Business owners everywhere are pinching pennies so hard they’re in danger of squirting copper all over their desks. Real estate is no exception.

But with long term trends driving more buyers online, some brokers are looking to cut overhead by reducing office space – or eliminating offices altogether.

Already, more than 80 percent of homebuyers start their search online, according to research from the National Association of Realtors, that means they’re looking at more neighborhoods, requiring brokers to be more mobile.

“In my market, first time buyers are younger buyers. If they’re looking in the South End, they’re also looking in Jamaica Plain, Brookline, Somerville,” and other metro-Boston locations, said Kathleeen Alexander, a Keller Williams agent based in Boston’s Back Bay.

Keller Williams has responded by offering the agents the option of not having a desk, saving on space.

“We have [about] 100 agents. I would say less than 20 take a desk,” Alexander says.

Industry analysts like Nicolai Kolding, partner at Colorado-based Murray Consulting and former COO of Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, are preaching the gospel of occupancy cuts. Kolding suggests that in order to stay profitable, brokers need to reduce space to less than 2,000 square feet per office, or less than 50 square feet per agent. Current averages are closer to 100 square feet per agent, Kolding said.

Commission splits, advertising, salaries for support staff, and rent are some of the biggest expenses brokers face.

“At the time the market started turning down in late 2006 and 2007, brokers were probably fairly quick to cut costs with print advertising, then started moving to personnel in some cases, but [rent] is really that next frontier, that some have started to tackle, and some haven’t,” Kolding told Banker & Tradesman.

Local giant RE/MAX is paying attention. The firm’s recently announced deal with supermarket chain Stop & Shop will put miniature, 250-square-foot RE/MAX offices inside the stores.

The non-traditional set up will provide a well-trafficked, instantly recognized meeting spot for agents and clients – and franchise fees will be about 30 percent less than they would be for a traditional RE/MAX location, according to Jay Hummer, executive vice president of RE/MAX of New England.

Small, Or Not At All

But some brokers are taking the initiative to downsize even farther – to nearly nothing at all.

“A consumer doesn’t know where an agent is [based], and doesn’t care,” said Fred Doleac, broker/owner of Virtual Homes Real Estate.

Doleac operated a RE/MAX-affiliated brokerage in New Hampshire for 20 years before breaking away last year to launch Virtual Homes. Aside from a head office in New Hampshire which acts as an administrative base for record-keeping, the firm no longer has any physical locations.

But it does have more 50 agents in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and is currently hiring in Connecticut.

“We can scale very quickly because the technology is already built,” without having to worry about finding and negotiating for bricks-and-mortar office space, said Doleac.

He’s looking to expand to 150 agents in the next eight months, and licensed every New England state but Vermont.

Doleac relies on coffee shops and the properties themselves for client meetings, and occasional hotel conference rooms when necessary to meet with his agents in the field for training.

Share And Share Alike

But moving to a virtual office doesn’t mean entirely abandoning traditional office features.

Shared office spaces, locations which provide reception, call forwarding, Internet hookups and office supplies, can help paper over the gap between brick-and-mortar and purely Web-based brokerages.

Adam Bailey, broker/owner of Boston’s Next Level Realty, another virtual brokerage launched in January, relies on international shared office firm Regus for his services. Regus has dozens of locations in New England, and hundreds across the world.

By incorporating some of that shared space, Bailey said, he was able to reassure more traditional agents he was aiming to recruit, at a cost of “10 percent of what it normally would [cost] to have offices in all those locations.”

That’s important, because virtual brokerages work best with independent-minded agents who are adept at generating their own leads.

“The facts of the industry are that 20 percent of the agents do 80 percent of the business, and those [agents] generate 80 to 90 percent of their own business, even when they work for the major brands, like RE/MAX or Century 21 or anything like that,” Bailey said. By eliminating occupancy costs, he’s able to offer up to 100 percent commission splits to entice agents, while still remaining profitable.

One hundred percent splits might raise some brokers eyebrows. But Bailey says that with the Web wiping out the traditional model, “I didn’t want to pay [my former brokerage] $5,000 to $10,000 a month in franchise fees when they’re not really going in the direction that I saw the industry going in.”