In this edition of RealTrending, Steve Murray, senior advisor to RealTrends, shares his thoughts on the way artificial intelligence is impacting recruiting, how consumer choices are changing real estate brokerage competition and observations from brokerage leaders on the market.
Here is a small preview of today’s RealTrending interview. The transcript below has been lightly edited for length and clarity:
Artificial Intelligence: We have tools that will alert an agent as to which people in their database are more likely to buy or sell. Not only that, but some of these tools will examine an agent’s database of customers and alert them that they lost a purchase or sale of a home — to people who are in their database — because they forgot to stay in touch. For brokerage companies, tools that help identify prospective agents and pinpoint which agents a brokerage is likely to lose are coming on the market. This is moneyball for real estate.
Consumer choices: Certainly, over the last few years, we noted the rise of iBuyers — Zillow, Redfin, Offerpad, Opendoor and others — not to mention dozens of major brokerage companies or large teams offering some kind of iBuyer program. That gives incredible new advantages for consumer choices. because they have more choices of how to sell homes. That means brokerage competition is coming from many different sources.
Brokerage leader insights: Not a single CEO that we talked with is taking this market for granted. The truth is, unit sales on an annualized basis have already slowed down from where they were three months ago. Now, they’re still above last year, and we’re still going to have an increase in unit sales this year from all viewpoints, but brokers understand this has been a surge. The economics have been extremely favorable to brokerage companies over the last 12 months. But brokers are getting prepared for when this market slows because of affordability and lack of inventory, and rising mortgage rates. Don’t make the mistake of assuming this market will go on forever.