Bright MLS, which serves over 98,000 real estate professionals in the Mid-Atlantic region, announced the launch of Teams by Bright on Wednesday.
Teams by Bright is a new feature within the existing Bright MLS platform, which Bright says was designed to make it easier for real estate teams to collaborate, build brand recognition and visibility on listings, route workflows, and sales track volume and rankings, all from within the Bright MLS system.
The new feature is currently included as a subscriber benefit, but a premium version of the service is expected to launch in early 2022. The premium version will enable subscribers to set team goals and track productivity.
In a statement, the Bright MLS team said that the idea for the platform came about due to the heightened popularity of real estate teams and the lack of products specifically catered toward them. While the exact number is not known, Bright says that hundreds of teams are currently subscribed to their platform.
“The teams business model has quickly taken hold in the industry, and brokers are leveraging this model to fuel their growth. In response to this growing trend, Bright has focused on this need, and understanding the what, the why and the how around team makeup and management,” Brian Donnellan, Bright MLS president and CEO, said in a statement. “Teams and their brokers need transparency, and Bright is uniquely positioned in the transaction to provide it.”
In our 2021 study on real estate teams, RealTrends found that teams greatly outperformed brokerage firms on profitability. On average, teams retained a gross margin of 61.8%, while the brokerage firms that RealTrends benchmarks, had an average gross margin of 13.8%. The study also found that smaller teams had higher margins than larger teams, but the difference was infinitesimal.
As brokerages like Compass, eXp Realty and Keller Williams continue to grow nationwide, more and more real estate teams are joining their ranks, suggesting that Teams by Bright is launching at a strategic time.