Aiming to Dominate Real Estate Brokerage: Robert Reffkin, CEO of Urban Compass (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: From the time that you launched to getting to your first customers who were selling their properties on your platform, what was the time window? How long did it take you to get your first transaction?

Robert Reffkin: The first transaction was in the first month. It was a rental. We had more demands to see homes. We had to hire aggressively in order to meet the demands of all the clients who wanted to see homes.

Sramana Mitra: How did the agent ramp happen? How many agents did you start with? How did you scale that agent process? It seems like that’s one of the key scaling pieces.

Robert Reffkin: We started with just 20 agents. Now we have 100. We definitely have to grow quickly.

Sramana Mitra: This is an Entrepreneur Journeys story. You’re going to have to help me a little bit in telling some strategic pieces of the story where you made certain choices that helped you grow or the mechanics of how you built this business.

Robert Reffkin: I understand. At first, we tried to separate the different parts of the agent process from scheduling, showing, and the closing process. When we launched, we had a bunch of scheduling departments. We had agents who did the showing. Then we had a closing partner. Ultimately, we realized that it was too difficult to control the end-to-end client experience without having one person control every piece of that process. That was an example of us trying to innovate where it wasn’t as effective.

Sramana Mitra: It didn’t work out.

Robert Reffkin: We started looking at how we could bring the most value to agents and we surveyed that using the app we built. We surveyed the agents and identified how they spent their time. The average agents spend only 11% of their time advising and building client relationships. They spend the rest 89% of their time doing non-core activities. That gave us the focus to build technology tools and business processes that helped reduce that 89% time so that agent can then spend more time on selling. That’s one of the most effective things that we had done. It’s really hard as a startup to know if we’re really creating value. It’s easy to create things that may look interesting. That’s why that exercise of how people spend their time and what are the things they do that they consider the most valuable. How can you create technology.

Sramana Mitra: If you play that logic out a little bit, how has that impacted how many clients each of your agent can handle? That seems to be one of the scaling points.

Robert Reffkin: They now spend just 40% time on the non-core activities.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Aiming to Dominate Real Estate Brokerage: Robert Reffkin, CEO of Urban Compass
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