I’m attending the Inman Connect conference in New York this week, and so far it’s been interesting, taking the temperature of the industry as it’s in a moment of transition, with some big outside forces set to shake it up. With Trulia and Zillow due to merge in the very near future, and Murdoch’s NewsCorp taking over Realtor.com, the two portal behemoths will be slugging it out for Realtor’s attention — and the industry seems to be sitting on the sidelines for now, pondering whether it should get into the mix.
Overshadowed a bit by Murdoch’s keynote and follow up interview, which occurred right afterward, yesterday’s session actually opened with an interesting interview with Richard Smith, CEO of Realogy. NRT/Realogy is of course the nation’s largest network of broker-centric, brand-name, brick-and-mortar brokerages — but while Smith was fairly bullish on those first two adjectives, he was pretty down on the third.
Pressed on his thoughts about agent-centric, profit sharing brokerage Keller Williams, which has experienced explosive growth in recent years, Smith was dismissive, hinting that he wouldn’t be interested in acquiring it nor did he much fear it as a competitive model. Instead, he seemed most engaged and interested in the over-head reducing possibilities of the tech side of brokerage. Part of the way that NRT successfully weathered the real estate downturn was by consolidating and reducing in size its many brick and mortar offices. Realogy’s most recent acquisition of Zip Realty is a pure technology play, and Smith’s attitude seemed to indicate that he thought incorporating some of the tech that enables Zip to be an online-only brokerage would be key to the future of brands like Coldwell and Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate.
