Staying Competitive- How The Power And Voice Of The Real Estate Industry Are Changing

Last week, Warburg Realty* became part of Coldwell Banker’s Global Luxury Group. Warburg is just the latest in a series of mergers and acquisitions which is gradually shrinking the pool of independent luxury brokerages in New York City. With CORE’s 50 percent sale to The Related Companies, followed by the sale of Stribling to Compass in 2018, and now Warburg, the landscape of New York’s luxury firms echoes the brand consolidation which has swept almost all industries in recent years. And the rest of the country fares no differently. For most brokerage CEOs, this decision is being spurred by an awareness of how profoundly the business of real estate has changed in the last decades. Here is the how and why:

Through the early 1980s the residential sales business in New York, as in most of the rest of the country, was a family affair. Most brokerages were run by founders or long-time owners. Douglas Elliman was the exception, having already had more than one corporate owner. The firms were small, as was the entire business. Property listings were written on file cards and were given non-exclusively to a handful of firms. Agents worked hard to acquire those listings, making cold calls and walking the avenues chatting up and tipping doormen. No one co-broked listings, since none were given exclusively to agents. There was no central listing repository. The only advertising was columns of listing ads in the New York Times Real Estate section and the occasional display ad in the Times Magazine or, as time went on, Quest Magazine. No firm had more than 60 or 70 residential agents; L.B. Kaye, where I (along with a number of other industry executives) started my career, had fewer than 50.

There were no condominiums at that time and a limited number of co-ops. Artists actually lived in Soho, in unimproved or barely improved loft spaces. Alphabet City was not a safe place to venture, and the Lower East Side was not much better. The Bowery was still inhabited by winos. 

The mid-80s brought a cascade of rental-to-co-operative conversions to New York. Landlords saw an opportunity to cash out of buildings. At the same time, they maintained cash flow by creating wraparound mortgages at high interest rates which they imposed on these conversions. Because of this trend, the number of apartments for sale probably tripled between 1980 and 1988, until the market crashed and conversions and sales both ran aground. 

During the early 1990s, multiple changes shook the market. First, we were forced to acknowledge that, as the number of co-op buildings exponentially increased, the old way of handling listings no longer worked. File cards gave way to the first clunky computer listing systems. Exclusive listings and co-broking came to Manhattan, championed by a small company led by Susan Byrd; her work transformed the way we sell property here (the superbroker Sharon Baum is one of the few remaining Susan Byrd veterans still plying her trade among us). Equally significant, the brilliant innovator Barbara Corcoran forced upon her reluctant colleagues the twin ideas of branding and marketing, which many of us were slow to understand were NOT the same thing as advertising. 

And so, as the millennium turned, the industry was poised on the cusp of a sea change: technology, branding, and capital pushing their way to center stage of our formerly tame backwater of a business. Over the past 20 years, the goalposts which enabled small firms to continue to succeed kept moving.  Cendant (now Realogy) acquired Corcoran and then Sotheby’s Realty, Douglas Elliman changed hands to become a part of the Vector Group portfolio, Terra Holdings took over Brown Harris Stevens and Halstead, Town Residential came and went in New York to be replaced by its vastly better capitalized and more sophisticated sibling Compass, which spread throughout the country like a wildfire fed by a seemingly bottomless pit of capital. The worst excesses of the finance and tech industries came to the real estate brokerage market, as huge companies offered six-figure signing bonuses as well as multiple assistants and vast marketing budgets to agents, all in the belief that today’s loss leader would somehow morph into tomorrow’s profitable company. 

In such an environment, a small residential company faces the ultimate challenge: not how to be profitable but how to provide competitive, best-in-class technology, customer relationship management, and seller engagement tools to its agents. In the end, these considerations drive many small and mid-sized brokerage owners into the arms of big national firms. These national players connect agents with like-minded agents in every major city and town in the country and often throughout the world. In addition, they provide their agents with the ability to match any tools a competitor may offer to win client business. The power and voice of the industry have thus gradually moved from the many to the few. With so many issues critical to real estate at stake before the Department of Justice and other government agencies, we all trust that these few have the deep understanding of the industry required to create a best-case outcome for us all. 

*Disclaimer: Frederick Warburg Peters is the CEO of Warburg Realty, which he sold to Coldwell Banker. Warburg Realty, of which Peters will remain CEO, will operate under the name Coldwell Banker Warburg starting in January 2022.

This post first appeared on Forbes.com. To see the original, click here.