Justin Stoddart 0:00
Welcome back to The Think Bigger Real Estate Show. I'm your host, Justin Stoddart, where my mission and my passion are to help you think bigger, bring people in front of you that expand your thinking. Because when that happens, a marvelous thing also follows, which is your business starts to grow. as your business grows, your life gets more options, and you are able to create a greater impact in the world. And that is my, again, mission and passion. I'm very excited today to talk about the friction factor. We live in a digital world. And it's all too often. There are lots of connections. We've got lots of friends through all kinds of social networks, but not very much, not very many deep connections. And I've got truly an expert here with me today to talk about this. Let me introduce Jim Remley first before I kind of give a full bio on you, Jim, thanks for being on the show today.
Jim Remley 0:47
Hey, my pleasure. I'm excited to be here. Thank you so much.
Justin Stoddart 0:50
You bet you are a big thinker. And let me validate that to all those who are hearing about Jim for the first time. So Jim actually lives in a small town in Oregon called Medford, Oregon and you'd never believe
so much success that he's created would come out of a small town. He's a 30-year real estate veteran, he grew a company to 17 offices here in Oregon, sold that he now runs one of the largest brokerages in Oregon. He's got 160 agents doing about a billion dollars in volume. A pretty impressive little group of producers out of Medford, Oregon, I love it. His company is the top 500 company in America according to real trends. And he now runs a platform, a coaching platform in addition to his robust brokerage and business, erealestatecoach.com. We're going to get more into that here in a minute. But thank you again, Jim, for being on the show and a super excited about today's topic.
Jim Remley 1:42
I'm excited to be here. I got a reputation down in Southern Oregon, my friend.
Justin Stoddart 1:46
So hopefully it's a good one.
So let's get into this, Jim. You know, I grew up in an era where the internet was introduced to my high school. And I thought to myself, that's so weird, weirdest thing ever. Like this is odd, right? Whereas we have a generation that's coming up that like does not know what life would be like without the internet. Like when I tell my kids Hey, guess what kids dad's older than the internet. And they're like, dinosaur dad. And but now it's so common all of us are really reliance upon it, aren't we like entirely our lives revolve around internet connection.
Jim Remley 2:21
It's absolutely true. You know, I grew up I'm older than you. So I grew up when we had Apple to computers before the internet. You know, the lab school program on this little tiny apple. I just read an interesting article. It was by David Brian at MIT review. And he said this, that what's happening right now with technology is that we are being we're seeing less and less human interaction within all technology. So technology is being built with humans being less and less and less a part of the technology itself. Because human friction is where most systems break down. And it's very interesting when you look at it. I mean, if you look at all lot of the things that we're probably all using, I'm sure you're using and I'm using my wife and I just signed up for Blue Apron. Right. So that's a delivery service for meals. And the idea here is that we don't have to go to the restaurant with wants to talk to a waitress, we don't have to build the grocery store. It's literally just sent to us arrives on our doorstep, we go out we open it up, we make the meal, right. So yeah, like Uber and Lyft. Before you know I'm old enough to remember when you get in a cab. When you get the cab you have to tell the cab driver where you're going to have a conversation. You'd have to tip the cab driver at the end. But now you get into an Uber you literally don't have to have a conversation because the system is built to have no conversation interesting already have already put it in there you open the door get in open the door get out you don't even have to talk to the systems like that. Captain Marvel a few weeks ago at the movie theater, and they had this scene where the main characters in a blockbuster video and you like Oh, that's so cute. I remember going to Blockbuster Video. But now everything's streaming. So we don't have to go talk to people at the video store. We don't even have to go to the movies, we just remember our phones and our devices. So you're saying there are this natural and kind of insistent move towards less and less and less and less human interaction. This morning in bed my wife was doing. She was shopping, put her whole grocery cart and the instacart. And it's going to be delivered at six o'clock. We don't- it's all being delivered to us.
Justin Stoddart 4:27
It's crazy, isn't it?
Jim Remley 4:28
Interesting world, right?
Justin Stoddart 4:29
It is an interesting world. You know, and a lot of these things are very convenient. I mean, every one of those things you just described Uber to Blue Apron to like grocery delivery. I'm all like, that's awesome. Like that sounds like right. And that's I think we're really technology can benefit what's the double it? What's the other side of that sword? Like if this is a double edged sword, right? Like, what's the problem with this?
Jim Remley 4:54
People say to me, Well, that's all great. I love it, I use it but does it real estate and it absolutely applies to real estate, there are pieces of the real estate, what's called puzzle or supply chain or, or, or the way we work that are being webbed eyes, chunk by chunk we all watched as Zillow and realtor.com. And as the market now buyers can do all sorts of themselves. But now showings are starting to go that direction. in large cities systems like Tour, which is a lockbox, you can put it on the house and can be remotely accessed, so that there doesn't need to be an agent president at the showing. Think of it like when you go to do an Airbnb vacation rental, and they put a keyless entry in the virus when qualified. They hit a button, and that lets them into the house. Of course, the seller has to sign off on it. But this is us right now. So imagine now you have showings, you can go search and you can show yourself the house. Every time one of these little things is taken out of our plate and made frictionless, it takes a proposition away from us. So what happens is we become a commodity. And we become one of many I just saw a study about the number of agents in the business right now we're at another peak, we had a peak in 2005. with about a million for agents, we're back up to that number. And some people would say that's more like 2.4 because not everybody's a realtor. But transactions are showing it about 5 million transactions. So you think about 2 million realtors or 2 million agents in the country. And as 5 million transactions, the number of people Zoomer has to choose from is massive. So in any market like in Portland, I'm sure there's 10,000 agents or more,
Justin Stoddart 6:32
Let's do 8500
in the probably metro area, but that doesn't include Vancouver, right, which is a whole, which is kind of Portland area, and there's a whole you know,
Jim Remley 6:40
so that means the consumer can just have all these massive choices. And when we get to monetize, it becomes an issue for us, we have to find a value back in the transaction. And that's my focus with agents, you know,
Justin Stoddart 6:53
you're speaking my language, I see...
