“The logical end point is that agency will mostly be automated.” That was the view delivered by digital strategist Antony Slumbers and echoed largely by fellow panellists at MIPIM UK.
In a debate around the transformation of the agent, the panel, which comprised Slumbers; Tushar Agarwal, chief executive of online brokerage Hubble; Rupert Parker, head of Futureproofing at GVA; Sebastian Abigail, senior director at VTS; and Jon Neale, head of research at JLL, discussed how tech was changing the face of the business.
Slumbers said that while the agency business would largely be automated that did not mean the death of the agent. It just meant they would do something else. He predicted that the growth of flexible workspace would bring about the demise of the lease, meaning that agents would have to focus more on the customer service role.
“If you can put together enough granular data about assets and enough granular data about the market, you should be able to reduce that down,” said Slumbers. “It is an algorithmic thing which means there will be a prize for one or two people to take the whole market but there will still be stuff for surveyors to do.”
That stuff is client services.
Abigail said that in the US the traditional brokers that first found LinkedIn its offices were now working as advisers to LinkedIn on its workspace as a whole, not just chasing the deal.
He did not believe that an algorithm would completely replace the agent as “no matter how much data there is, there still needs to be a neck to throttle”.
Neale highlighted the obvious nervousness around tech from an agency perspective.
“People come to us and say they have a great tech solution, all you need to do is give us all your data. Why would we do that? It might make the world a better place, but what does that do for my world?”
Parker, who has transformed his own role from traditional agent to head of future-proofing, said the industry needed to stop talking about jobs being vulnerable to tech and instead start thinking about how adaptable they can be and how tech can advance their careers and business.
“We can all learn by taking a step back by looking at consumer electronics. They will start changing the way people in real estate want to work.”
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