Acceleration of the natural trend towards digital

Across our society, long-term trends are accelerating dramatically: the shift from movie theaters to Netflix, from department stores to Amazon, from gyms to Peloton, from commuting to work to working from home with Zoom, from dining out to Uber Eats delivery, from in-person check-ups to telemedicine. Novel conveniences have become daily necessities.

In industry after industry, companies that invest in scalable technology platforms for their customers are gaining distance over companies that don’t. Technology companies are benefiting from an acceleration of customer behavior towards digital approaches.

Brokerage firms are in the same boat as the competitors of Netflix, Amazon and Peloton. Historically, the model in our industry has been for brokerages to take their share of the profits from agents and simply pocket them. Brokerages were not investing that money in hiring people from Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Uber to build a scalable technology platform that can work as well for one person as it does for 100 or even 100,000.

Every single day of every single month in the COVID-19 environment, Amazon, Netflix and Peloton are getting better — while their competitors stagnate.

At Compass, we’re fortunate to be getting better every day, too. In this environment, our 500 person technology team is actually launching new software and tools faster than ever before, making our platform better for every single Compass agent — while our competitors, in most cases, aren’t building anything. As a result, the distance between Compass and our competitors is only widening.

I’m hearing from agents every day telling me they’ve never appreciated what we’re building more than they do right now. Video Generator. Digital Asset Library in Marketing Center. Our drip-campaign Action Plans in CRM. Compass Academy. Marketing Center 2.0. Virtual Agent Services. Compass Lens. And that’s just some of what we’ve released since this all began.

My optimism about our future comes from our agents’ optimism about what we’re building for them: a scalable platform that helps agents save time and grow their business, regardless of the world around them.

Even though we couldn’t have predicted this pandemic, the work we’ve done over the past 7 years — and the work we’re continuing to do each and every day — puts us in a terrific position to navigate it. Thanks to the power of our technology and the passion of our people, we’re not just going to survive this time, we’re going to thrive and emerge stronger from it.