Typical response from some Toronto REALTORS® today as Zoocasa announces the end of operations effective June 22nd according to this email to clients.
Zoocasa was/is a registered real estate brokerage with various boards across the country and has been attempting to nab some of Toronto’s hot real estate market share by offering rebates to clients of up to 25% of the commission and charging agents 35% for the “leads” netting 10% of each commission cheque that came in through their system. When your average home price for a detached home is upwards of a million dollars now that’s not small change. So you can see why your average REALTOR® would object to this business model.
Fact is, Zoocasa was a tech forward brokerage offering a unique search tool (ours is still so much better), they’d connect you with “Top Realtors” and offered a better real estate search experience than your typical brokerage. The problem was (and the reason why they’ve been losing nearly a million a month for 2 years) that those “Top Realtors” were simply those that paid to be there. They weren’t “Top” and they weren’t providing a level of service or hyper local knowledge that was anything to write home about (and really how could you when you’re giving up 35% of your income).
Here’s some of the reaction from today. This may have been just today but over the years there have been TON’s of useless arguments about alternative business models and how they’re doing people a disservice. The reality is that there are different types of consumers out there who demand options as we’ve identified in this post from a while ago.
The Canadian real estate market has been extremely resilient against any sort of disruption unlike the airline, hotel, and transportation industries and it’s only a matter of time before a creative, tech focused company jumps onto the scene and blows consumers away with something special much like Zillow in the States. When this happens all the average sales reps, brokers, and brokerages will cease to exist (much like zoocasa) and forward thinking, tech savvy, positive high level service providers like us will thrive.
We can’t wait for this day. In the mean time we hope that the naysayers (that we’re all too familiar with) focus on elevating their customer service and digging into some hyper local knowledge to keep themselves relevant instead of spending their day on social platforms bitching about alternative business models. We love creative ways of doing business and our industry needs it. Bring it on!
forward thinking, tech savvy, positive high level service providers like us will thrive.
