A Latte Experience?

 

Years ago, when technology was just being introduced to the commercial real estate market, much of the heavy lifting was being done by a few top people. Some of these people included, my good friend Jim Young of  RealComm, who is still going strong, Peter Pike who was the founder of PikeNet, Steve Felix,  On The Road and Brad Inman, of  Inman News, whom I had the pleasure of being in some meetings with. Brad came out of the print world and is one of the smartest and most successful people I know when it comes to the convergence of technology and real estate. Albeit, he is in the residential market, which we all have to admit does a lot better job of this than the commercial industry.  That said, to this day I admire and follow his lead on a lot of things. That's why I wanted to refer you to an interview he had earlier this month, Latte Vision, where he talks about making the "process" smooth. Yep, there's the word that got me - process.  In the interview he talks about how the residential real estate transaction should be as smooth as getting an espresso expertly pulled by a well-trained barista.  It was music to my ears and it should be music to yours.  If you take a minute to read the article, you'll see that he talks about the fact that a real estate transaction shouldn't be painful.  Of course he's right. We just have to all be tired enough of the pain to do something about it.

  

I know we're making progress, because as I started to think about this article I looked back to my notes from nearly 10 years ago talking about collaboration and sharing of documents and having the transparency amongst all the players that it takes to close a real estate deal.  There was much confusion and a lot of eye rolling.  Fast forward to today, where because somebody (in a marketing department, of course) ingeniously decided to call collaboration "working in the cloud", there's a good healthy curiosity about actually making that happen.  There are more companies like mine out there working hard to provide both the platform and the education so we can stand beside some of the best in the residential industry.  While it's generally argued the commercial real estate transaction is way too complicated and that's why we are behind, I'm really not buying that anymore.

  

So what are the barriers to making this happen?  You tell me.  I know it's not that everybody is making so much money that it just doesn't matter;  if there was ever a time that the economics of the deal would have forced our industry to explore how to make the process less time consuming and therefore costly, it would've been in the past few years.  So I ask again, why is it?  Why is it that our industry seems to still be mastering some of the most basic options for collaboration? This option tends to primarily mean people are using Outlook to schedule meetings with one another.  Although I do feel that there's more going on in the social media side of things in our industry, frankly there's a much bigger, better, measurable return if we did true collaboration.  But maybe I'm too close to it. Is there need for a "transaction coordination service" complete with people who can make the process run smoothly, or is that just a layer of cost that the market doesn't place value on?  Maybe you, my delightful readers, can give me some insight.  Maybe you will take a few minutes and check out some of the exciting things that are happening not only through Inman News, but in the residential industry in general. Maybe this will make you feel the need to help push us commercial real estate people down a path of collaboration too.  

 

Come join our discussion on our blog or I welcome your feedback through email.