Leveling the playing field in residential brokerage

Real Estate Weekly, Feb 24, 1999 by Jonathan Greenspan

There are two intangible elements to every real estate broker's daily pursuit of the next transaction: time and knowledge. Time is of course finite. None of us have enough of it. Knowledge is limited only by our own abilities and priorities.

Outsourcing, the ability to use a qualified service to perform many of the information gathering tasks involved in the brokerage business in New York, is crucial for the small firm so that it can stay abreast with the marketplace and maintain a competitive edge.

On-Line Residential, which has been a fixture in the residential marketplace for the past four years, now fills this role for more than 70 brokerage firms, large and small, across the city landscape.

To call the company just a "listing service" is an injustice. We have developed the finest and most efficient listing software used anywhere in the city. The software was developed in-house and it continues to evolve with the full input from our clients The next generation of the program, which is in beta testing, will be a hybrid internal data base and web site.

Today, On-Line Residential has grown from a concept into the most widely used piece of software in the industry. The software is the only program to boast of a full library of residential floorplans, and the company's photo library of residential buildings is the largest of its kind.

Our clients benefit from our expertise and our constant desire to improve our capabilities. The problem of the small and medium-sized brokerage firm in Manhattan is a limitation of financial and human resources. The goal of On-Line Residential is to offer these firms a dependable outside source so that they can spend more time pursuing business. The company fills a tremendous need.

Our client portfolio is not limited to the small and medium-sized brokerage houses. Larger brokerage houses use us to supplement the information gathering of their own in-house staffs. The cost of the service is of no consequence to these larger firms. Two or three small transactions over the course of the year and the software pays for itself.

Firms in every industry outsource projects. They do it for two reasons: the outside vendor has particular expertise, and going "outside the company" is cost-effective. The local real estate industry is just behind the curve. For a fraction of the cost involved in gathering data and maintaining an in-house database, a company can effectively outsource these tasks and offer its agents state-of-the-art software year in and year out.

Seven years ago, each commercial real estate firm in Manhattan maintained an in-house listing department. Only a few firms could actually keep abreast with the full breadth of the marketplace. Today, two outside vendors, Relocate and Co-Star, are staples in almost every commercial brokerage house. The in-house departments have virtually been eliminated.

There is an economy of scale to collecting data and information this way. We are more efficient and our employees are better trained than a typical listing staff. We hold weekly training sessions on different aspects of the business and encourage all of our employees to maintain a real estate license. We also do not have the turnover in our listing staff that one might see at a brokerage house. We have taken the transient nature out of the position.

The problem of the small and medium-sized brokerage firms in Manhattan is a limitation of financial and human resources. The philosophy of On-Line Residential is to offer these firms a tool by which they can "level the playing field" with larger firms with unlimited resources.