Few and far between are the real estate agents who could walk into their brokerage’s weekly sales meeting and be mistaken for their female colleague – while wearing a bright orange men’s blazer and khaki slacks.
But of course, anything’s possible when your weekly sales meeting is taking place in a virtual reality auditorium, where participants are identified by having their names floating over their customized avatars.
Just another Friday morning at eXp Realty, an online “cloud brokerage” that’s a little bit different from most. Launched by Texas-based broker Glen Sanford in October 2009, the firm has rapidly expanded, adding agents in 28 states over the past four years. The company went public this fall, and is currently working on expanding its presence overseas; it already counts agents in Ontario, Canada among its ranks.
The firm has no brick and mortar office, though it does provide free access to flex offices spaces in the states it operates in for agents to host client meetings. Otherwise, all work is done online, through the company suite of cloud computing applications, which includes mobile apps, websites, and client relationship management software and document signing applications.
The real estate crash itself was eXp’s inspiration, Jason Gesing, eXp’s president, told Banker & Tradesman. Sanford had a tech background and had been successful at applying his knowledge to generate online leads when he launched his real estate career. By 2008, he was operating his own brick-and-mortar brokerage, with offices in several states. But the crash forced him to close two offices and cut costs to the bone.
So he “sat down and said, ‘you know, we really need to radically change the way we do business, because the costs of doing business aren’t going down, but the revenues are going down.’ Sellers can’t sell, buyers can’t buy. And [I felt that] the technology exists now where you can have all the interaction and engagement of a traditional model but without all the expense,” said Gesing.
The virtual sales meetings are a part of that. Agents log in to a special website and select an avatar, much the way a person playing a video-game selects a player-character. The agent can then enter various meeting rooms, where they can look around in a 3D setting, mingling with the avatars of the other participants. Slides and notes can be projected onto virtual “screens” within the room, and headsets allow for speakers to be heard by everyone.
Getting To Know You
Glitches aside – turns out the mis-identified agent at the sales meeting had accidentally used the wrong login – the technology allows agents to mingle and get to know one another even while sitting at desks thousands of miles away.
“This whole idea of adopting an avatar, going into a conference table that was on your screen and feeling like you’re in the room with them, that was a little bit radical,” said Gesing. “And it was something that I think I could sort of get behind.”
The promise of the tech was enough to tempt Gesing to leave his private practice as an attorney in Boston to join eXp in 2010. “Brick-and-mortar in real estate, it’s of diminishing utility, because of the way the consumer now searches for properties. The tools at the disposal of agents give them more mobility. And that really resonated with me, because [as an attorney] you sit in an office all day and clients, you know, they may come in for a deposition, but really not all that frequently, and the expense of it was enormous. It made me wonder if there was a leaner way to do it.”
It’s also been a draw for experienced agents. In addition to the lower-fee cost structure enabled because of the reduced overhead, the firm offers revenue-sharing incentives, so that successful agents who recruit successful agents to eXp are rewarded.
The group’s low-overhead model and rapid growth is beginning to attract industry attention. In 2011, they were named a finalist for the “Most Innovative Brokerage Award” by Inman, and the well-regarded industry analyst Stefan Swanepoel highlighted the firm as an example of a successful model for the future of brokerages in his 2013 industry trends report.
“I think with this company, for me anyway, there’s always been a feeling that you’re doing something a little bit more meaningful than just the business of real estate. You’re changing the way in which a service industry can be conducted,” said Gesing.
Email: csullivan@thewarrengroup.com
