I’m just not a rah-rah guy. The most trouble I was ever in at Nordstrom – it almost got me fired – was my refusal, as a men’s shoe buyer in a suburban Portland mall store, to participate in an Anniversary Sale employee pep-rally-fashion-show, in which the men modeled the women’s apparel and the women modeled the men’s. When the store manager asked me why I wouldn’t want to be a team player, I told him shoe dogs – at 8.75% commission – tend to get much more excited by having enough of the right product to sell than my walking around in a dress; that would be my focus. I was saved by the increase.
So when I heard several weeks ago that Dave Liniger – Chairman and cofounder of RE/MAX International –would be in town for a three hour seminar, with the jingoistic “Be Great in 2008” title, my first thought was “Uh oh.” But I’d read the fabulous Everybody Wins, and think Dave Liniger’s brilliant; one has to be to go from nothing to building one of the most recognized brands in the world. So I and about a thousand others went.
He had me with the opening: “Don’t believe any crap NAR tells you.” That was followed by three hours of substantive (and riveting) advice on how to deal successfully in a real-world down market. I found myself every so often closing my eyes and thinking: he sounds exactly like Russell Shaw.
The number of mentions of Web 2.0 in that three hours: 0.
===
When I left Nordstrom in 1979, starting a 24 year career as a manufacturer’s rep, I drove four NW states, and called on two or three independent shoe stores in every small town. Nordstrom had a shoe buyer in every store; what sold in one didn’t necessarily sell in another only a few miles away. The focus was entirely on the right product, the one customers actually wanted to buy, and I made a good living planting seeds in a few stores, then expanding based on success. We had a four day trade show every six months in Seattle, and I’d stay busy from opening to close. Reps were paid typically 6%, and there were a number – I was never one of them – who made seven figures simply by being with the right company at the right time.
When I stopped four or five years ago, I travelled ten western states, expenses were through the roof, independent stores had virtually disappeared, Nordstrom had gone to regional buying, department stores were consolidating (and closing), and big box discounters were surging. The big volume manufacturers were bringing reps inside as $65k-and-a-car gofers, and taking the money saved to apply to markdown money and guaranteed margins for the retailers. With the same buyer, sitting in San Francisco, buying for stores in Beverly Hills, Dallas and Anchorage as well as San Francisco, guarantees were important. The right product became an afterthought.
Talk about disintermediation! And note it didn’t have anything to do with Web something-dot-something.
Things change!
But here’s another aspect: a few years before I left the business, a number of people were absolutely convinced that the internet was going to supplant brick and mortar shoe stores, this before Amazon had made a profit. But shoe buying is tactile: even now the majority of shoes sold over the net are ones people have already had three pair of, or those seen, felt and tried on in a real store. A few have managed success, but without brick and mortar, internet sales would be non-existent, and they remain a very small percentage of the whole.
But: They don’t always change the way we think they will.
===
I’m in a RE/MAX office with eighty or so other agents, average experience thirteen years. I can count on one hand the number I’ve met I don’t thoroughly respect; otherwise I’ve been lucky enough in my three plus year career to have seventy-five mentors. The office is consistently in the top ten of producing offices in the Portland Metro area, and RE/MAX equity group – 1000 agents – is responsible for about 15% of the area’s real estate volume, double any other broker.
At last count – yesterday – there were roughly: two of us who blog.
There are many things that need (as opposed to desire) to change in the business of real estate, some of which have to do with Web 2.0. Still, I think, the most important because it will cure so much else is the separating of buyer agent and listing agent commissions; in that case Web 2.0 is important only in that it’s the perfect vehicle by which to make the case.
But we get absorbed in our own worlds and think geek vernacular – ‘web 2.0’ – is important to any but a very small group. Everyone in the business I know now has email, has access to the online MLS, has a web site of some kind, can translate and send an EMA in PDF form, and advertises on CraigsList; if I asked any of them ‘Do you know anything about Web 1.0?’ they’d look at me like I was crazy. I think Jeff said earlier, this is something that’s going so seep into the business; no overnight revolution.
That’s not to say that it’s not important. I’m with Mike Farmer: it’s going to happen, but how is yet to be determined. We can talk, cajole, argue and theorize all we want, but it’s the market that will make the ultimate determination.
I do know this: If buying shoes is a tactile experience, buying a home is infinitely more so. Thus the chances of any but an infinitesimal few buying and selling real estate solely on the web, without having visited the property, would be on the order of:
0.
Todd says:
Mr. Kempe,
A well written post, thank you for sharing parts Dave Liniger speech and your reactions.
I would suggest not taking the “pulse” of technology by who uses what in your office, however successful it may be. It’s what tools your customers use that is important. If your customer asks you to send them the URL of the listing you want them to look at via Twitter, and you go “huh?” – that should be your area of focus.
April 11, 2008 — 2:13 pm
Jeff Kempe says:
Thanks, Todd; appreciated. To clarify, after nearly a year, blogging is showing a return. I’ve spent my career responding to customers, and will continue.
However, this…
>I would suggest not taking the “pulse” of technology by who uses what in your office, however successful it may be.
…brings with it a question: If not by success, how, exactly, do you measure the worth of something?
April 11, 2008 — 2:43 pm
Lenore says:
Jeff, great post. I have one client who did buy two properties site unseen, except virtually. She did ok but was screwed by the agent and the lender – put into a sub-prime loan when she had a 790 FICO. I am convinced that this all happened because she wasn’t there in person. You need to see what it is you’re buying if you don’t know who you’re buying from.
Nordstrom was a grand store but really lost that, as you mentioned, when they regionalized in the 1990’s. It’s still one of the better places to shop but not quiet as fine as it once was.
We, as agents, need to give the Nordstrom experience and show our clients why they want us in their corner. I want them to touch me and know that I am the real deal and that I’m there to fight the fight and make sure they get the best deal, and then refer me. That’s what it’s all about.
April 11, 2008 — 2:56 pm
Todd says:
Mr. Kempe, I was not making an evaluation of your office’s success, I am sure everyone there is great. I was trying to stress that new tools will most likely appear from your customers.
So to answer your question, if 8 out of 10 of your customers are all using a given “Web 2.0” ( ugh, I hate that label ) that is the time to adopt it to best serve them.
Sincerely,
Todd
April 11, 2008 — 3:02 pm
Greg Swann says:
FWIW, I think there is way too much false dichotomy on the con side of this debate. Brick ‘n’ mortar shoe stores may be hanging in there, but how much women’s ready-to-wear has gone to catalogs or web sites? Do you know what kind of custom one-off embroidery I can do with a PDF file? Screen printing is entirely digital now — and it’s never looked better.
Imagine a cheap laser pantography closet that provides perfect measurements to one-off shoemakers, dress-makers, glovemakers. Feet different sizes? Missing a toe? No problem. Tactile might matter to other people. What matters to me is get-’em-here-by-Tuesday.
If something like that were to be built — and Land’s End is already doing something like this with on-line avatars — would it put all brick ‘n’ mortar stores out of business. Nope. Just most of them.
Danielle Schoon, with whom Brian and I worked last year, starts every purchasing adventure on the internet. Realtors who cannot be found by Danielle Schoon will never have a chance to do business with her — and she is our future. Does this mean tech-averse Realtors will disappear? No. But they will work their way out of the business one by one — and some, not all, of them will be replaced by much more efficient agents.
April 11, 2008 — 3:19 pm
Bawldguy Talking says:
95% or more of my transactions are for properties never having been physically seen by the buyers.
When folks tell me to send them stuff on Twitter, and they have, I tell them to pick another medium. If they’re all that tech savvy, it’s not a problem. Will I ever be on Twitter? Probably when more than 1 of 50 of our clients are using it.
April 11, 2008 — 3:28 pm
Jeff Kempe says:
Greg, t-shirts aren’t shoes, unless you’re talking flip-flops. Nike’s spent billions on product development, and I still can’t find one to fit me. (And, trust me!, if they could build what you describe, they would.) Feet are unique, lasts are unique, materials are unique, designs are unique, adhesives are unique; all of which have to go through several hundred steps to the finished product. That’s why, even in the most efficient operations, returns average around 35%, hugely expensive when the internet house is paying freight both ways. The successful ones have to put inventory responsibility on the manufacturer.
Brick and mortar in shoes is around for a long, long time…
April 11, 2008 — 3:46 pm
Jeff Kempe says:
Jeff, interesting. I would think even investors would want to view properties they’re buying. Was that true even before the internet?
April 11, 2008 — 3:51 pm
Greg Swann says:
> if they could build what you describe, they would.
Something like what I described — a device of some sort to feed perfect measurements into a one-off manufactory — is inevitable. Mass production is an almost comical solution to the problem of scarcity: We can make impossibly expensive things almost impossibly cheap, but only by flattening out the variations curve. In the age of abundance, I can make limited-run jewelry at an amazingly low per-unit cost. I can print a custom real estate sign for less money than others might have to pay for a generic sign of the same size. This pattern will find its way into every business.
On shoes: Your presumption is that a better manufacturing technology would make the same old stuff. Why would this be so? If I could have perfectly fitted footwear on demand, why wouldn’t it be a radically different kind of design — maybe something that pulls on like an over-the-calf sock and is intended to be worn one time only? Every time people insist that things won’t change much or even at all, they start with premises another mind might reject from the start.
All the old typographers insisted that desktop pre-press could never work — and they were hugely right: More and more desktop publishing — like this weblog — is done straight to the internet with no press work at all! Amazing foresight, no?
But: What we’re talking about is real estate. There are still people employed down at the screen-printing plant, but none of them are pulling ink across a screen. I think it’s an error to insist that, since there will be personal-service Realtors still at work in five or ten years, that the tech-averse agents in the business now will not have been supplanted. This is a conflation of unlike things under the same conceptual category: Realtors = Realtors == Screen Printers = Screen Printers. It’s a false statement given the color of truth by looking at things hastily and from a vast distance.
The people working successfully in personal-service real estate representation five years from now will be — in overwhelming numbers — different people from today’s successful Realtors. This again is a pattern we can observe over and over in other businesses. Not all technophilic Realtors will succeed, but virtually all technophobic Realtors will fail in due course.
April 11, 2008 — 4:16 pm
Ron says:
Jeff,
Zappos, the leading online shoe retailer, did $840 million in sales last year. This year they will do over $1 billion.
They did this by concentrating on value for the buyer. Their technology isn’t anything mindblowing, but they seem to really concentrate on service, and they deliver that in new ways.
At some point, a company will crack your industry open. Maybe not Redfin, but someone will. Just like Expedia did for travel, just like Schwab did for stocks, and just like Zappos did for shoes, i.e those tactile things you have to buy in a store.
You folks will probably still be comparing yourselves to doctors at that point. Or sniping at Barry Cunningham.
April 11, 2008 — 4:29 pm
Eric Bramlett says:
But shoe buying is tactile…
That is a fantastic point about products that will succeed online vs. offline. I have a few online endeavors, and they all have to do w/ products that are recognizable by brand, and repeatedly purchased (tanning lotion, supplements, etc…)
When you’re dealing w/ products (like shoes, women’s clothing, or real estate) that are highly personal and vary a great deal, people are going to want to see and touch them before making a decision. On a scale of “personal w/ variation” 1-10, I think that women’s shoes & clothing falls somewhere around a 7, and real estate HAS to be a 9 or 10.
Has the internet made house shopping easier? Absolutely. Have our jobs become more efficient and a bit easier? 100% However, that doesn’t mean that people are EVER going to be able to buy a house 100% online, or that they would ever want to.
April 11, 2008 — 5:12 pm
Jeff Kempe says:
>On shoes: Your presumption is that a better manufacturing technology would make the same old stuff. Why would this be so?
Simple: that’s what customers demand. When I said that buying shoes is a tactile experience, what I meant was: buying shoes is a tactile experience.
I spent twenty years, nearly every Saturday, watching people in malls. What they wore, what bags they were carrying, what displays they touched, what displays they didn’t. (I watched, in several iterations, how they ignored the shoe-socks.) The mistake you make is the same mistake many buyers make: they assume their preference equals that of their customers; it doesn’t. I remember well the hyper-reaction of the press and all the buyers to the new line of recycled footwear – it’s green! – all of whom ignored the fact that they were ugly and didn’t fit (and, it turned out, fell apart.)
As to technology in real estate, I’m not even going to hazard a guess. Things are going to change, probably dramatically, but how I have no idea at this point.
I’ll wait for the customers.
April 11, 2008 — 5:12 pm
Bawldguy Talking says:
Jeff — I didn’t expand our operation out of San Diego before the internet, so I don’t have the answer. Speaking for myself, the last car I bought was through a referral to a locator from one of my clients. The first time I saw the car in person was when the tow truck driver called to say it was out front.
I trusted the experience, expertise, and integrity of the pro with whom I was working. I’ve now had the car for four years (in August) and couldn’t be happier.
April 11, 2008 — 5:41 pm
Greg Swann says:
> Simple: that’s what customers demand.
People accept what they’re given. They spend almost no time imagining alternatives to what they are given.
I’m not arguing for any particular type of shoes. I hate shoes. I can’t stand to wear them, and I kick them off as soon as I can.
I am not arguing for any particular anything. My argument is that pronouncements about what markets will not do in response to the tech revolution are almost certain to be risibly wrong — in ways we cannot even imagine at present.
Every bit of evidence collected thus far from the marketplace supports my position.
April 11, 2008 — 6:06 pm
Jeff Kempe says:
Ron, Zappos is a terrific company, even out Nordstroms Nordstrom. When I was leaving the business, they were only a few years into it and still making an impact, though not yet profitable.
Then they were shoes only; now, of course, they’ve expanded into clothing and accessories, a much different online dynamic. I’d be interested their volume mix, as well as their margins (unpublished).
April 11, 2008 — 6:25 pm
Jeff Kempe says:
>I’m not arguing for any particular type of shoes. I hate shoes. I can’t stand to wear them, and I kick them off as soon as I can.
YOU’RE the one that kept my family from eating in ’99!
>My argument is that pronouncements about what markets will not do in response to the tech revolution are almost certain to be risibly wrong
Are you sure? Does that mean Redfin will be successful as currently configured?
April 11, 2008 — 6:27 pm
Eric Bramlett says:
The problem w/ comparing an online retailer to real estate is that real estate isn’t retail. I don’t think it gets much more tactile than real estate.
If anyone can “crack the industry open” then Redfin’s model should be able to. They’re offering 50% rebates w/ actual tours – it will be interesting to see if they will be able to turn a profit. As (I think) Greg pointed out in another thread, Zip Realty offers 20% rebates and still booked a $5m loss last year.
The bottom line is that most people will want a competent person to help them through the home buying process. There will always be DYI buyers, and DYI buyers now have very real options – Redfin, Zip, and the many local discounters that are available.
April 11, 2008 — 6:29 pm
Greg Swann says:
> Are you sure? Does that mean Redfin will be successful as currently configured?
No it means that people much smarter than us will keep coming up with ideas we could not have foreseen — and may insist are impossible long after they are demonstrably possible — and nothing in a free market will ever hold still no matter how much we might hope or wish it could. I’m not making any specific prediction. I am making the general prediction that every business will be radically changed in ways we cannot foresee by the tech revolution, no matter how much we might think those businesses are insulated by physical factors.
April 11, 2008 — 6:34 pm
Jeff Kempe says:
>I am making the general prediction that every business will be radically changed in ways we cannot foresee by the tech revolution, no matter how much we might think those businesses are insulated by physical factors.
Things change!
But: They don’t always change the way we think they will.
We agree!
Friday: off to play music…
April 11, 2008 — 6:46 pm
Ron says:
Eric, you have very limited vision. Why should Redfin be the one to crack it open? Some company will eventually do it, and the model they use may well look nothing like Redfin. And yes, people will want a competent person to help them, but it’s shortsighted to assume that person will be a realtor, as currently configured. In a recent transaction I purchased a lot to build, and my RE attorney was much more useful than the agent.
Just a tidbit for you: At some point, Google was nearly shut down bu its board for lack of revenue. They basically stumbled into a business model that now generates $13 Bil this year. Craigslist is a dull listerserver run by a mellow guy in SF who has opted to make $30 million a year instead of $1 billion (by running ads). Together, these two companies have basically killed the entire newspaper industry. Do you think that in 1994 any news moguls anticipated anything like this? I’m just saying, just because you look around today and see Redfin and Zip doesn’t mean that you are on forever easy street if those two fail.
I own a batch of homes, am not a realtor, but I do read this and other blogs. My two cents: Greg Swann is a *lot* smarter than nearly all of the other posters on this blog.
April 12, 2008 — 6:55 pm
Eric Bramlett says:
Ron – I definitely see where you’re coming from, but you keep using very poor logic to try to prove your point.
The fact that Google & CL killed the newspaper industry has little to no relationship to the real estate industry. You’ve harped on Expedia, Schwap, and Zappos, which have very little similarities to the real estate industry, as well. And let’s not forget that the brick & mortar financial & shoe industries are both very alive & kicking.
It’s 100% possible, and much more difficult, to buy or sell a house without the use of a broker/agent.
It’s very obvious that you see no value in Realtors – Don’t use a Realtor!!!
The fact is that the internet has, and will continue to change all industries. I will stand by my statement that Realtors’ roles will change, but we will not go away.
April 12, 2008 — 7:09 pm
Eric Bramlett says:
And Ron – if you see such an obvious opportunity to “crack the real estate industry open” then go for it! Get your millions!!!
April 12, 2008 — 7:11 pm