Stop focusing on the past, writes coach Darryl Davis. If you want to compete in today’s real estate industry, you need to shift towards:
At one point in the late 2000s, more than half of all business smartphones in North America had the BlackBerry logo and a BlackBerry keyboard. Then the Cupertino company made the keyboard irrelevant, and the business case for buying BlackBerry fell apart in slow motion.
Fall is the part everyone remembers, but it’s a gist that broker owners need to study. BlackBerry didn’t survive by developing a better keyboard. It survived by quietly exiting the phone business and moving into automotive software, embedded systems, and cybersecurity.
Today, the company’s QNX platform powers vehicle safety, infotainment, and digital cockpit systems around the world, and while BlackBerry’s IoT division has consistently posted double-digit revenue growth, its cybersecurity division has been carved out as a separate business. The brand that once stood for hardware failure is now talking about software.
Because this is true, let’s think about it for a moment. The housing brokerage industry is staring at a Blackberry vs. iPhone moment.
Compass completed its $4.2 billion acquisition of Anywhere Real Estate in January, creating a combined company with about 340,000 agents and more volume than the next five largest brokerages combined.
In late April, The Real Brokerage announced an agreement to acquire RE/MAX for $880 million, combining its cloud-based, AI-powered platform with one of the industry’s most recognized franchise brands to form The Real REMAX Group, a global operating company with 180,000 agents.
A few days later, eXp World Holdings acquired NextHome, adding a franchise model to the cloud brokerage and adopting a new ticker: AGNT. This pattern is unmistakable. The franchise model that defined the past 40 years is not only losing market share to cloud-based and technology-advanced competitors, but also being acquired by those competitors. Integrators pay differently, train differently, own their agent relationships differently, and now they’re absorbing traditional brands in their entirety.
If you’re a brokerage firm owner looking at this from within a traditional store, the temptation to build a better keyboard is real. Please hire more. Make deep cuts. Add a new CRM. Run a recruitment campaign targeting last quarter’s agents.
That’s exactly what Research In Motion did from 2007 to 2012. They shipped more devices, updated the operating system, defended the keyboard… and ultimately lost.
What BlackBerry actually did (eventually)
When John Chen took over BlackBerry in late 2013, the business looked unrecoverable. He made three decisions that brokerage owners should print and tape to their walls.
First, he stopped acting like the old product was a company. Within three years, he was completely out of cell phone manufacturing. The brand survived. The product line was not. The willingness to sever what made the company what it was built on is what bought it the rest of its business.
Second, we doubled down on assets that were undervalued internally. QNX, the embedded operating system that BlackBerry acquired in 2010, was treated as a side project for many years. Chen made that his strategy. Currently, it is the company’s growth engine.
Third, he changed his customers. BlackBerry stopped chasing consumers and started selling to businesses, automakers, and governments. Different customers, different sales cycles, different margins, same core intellectual property.
What does this look like in a brokerage firm?
Brokerage hardware is desks, office leases, franchise signage, and traditional commission splits. Software is training, culture, data, customer relationships, and agent productivity.
Most brokerages are still judged by their hardware. Companies that survive in 2030 will be judged by their software.
Compass and Anywhere are betting that scale and an integrated technology stack are the way to survive. Real is betting that its platform, with its low overheads and equity and revenue sharing, will attract a working class that no longer values corner offices. REMAX, eXp, and Franchise Network each run their own versions of the same calculation. None of these companies are suitable for every market or every agency. Whether they admit it or not, they’ve all read the BlackBerry story.
The question for independent broker owners is not, “How can I compete with Compass?” The question is, “What is my QNX?”
It could be a program of coaching and accountability that transforms average agents into above-average producers. It could be a niche specialty (luxury goods, relocation, new construction, senior transitions) that cloud-based competitors can’t replicate at scale.
It could be a property management department, a title or mortgage joint venture, or a referral network with brokerages outside of your home base. This could be a training pipeline that brings in new licensees and increases productivity faster than anyone else in the market.
What can’t happen is, “We’ve always done it this way.”
3 questions to ask at your next leadership meeting
Speak with your leadership team and answer these three questions out loud.
What part of the business model is the keyboard? In other words, what are we following by habit rather than economics? If a clean sheet competitor opened across the street tomorrow, would they recreate it or would they scoff? What assets do we own that are underinvested in? Every brokerage firm has one. It could be intellectual property, it could be a person, it could be an app idea, it could be a relationship, it could be a market segment. Find it before someone outside your company finds it. Who are our real customers? Agents are not customers. They are partners and products by the day. Consumers are customers. Our clients include builders, lenders, lawyers, employers, and investors. Some of the most resilient brokerages in the next cycle will be those that figure out which brokerages they actually serve and serve them better than anyone else.
The integrity of our profession does not depend on preserving the mediation model that existed in 2015. It all depends on intermediary owners willing to do what BlackBerry was ultimately trying to do: take an honest look at the product, name what’s dead, and shift resources to what’s alive.
That’s leadership. The other is a press release regarding recruitment benefits.
