The Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate® franchise is widely recognised for its ability to innovate. They have, under the leadership of Sherry Chris, taken this one step further to look at what the next generation of real estate brokerages might look, sound, feel, and operate like in the future. It’s called the “Beta Brokerage” project. Story by Samantha McLean.
Better Homes and Gardens®. Isn’t that a magazine and a television show?
Well yes, but the well-known brand name is also the namesake of one of the newest, fastest growing real estate franchises in the U.S., Better Homes and Gardens® Real Estate (BHGRE). I connected with firm’s president & CEO, Sherry Chris, via social media, and began getting insights into her world and the BHGRE ‘way of doing things’. I became intrigued with the brand that seems to embody the future of real estate by savvy use of technology, while remaining grounded in ‘the home’ and one associated with a magazine that was first published in the 1920s. So I set about connecting with her personally to find out more.
Today BHGRE is growing rapidly and currently includes more than 200 offices across the U.S.with over 7,500 sales associates serving homebuyers and sellers in 24 states and in Canada. Sherry contends that today’s home buyers are buying into lifestyle and community first rather than the house itself.
Sherry Chris herself is recognised widely throughout the U.S., both as a thought leader in the real estate industry and as a role model for women. Chris is a sought after speaker at real estate events on topics such as technology, innovation and social media, and admittedly never has a ‘typical day’. But what she does have is a great passion for the brand, the industry, the company and the team of people she works with.
I start our Skype chat by asking her how she got started in real estate. “I started my real estate career 30 years ago. After buying my first home in my early twenties, I thought I could sell real estate and probably do it better than how I’d seen it done. So I took my real estate license course at nights and weekends, and once completed, I resigned from my junior banking job in business development. Before I got my first job in the industry, I realised many brokers were hesitant to bring me on because I was young, at the age of 23. They were worried that I would not be able to relate to the consumer. After 18 months of selling, I realised that I would be a better fit in management and started the second phase of my career as a manager. Throughout my career, I became interested in how technology creates efficiencies within our industry and helped people surpass their own goals. After many years of rising through the ranks, I was asked to join Realogy Corporation. (Realogy is the parent company of Century 21®, Coldwell Banker®, Better Homes and Gardens® Real Estate and Sotheby’s International Realty®, located in New Jersey, USA.)
The conversation quickly turns to technology, and the role that will play in the industry in the coming years. “We have become a very mobile society overall. Part of the reason for that is the big shift in demographics. Here (in the U.S.) a third of the population are baby boomers, another third of the population are what we call ‘echo boomers’. They are the 18-34 year olds that are really going to drive our global economy and our real estate economy for the next 30 years.
This group is very collaborative and very inclusive in decision-making, and they are obviously not frightened to buy online. Actually, they do everything online – they are just more comfortable with that method than the previous generation. Sites like Facebook and Twitter were started by echo boomers for echo boomers. But now we have all started to use these sites, and it goes further: we have sites like Yelp where you can rate a restaurant, plus others. We have become a rating society, and frequently hear, for example, ‘I don’t go to a restaurant now until I have read some reviews on it’. We didn’t buy things that way in the past. The biggest change that’s happening right now is that we are totally mobile. This, for real estate, means that agents do not need to go to offices anymore. They can work from their laptops, iPads, and iPhones. The consumers are mobile too; they want instant access to all the information. They want to know everything that they can about neighbourhoods and communities. And so our role has changed dramatically; not only because of the technology that we are using as real estate agents. Beyond just the websites that show listings, I am talking about the way we basically live our lives which is very, very different. We are not the sole gatekeepers of information any more. Therefore we need to find ways to remain relevant within the transaction. How do we do that? We have to provide a different and better service. We need to become community experts; we need to stand at the side of the consumers as their trusted advisers; we need to walk with them every step of the way through the transaction. That is different from the roles we had ten, or even five, years ago.
Those are some of the things we considered as we developed the Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate brand. We positioned ourselves as the next generation brand so every tool that we build, every interaction we have, it’s all with the thought of what real estate will be like 18 months from now, two years from now, five years from now, and how we are going to work effectively with the consumer of tomorrow. The strategy goes well beyond having a fancy website.”
What about the future of the shop front? “Good question and one that is not going to be answered easily. We are not going to move to a virtual business overnight. During the U.S. economic downturn over the last five years, the biggest expense line of the broker/owner’s profit and loss statement is their rent. And the sad part about that is that most agents aren’t sitting in those offices anymore; they are out at the local coffee shop, for example, meeting their clients there, doing their work remotely.
Now, having said that, I think there is still some need for an office environment, but one with a very different look and feel. Some brokers have started opening community focused offices mimicking the likes of an Apple store; there may be 50 or 100 agents who work out of the office, but you’ll only see seven or eight people on-site at a given time. This kind of open space office has state of the art wireless, and all the facilities that an agent would want to use, even perhaps a cappuccino machine, which makes it inviting to both agents and customers.
