Roll With the Changes

Few, if any, industries have changed more radically in the last 20 years than real estate. What used to be a print-based business with minimal computer interaction is now almost solely concentrated on the Internet, with 90 percent of home searches now beginning on the World Wide Web.

And as technology has changed real estate, so has the managerial approach of Bill Murray, the senior vice president and managing broker for Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Georgia Properties’ Buckhead office. A longtime managing broker with a few decades of experience under his belt, Murray has seen the role of the agent change dramatically, and his priorities as a managing broker, he explains, have changed in accordance.

“The main thing that’s changed is the technology that available to the agent, and the actual need they have for physical space,” he says. “Agents, when I first started managing, wanted and needed an office. They needed that hub where they could come in and conduct business. Now, though, with the technology that’s available, they don’t really care about that.”

The evanescent quality of agents today, Murray says, can make coaching a challenge. Though agents still like the concept of an office, and still like visiting it on occasion, it’s no longer central to their business. The solution, he found, was making his weekly sales meetings essential.

“[Agents’ schedules today] make the sales meeting even more critical,” Murray says. “I try to have more emphasis on a variety of subjects and topics that we cover during the sales meetings, knowing that could be the only day of the week that the agent is going to come into the office.”

Topics that Murray covers in his sales meetings include: detailed analyses of interest rates, including why rates are at their current level and where they are heading in the short and long term; visits from closing attorneys/title partners, who give legal tips; and specific insights into such subjects as contractual issues and the company’s Web tools.

“If I don’t give them relevant information in the sales meeting, they won’t come back to the next one,” Murray says.

Changes in technology, though, are not the only thing that managing brokers have to adjust to. In addition, brokers must be mindful of shifting consumer attitudes, and how they influence the way their agents conduct business.

To stay abreast of those metamorphoses, Jones regularly accompanies her agents in the field.

“One of the key components,” she says, “that I implemented four or five years ago is, I make myself available to go out on listing appointments with the agents, or to meet the buyers in the office, should the agent let me know if their visiting. That keeps me fresh on the market. It’s very easy to talk about what you know and how to do it, but if you’ve not actually done it in quite some time – in our companies, our managers do not sell – I go on two to three listing appointments a month now … it keeps me in tune to today’s consumer, not the consumer from when I was in sales in the late ’90s, early 2000s.”