To Hell and Back
Last week’s Inman Connect conference in San Francisco (which I followed online but did not attend) focused on the twin topics of technology and disruption. The conference, as always, presented articulate speakers and interviewees with a broad range of ideas. While everyone was able to agree that the industry has changed profoundly during the past 15 years, there is less agreement about what that portends for the future. In the high value, high complexity New York market, we at Warburg believe that means seeing technology as an agent tool rather than an agent replacement. Although in today’s business environment concepts like “efficiency”, “disruption”, and “workforce capital” hold sway, we believe that the role of our agents as trusted advisors remains critical. We aren’t robots. In a world of actual people, where how we feel matters (and nowhere more than in the world of residential real estate) other priorities continue to resonate for consumers. As my daughter, the smartest person in the room and a BIG proponent of technology, says, ”The problem with technologists is that they tend to believe that technology is the solution to every problem.”
That said, technology does provide many (here I go) “efficiencies”. In the 1980s, we kept all of our listing information on index cards, which were arranged by address in little metal drawers. We would jostle each other as we gathered in the listing area pulling out those little drawers, flipping through the index cards and jotting down addresses, names, and phone numbers so we could each return to our desk and make phone calls to set up appointments. As our purview has expanded, embracing ever greater swaths of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens, that system would be impossible. Yet we thrived with it only 35 years ago.
The pace of world-redefining change accelerates every year. Today technology enables consumers’ ability to search for property quickly and efficiently, agents’ ability to create comparable sales reports and market analyses, and to maintain client connection in myriad ways with a few keystrokes. Yet my career history is replete with buyers who would never have found the fabulous places they now call home with online searches alone. They live where they live now because I heard the subtext within their descriptions of what they wanted in a place to live, sometimes a subtext they could not even hear themselves. So I was the one to say “I know this is not what you described but I think you will love it” and coerce them into a cab (yes, I still take cabs in New York, not Uber or Lyft) to whisk them off to a different location or property size or configuration, which I intuited would bring them the excitement that had eluded them in the properties we had already seen.
Things change. Mostly that’s good. But in my experience the most effective change tends to be accretive rather than disruptive. Disruptive change tends to be followed by some reversion to the mean (look at the return of the travel agent.) Accretive change builds on what has gone before it, enabling us to see and solve a problem in a better way. The danger lurks in the desire to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In the residential real estate business, there’s no app for intuition, experience, or emotional support. Those remain (at least for now) uniquely human attributes.
Life is messy. Feelings cloud our ability to decide issues rationally. We still need guides through the unfamiliar as much as Dante did when Virgil escorted him through the circles of Hell and the heights of Paradise in “The Divine Comedy.” While I make no claim to being Virgil, I do believe we agents continue to have an important role in real estate transactions, precisely because we are not apps, with or without fuzzy logic! At least for now, there’s no disintermediating the qualities actual humans bring to the real estate table.