RE/MAX president talks digitization of real estate

Today’s HousingWire Daily features a crossover episode with RealTrending, a podcast that features interviews with the brightest minds in real estate and housing. In this episode, Tracey Velt, managing editor at RealTrends, an HW Media company, interviews RE/MAX President Nick Bailey. Bailey discusses how the company hopes to capitalize on digital real estate tools such as machine learning to aid agent productivity. 

He also shares some of RE/MAX’s other growth strategies as well as industry market trends that he has noticed over the past couple of months. 

Here is a small preview of the interview. The transcript below has been lightly edited for length and clarity:

Tracey Velt: Tell me your thoughts on agent efficiency. What is RE/MAX doing to increase per-agent productivity and lean into the digital transformation?

Nick Bailey: We have more agents than listings in this country. They’re just a different set of challenges, but the idea that when more agents come into the business that one, or two, or three deals get peeled off and go to Tom that got his real estate license, it happens.

At the same time, this is where agent efficiency is absolutely crucial. Only seven years ago, they were around 4.5 million leads generated in our business. There’s a 100 million a year generated now. I’m seeing agents try to use tech, but they’re spending a lot of time, money, and energy figuring out who from the 100 million leads generated, who are the 6 million that are actually going to buy or sell?

And that’s where I think this digital transformation in the next few years is going to open the doors to AI machine learning. It’s not that the tech doesn’t exist, it’s that the mindset of the industry has always said, or many have said, “Fort Knox around my data.” We’re going to find out that that’s not the key to the future, in our opinion. It’s really: How do you lean into the digital transformation and some of these tools to figure out who the people who really want to buy or sell, and that’s where we’re going.

HousingWire Daily examines the most compelling articles reported across HW Media. Each afternoon, we provide our listeners with a deeper look into the stories coming across our newsrooms that are helping Move Markets Forward. Hosted by the HW team and produced by Alcynna Lloyd and Elissa Branch.