How is real estate marketing changing? The traditional bricks-and-mortar real estate brokerage is hemorrhaging, and all that keeps this archaic business model alive is consolidations. As offices close, some agents quit, but the survivors move their licenses to another sinking ship, a ship that looks just like the last one and often with the exact same name on the bow. The changes in real estate marketing are dramatic. According to the NAR, we’ve lost 300,000 agents nationwide since 2006, and one NAR spokesman suggested we need to drop from 1.1 million agents to 750,000. This past week two more offices closed in my small market, and the press is not writing about these closures. But this is happening all over the country–it’s just not front page news . . . for anyone who still reads the front page.
These changes in real estate marketing are killing traditional business models. Bricks-and-mortar real estate brokerages that stubbornly refuse to bridge the gap to an entirely new business model will die a slow and painful death. It’s one thing for brokers to ride their own ship down, but it is quite another thing altogether for those brokers to sell tickets to real estate agents with promises they can’t keep.
The most unfortunate thing about all of this is that the agents who think they are doing what it takes to survive are only re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Many of them truly do not know or comprehend how Read more