate survey during a 10-day period in February.
Speak softly but carry a big stick
Nearly 60 percent of responding real estate professionals believe leadership within their companies should support social causes.
They believe the biggest social and economic issues affecting the real estate industry right now are gentrification and affordable housing (40 percent), tax reform (37 percent), government regulations (36 percent), affordable health care (36 percent), untruthful mass media/internet rumors (34 percent) and Realtor/agent safety (26 percent).
Yet, somewhat contradictorily, 66.5 percent also believe that it’s unacceptable for their C-level superiors to bring up political, religious or social stances in the workplace or while conducting day-to-day business, according to the Inman survey.
“Like our nation, our brokerage is polarized,” wrote one Texas sales associate with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, who said leadership at her company should neither endorse political candidates or raise social issues, religious views or political beliefs in public or during work.
Among the real estate respondents, 60 percent said it was either “very important” or “somewhat important” that company leaders reflect the social issues they care about, while about 52 percent said they believe that their employers share their political views. About 13 percent, meanwhile, said it was “not important at all” that their bosses shared their views.
However, a majority of 51 percent of the respondents said real estate leaders should never endorse political candidates, compared to 28 percent who countered that they should endorse them and another 21 percent who said they were “unsure,” according to the survey.
“I don’t believe that our leadership team should assert their values on us,” said one Southern California-based Realtor, who said that industry associations should actively make donations to political candidates and causes. “But, there should be an environment of open discussion.”
Helping after disasters
There was some broad unity to be found among Inman’s Leadership Survey respondents, especially with regards to assistance in the wake of natural disasters.
An overwhelming majority voiced support for philanthropical work and causes meant to “improve society,” including aid for natural disasters such as wildfires that broke out across California in December and hurricanes last summer in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico. To be sure, about 60 percent of real estate professionals nationwide said their company leadership had offered aid or assistance in response to a natural disaster, while only about 11 percent claimed their employers had donated nothing to victims of natural disasters.
In August and September, when Hurricane Harvey tore through the Gulf Coast, Katie Ruffino and her colleagues at Coldwell Banker Ag-Town Realtors in College Station, Texas, used a company moving van to haul diapers and dog food to those hardest hit in Houston and elsewhere. And when members of the Coast Guard and Navy were stranded at the height of the storm, Ruffino, the lead buyer’s agent for the brokerage, helped feed some 400 of the men.
“They were hubbed here, and they were sent with no food, no anything, and so the Realtors here started a whole sign-up,” recalled Ruffino, who told Inman News that her team sold about 200 residential units last year. “At one point there were 400 guys from Arkansas that came over actually to help us, and we fed them breakfast, lunch and dinner for three weeks.”
“They were saving lives,” she added. “Of course we were going to help.”
What leaders need to weigh
The debate over politics comes as some of the industry’s most visible leaders publicly wrestle with the pros and cons of taking a political stance in a deeply divided country. In January at Inman Connect NYC 2018, Robert Reffkin, the outspoken Compass CEO, and Glenn Kelman, the CEO of publicly traded Redfin, weighed in on the benefits and drawbacks of speaking out politically.
Kelman said that beyond the threat to Redfin’s bottom line, speaking out on social causes runs the risk of alienating employees. Nonetheless, he and fellow Redfin executive level felt the need on multiple occasions to speak out in the age of Trump — once on immigration-related matters following a temporary travel ban last year, and another time, in a private letter, to then-North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory following the enactment of the state’s so-called bathroom ban.
“I just have to ask myself, I have to remember, there are employees at Redfin who voted for Donald Trump, there are employees who voted for Hillary Clinton, and they all have helped build the platform that I stand on,” Kelman said at the Inman Connect conference in January. ”And if I use that platform to espouse opinions that they don’t support, what am I doing?”
Email Jotham Sederstrom
Next up, Inman has gathered a collection of nearly 200 real estate leaders in Palm Springs, California, on March 26-28 for our Disconnect in the Desert event, where they will draft a new Manifesto for Change in Real Estate — a path forward for the industry and those to whom they are responsible: their employees, their clients, and all of us who believe in the American dream of homeownership.
We will publish the Manifesto for Change later this Spring, and invite all of our readers to continue in the conversation by emailing us at leadership@sandbox.inman.com
