Real estate brokerage in 2025
Just as happened to travel agencies, it is only a matter of time before 100% of the property sales process is in the hands of technology companies and large providers historically outside of real estate brokerage.
Just as in the travel sector, only those real estate agencies able to offer a high value-added service inaccessible to companies operating online will survive (and grow!).
Imagine the following:
You live in Barcelona and you woke up at eight o'clock on a Saturday morning with the intention to putting your home up for sale before breakfast time.
Google Nowbased on data from the INE has been alerting you via your mobile phone for days that it is approaching the time of year when the most flats are being sold in your area, so you know that you will be on the market at the optimum time.
The day before yesterday, through the Garrigues online platform, you completed the checklist for the documentation required for the sale of your property and you processed online the issuance of the missing documents. You also declined their offer to hire an expert negotiator online because you recently read a post about how much better the algorithms of digital negotiators had become, taking into account more and more personal and professional information of the people involved in the negotiation.
Yesterday before going to bed you calculated the price of your home through tercerob.com -acquired at 100% by idealista.com in 2018- which values homes with less than a 0.5% error thanks to an extraordinarily sophisticated algorithm that is fed from the portal's database. The same tool suggested a starting price based on the data of registrations and cancellations in housing portals in the area, the number of requests for information they have received and user comments on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare about the prices of published homes.
When the suggested price information appeared, a pop-up from the Yale digital lock company offered to replace your old lock with a new one within 48 hours and to charge you after the sale of your home. You accepted the offer and automatically the suggested price of your home was increased by the cost of the new lock. As you already know, the benefit of a digital lock is that it allows you to give access to your home to whoever you want, in real time, and remotely from your computer or mobile device. Google Now decided to share with your circle of family members that you had just purchased a Yale digital lock.
So now you turn on your computer and verbally command it to access Homesellerwiz.com*, the real estate services aggregator who will recommend you the optimal combination of real estate portals and the products you should contract in each one of them in order to optimise your investment and make sure you reach your audience of likely buyers..
Once you have opened your user account through your Facebook profile on Homesellerwiz, you must fill in the required fields, upload the necessary documentation and select the services you need: home staging, fragrance staging, interior photography, video-drone, telephone and visit service (monopolised by the real estate portals themselves) and virtual negotiator.
The platform sends out requests for quotes to various companies who then enter the bidding process offering their best offer for each service. You make your selection for each of these services, which immediately detect the cookie left by the Yale lock company and announce that you will be asked for access permission once the new lock is installed, within 48 hours.
Finally, you access to Yoummunity.com*, and contract for 30 days the service of virtual community manager which will be responsible for disseminating all the actions related to the sale of your property through your social profiles, thus extending the marketing process to social networks. Obviously, it will do so using the words you would use yourself, as it scans your conversation history in emails, whatsapps, and social networks to replicate your unique and inimitable style of communicating things.
Barely two hours have passed and you have already made all the decisions. All that remains is for you to wait for all the services you have contracted to be executed one by one, almost automatically. and that will take place over the next 4 days, at which point your home will be on the market.
The total cost is €2,540.
(*) Homesellerwiz.com and Yoummunity.com are companies that do not (yet) exist.
I don't know what you think of this little real estate science fiction story, and I would certainly love to receive feedback from all of you, but the summary is as follows:
If your service is based on purely technical knowledge, you are dead.
If your brokerage or representation service is indistinguishable from that of any other agency, you are dead.
If you base your business acquisition on relationships of trust, you are dead.
If your customers hire you to "sell fast and at the best price", you are dead.
If your clients hire you because you are the real estate agency "down the street", you are dead.
If your customers go "on price", you are dead.
Yes... Yes, you are dead.
You have 10 years to think about what you are going to do.
It is only a matter of time before 100% of the process of selling a property is in the hands of technology companies and only those real estate agencies capable of offering a high added value service inaccessible to companies operating online will survive.
