William E Hillis

At their most basic, agents’ salient characteristics are their preference for listing business or selling business, and their social engagement. Agents are assumed to have social connections to certain geographic, cultural, professional, or business communities.

The brokerage brand owners, and their managing brokers, are confronted with a difficult task: assembly of a self-directed, independent sales force that can be piloted toward the brokerage’s strategic objectives amid economic and regulatory uncertainty.

The game was conceived as a training exercise to “get inside the heads” of owners of a branded real estate affiliate and their senior staff. The next step was to host a game involving the managing brokers of that brokerage’s regional offices, giving them the chance to “play the owners for a day.”

Brokerages need to think more broadly than agents. While the agents practice place marketing in miniature—an apt description of home sales—the brokerage brand sells intangibles. Their scope of business comprises those markets of all the agents whom they employ, or might employ in the future.

Measures of central tendency are potentially erroneous and, in any case, self-limiting methods of determining where the most brand-aligned homes are being sold. ... There are alternatives to these measures and counts of sales above a threshold for more precisely identifying target markets by price.