Inman Connect San Francisco 2009 epitomized the current deconstructivist nature of the real estate industry.

Deconstructivism in contemporary architecture stands in opposition to the ordered rationality of Modernism...One example of deconstructivist complexity is Frank Gehry's Vitra Design Museum in Weil-am-Rhein, which takes the typical unadorned white cube of modernist art galleries and deconstructs it, using geometries reminiscent of cubism and abstract expressionism.

Real estate data and content in the form of IDX, blogs, etc. is fragmentized and atomized. Client relationships are similarly situated when considering the many different ways real estate professionals can interact and communicate with clients in a Web 2.0 world. Further, in the midst of this rapidly changing client relationship matrix, one could legitimately argue that the recent financial crisis essentially shattered any lingering "modernist" real estate practices regarding branding and client engagement.

Connect SF 2009 was a crucible in this regard.

Throughout the conference there was a steady stream of collaboration, interactivity, and collegiality (obviously juxtaposed against thinking of ways to outshine your competition). The conference sessions were geared to get one's idea juices flowing by showcasing best practices and incenting open dialogue. Some of the sessions that peeked my interest included:

  • Building a Brand that Matters, which was delivered by Zappos COO Alfred Lin
  • Broker/Owner Breakout: Start on the Road to Reinvention, which was three hours of sessions moderated by 1000Watt Consulting focusing on issues brokers/owners face regarding branding, technology, and normative changes with respect to client relationships
  • Blogging by Numbers: How to Measure, Analyze and Optimize Your Social Media Plan, which was a fascinating discussion about the critical role metrics plays in driving effective social media marketing strategies
  • Ruby on Real Estate: How to Apply Agile Development Principles to Your Project, which discussed iterative product development principles and the competitive advantages related thereto

These sessions tackled issues of fragmentation and client relationship management while giving clues on how to answer certain fundamental questions:

  • Who owns the client relationship? (for that matter, can anyone own the client relationship?)
  • What is the "brokerage of the future"?
  • What is the nexus between brand and culture and how does one instill this in development teams, agents, and clients?

Controlling or "owning" the client relationship is command-and-control-like terminology that implies that one views a client or potential client as an automaton, willingly being fed with CRM claptrap—a decidedly modernist or even baroque approach to branding. A deconstructivist-like approach to engaging clients as partners was displayed in the Broker/Owner Breakout series. This series began with a substantive critique of the Carpenter Real Estate website (willingly facilitated by Ryan Carrell of Carpenter, with participation by me on the first panel).

The gist of this initial session was that client engagement begins with a well-architected site that's been designed to facilitate client interaction where the brokerage recognizes a website visitor as a guest with all that implies, including responsiveness, easy-to-discern navigation, and clear calls to action; all cogently linked together to facilitate engagement and information delivery while minimizing frustration and uncertainty. In this way the "client relationship" is not so much "managed" as it is "facilitated." It's the job of a brokerage website to facilitate interaction, dialogue, and client-to-agent engagement. In this way a broker creates a situation that satiates visitors' needs and, thus, lays the groundwork for a positive brand impression. Under this rubric the client owns the client relationship.

This deconstructivist meme continued with the concept of the brokerage of the future. In my mind there were two key take-aways on this issue: (1) define and live your company and brand ethos, and (2) facilitate creative knowledge environments.

The former concept was embodied by a keynote address by Zappos COO Alfred Lin. Zappos has addressed this topic many times before. The most important concept from Lin's presentation: clients (and potential clients) will not remember what you do so much as they'll remember how you make them feel. Thus, a brokerage should instill and reinforce a cultural meme in all aspects of their brokerage, from training, to intra-company agent relations, to supporting their agents in terms of infrastructure and "agent concierge" services, etc, with an aim towards facilitating an exceptional experience for clients and potential clients.

At Zappos they begin to instill their cultural norms through a hiring/training process that seeks to ensure that any employee is truly committed to the Zappos culture. For example, close to midway through the hiring process Zappos will offer $2,000 in cash for a prospective employee to walk away. And any new hire at any salary grade level is trained in the core elements of Zappos, such as working in a call center or fulfillment center. This is important to Zappos because their brand is centered on superior service and the client experience. Accordingly, following Zappos’ lead, the brokerage of the future should focus on instituting a vetting process that allows them to hire and retain the most qualified agents that commit to maximizing the client experience which in turn reinforces the overall brokerage brand.

With regards to internal agent relationships, brokerages should focus on enhancing the skills that best embody their agents and ensure that they're empowering those as opposed to hindering them. In the case of @Properties, which participated in this session series, they support their agents through a variety of agent concierge services spanning from one-on-one coaching to full-service marketing. According to the panel discussion, their culture is about minimizing the routine, mundane, and administrative aspects of agency. Theoretically, this should focus their agents' time and efforts on where it matters most: the client experience.

Client-centered culture also starts with fundamental shifts in terms of team structure. This meme was also touched on by Zappos' Lin but really reinforced in the Ruby on Real Estate session focusing on agile software development. At the heart of both the Zappos and agile development presentations is the concept of fostering, or nurturing, creative knowledge environments within one's brokerage, especially regarding the alignment of marketing and IT teams.

The core concept centers around hiring smart people, creating small teams with mutually exclusive skill sets (i.e., combining business development, marketing, IT, and operations), setting these teams with attainable short-term goals that roll-up to a longer term goal (e.g., increasing company dollar by n% over the next 18 months), allowing these small teams to figure out the process of attaining this goal by dissecting it into smaller goals, and creating an execution plan in which both the executive team and the agile team have signed-off on and are accountable to fulfill. This process favors iterative development and roll-out which allows teams to sync product/service development lifecycles with the pulse of quickly changing markets rather than getting bogged down in long-term goals that when realized are immediately outdated. And as was alluded to in the Blogging by Numbers session, the use of metrics allows one to “scientifically” analyze the market pulse and, thus, make more informed marketing—especially social media marketing—decisions that play to this pulse based on grounded business intelligence.

In summary, just as Frank Gehry uses the same or similar materials as other architects to construct his works of art it takes vision and a commitment to ideals to create and sustain a revolutionary yet effective strategy that meets your constituency's needs. Gehry takes elemental components--wood, steel, stone--and makes something extraordinary, it's pure deconstructivist art with a utilitarian component. Vook, which was profiled during Brad Inman's opening speech, is doing something similar. In the same vein, brokerages and agents have the opportunity to follow a Gehry-esque mode and create something revolutionary and unique in terms of client experience. Future innovation and true client-centered leaps forward will be embodied by the convergence and unique assemblage of the elemental parts of products, services, technology, and culture. And Connect SF 2009 provided a forward-looking view of what is to come.

Related post: Many Industries Want to Follow a Zappos Model, Can We?


Posted By: Eric Bryn