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A glut of inexperienced and part-time agents, paired with a string of negative headlines and confusion caused by antitrust litigation and settlements, has driven trust in the industry to new lows, Coldwell Banker Realty CEO Kamini Lane said Thursday.
Lane spoke to a room of industry professionals at the Aria Resort and Casino in Las Vegas on the final day of Inman Connect Las Vegas about what her team is doing to rebuild trust in agents and the industry at large.
“We are at an all-time low when it comes to trust and, frankly, confidence in our industry and, unfortunately, a questioning of the value that real estate agents provide their clients,” Lane said.
Lane said the influx of licensed and inexperienced agents came during and after the COVID real estate boom, as home prices spiked and low interest rates drove demand for homebuying across the country.
“To be sure, those people were responding to the market need,” Lane said, “but I don’t think it was the same level of experience that this industry had been known for in the past.”
Photos by AJ Canaria Creative Services
Lane focused on the inexperience and part-time mindset of many agents. To highlight her point, she brought up the gig economy nature in her hometown of Los Angeles, where it’s common for residents to be a writer-slash-barista or server-slash-actor.
She gave that type of worker a term — slashie — and said real estate “shouldn’t be an industry of slashies.”
“This should be an industry of professionals who take this very seriously, who operate with the highest level of integrity,” Lane said.
Lane said Coldwell Banker hand-picks agents who work for the franchiser.
“It’s not a question of building an infantry,” Lane said. “There’s the phrase ‘recruiting wars.’ I don’t think of it that way. We’re not fighting a war; we’re not building an infantry. We really want to have a collection of the best professionals in the business who fit with our culture.”
The franchise is also focused on providing up-to-date training on the post-settlement rules and regulations and adapting to changes that will continue happening up until and after Aug. 17.
That training includes encouraging agents to have conversations with clients about value and compensation early on in the relationship and to be transparent about how the agent will be paid.
“We very much believe that it is in a seller’s best interest to offer compensation to a buyer’s agent,” Lane said.
She said Coldwell Banker was encouraging agents to move past the mindset of acting as gatekeepers of data and information, which was more traditionally a role for agents 20 years ago, she said.
“Having value that is seeded in any sort of gatekeeping of data is just not relevant anymore,” Lane said. “There has to be a long-term lens on building a relationship with an individual, with their family.”
Lane said agents need to shift into the role of financial advisor who guides clients through complicated transactions, looks for ways to make them simpler, and builds long-term relationships that can last multiple transactions.
“The role of the agent will continue to push into this path of providing this expertise and making that transaction simpler and being at the center of that incredibly complicated transaction versus doing tasks that can be done online or spending time on things that can be done by artificial intelligence, for example,” Lane said.
