Professional One Selected as “Brokerage of the Future”

At #ICSF (Inman Connect San Francisco), held July 13-15, 2010, Sherry Chris, the CEO of Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, presented a list of 24 brokerages she termed “Beta Brokerages,” or the next generation of innovative real estate brokerages. Professional One Real Estate was selected as one of these “next gen” brokerages: a brokerage of the future.

Chris stated the following:

The next generation brokerage markets themselves in new ways – ways never thought possible – and connecting with consumers across the myriad of social media channels that were once considered frivolous or off limits to marketers. Some of these brokerages were founded by agents working within traditional organizations who felt the need to step out of past and into a present that their brokers either misunderstood or ignored.

We’d like to personally thank Sherry (who herself was named Inman’s “Innovator of the Year“) and Better Homes & Gardens for including us in this group of up and coming brokerages. We are truly honored to be named with such an illustrious list of excellent companies and concepts.

As an example, we are familiar with Thompson’s Realty and its founder Jay Thompson (@phxREguy). His concept is excellent and I believe he’ll be successful over the long haul, with his emphasis on low-cost/virtual operations and intelligent leveraging of Social Media and blogging. To be included with Jay? Priceless.

As we’ve been saying consistently within the confines of this blog, we truly believe that the future of real estate – because of the seismic changes being brought on by decreased broker profitability, the ever increasing impact of technology, the explosion of Social Media, the increasing availability of information to the end user, and a host of other changes – is going to look very little like the real estate industry that we’ve known up until now.

We believe that a number of these companies are going to lead the changes that we see as inevitable in real estate. We’re excited to be doing it here in Metro Detroit–focusing primarily on Northville, Novi, Plymouth, Canton, Ann Arbor, Birmingham, Livonia and West Bloomfield–but we’d also like to offer our sincere congratulations to the other companies named to this prestigious list.