I want to start by saying I take no credit for anything I’m building.
With the way technology is working right now, it’s almost surreal, and in fact it should be illegal.
I just spent the past few days totally revamping my brokerage’s website. And I’m not talking about just the front end anymore.
I’ve added a slew of applications that were once segregated from each other, and were built on different platforms, but are now harmoniously in one place.
A new dashboard feature using live data and an interactive chatbot was rolled out which will give our real estate agents a better glimpse at their production, current deals, and overall performance.
A back end for our leadership team that gives them recruiting intelligence and coaching tools to help their real estate agents perform better.
And even though this isn’t at the scale of the larger brokerage brand that acquired us recently, I will challenge that its performance fulfills the functionality that they are planning to roll out and offer to us. Except we own our stack, in-house, and have built it in a fraction of the time they did.
I’m not saying this to boast, of course. I’m saying this to shed light on what’s real today. What these tools let you build in hours and days, instead of weeks and months.
And I take no credit for any of it, except for the imagination and persistence needed to pull it off.
I appreciate the work of technology firms and developers that have spent years honing and perfecting their crap, tirelessly churning code, and launching applications that changed the way business was done.
Today, all that code sits in repositories, and nothing is new.
Want an AI chatbot for your website? You got it. Built in 10 minutes.
Want to pipe your SkySlope data into a custom built dashboard? Oh, that’s another 20-30 minutes. (I’m guessing, and erring on the side of it taking longer than what it probably did.)
The point here is this: code, at least for existing applications, is no longer a moat. Nothing is new under the sun. And perhaps there is a better way to do things, but existing applications have become a commodity.
What is the competitive advantage when an individual or small team, with access to tools, can build what bigger teams and larger companies have built in a fraction of the time?
Is it the audience? The business model? Brand equity?
Business and competition is undergoing a massive transformation. All I know is that in the past few days, with the help of technology, I’ve built what brokerages would have taken years and big budgets to build, at a fraction of the cost, in a fraction of the time.