Driving Management Collaboration

As the industry continues though its winter and spring conference season a number of evolving concepts have become increasingly clear. For those who have been tracking industry acceptance of change and adaptation, it would appear that a point of universal acceptance has finally been reached relative to the fact that the traditional brokerage business model is neither functional in today's real estate industry and market environment nor appropriate in terms of profitability and return on investment.

With very few exceptions the coaching, presentations, articles, blog posts and editorials delivering this enlightenment have carried the message that, moving forward, brokerage management will have to be a matter of neutralizing agent centricity, focusing on customer experiences and installing metrics driven management practices that are surrounded by and driven through standards, best practices, accountability and organizational transparency.

Of course, it will come as no surprise that those industry executives who are less than excited about this impending transitional experience (and the prospect of spending the last years of their careers engaged in a total reengineering of their life's work) are reporting to company decision makers that move in these directions will cause massive disruption within the agent panel. What is of even greater concern is that these announcements are, in many cases, not issued to assist top brokerage executives to anticipate danger ahead as much as to ward off the decision itself and allow these veteran and vested managers to skate to retirement. All of which is to say that there is growing evidence that it is senior managers that may be the ultimate impediment to brokerage change rather than the more traditional scapegoat, the agent.