Let's talk about something other than private listings and industrial-scale disruption for a moment. Well, actually... I guess this will end up possibly being industrial scale disruption as well? But let's see.

Cruising around Reddit, I found a very interesting post from Kevin Stuteville where he discussed the Real/Max deal and how it means that "legacy" brokerage and franchise models are dead. His full analysis is here. Turns out Kevin is the founder and owner of a number of companies, but the most prominent appears to be Effective Agents. I had never heard of Effective Agents or Kevin before, but from his writing and his accomplishments to date, he appears to be a very smart, very savvy, very informed person.

The Real/Max analysis was fine, but that's not what got me interested in writing this. What got me interested was his take that the future of brokerage is software, and that the future broker-owner is a technologist who who can "read a commit log and ship a Postgres migration without scheduling a meeting about it."

Kevin's idea appears to be that the future of brokerage is to become a tech company, like Real or Compass (both of whom he praises), just at a smaller scale and focusing intensely on 50-100 productive agents. He notes that "AI just drained the moat" and allows "a small competent team using open-source frameworks, hosted models, and a cloud bill smaller than most franchise innovation assessments" to beat the big national franchises.

He ends up recommending that agents "pick a brokerage that ships software" and to "master one AI workflow per quarter."

I wanted to write this because while Kevin is correct about much of his diagnosis of what has been going on with big national franchises and other big institutions in real estate, I think he's overestimating the importance of the technical cofounder and underestimating the impact of AI.

I could very well be wrong. I've never done a transaction, except as a consumer. I've never walked the walk like Kevin has, I imagine. I live with a recovering broker who has, and I think I have a pretty good idea of what that's like, but I've never lived it myself.

Nonetheless... the past few months of working with AI has been eye-opening, to say the least. I find that I go in a dramatically different direction from Kevin's conclusion, so thought it worth exploring.

Let's get into it.