I promised you a “virtual tour” of a “virtual company”, so let me walk you through my office and give you a guided tour.  That will help you picture how our model is so different.  In the last article I shared how visiting our company for two short days gave one of the top brokers in the world a meltdown, and a wake-up call.  Maybe I can get your wheels turning too, and maybe I can help you actually visualize this virtual office model.  And don’t hesitate to call or email questions or post comments to this article.  I’ll do my best to answer them.

Imagine driving up to our office.  You’ve just turned off of one of the five busiest arteries in our city and are about a block away from one of the busiest intersections.  As you approach our office you see a modern, two story, brick office building of 16,000 square feet.  On the bottom floor there is a very busy dental practice on the left and a plastic surgeon on the right.  Right above them, the entire second floor, is FavoriteAgent.com.

When you come in the front door of the office building, you can choose to take stairs or an elevator to the second floor landing.  When you arrive on the landing, you’ll see a very warm and inviting commercial space painted in a flat beige color, with paintings on the wall, two leather wing chairs around a polished mahogany table with a large plant on top.  Signs direct you to our office door, which remains unlocked during business hours with an electronic number key-pad for after hours access.  [A note about the key-pad access: When you have a large number of agents coming and going, it is much easier to give agents access codes than keys.  When they leave, you can simply remove them from the electric lock, and there is no risk of unauthorized entrance with an extra copy of their old key.  Additionally, there is the ability to see who came and went should there be any security problems.]

On the door you note a small sign that kindly asks you not to smoke inside.  As you walk through the door into our foyer, you’ll see a large mahogany desk and empty leather chairs.  Notice I said a desk, not a receptionist.  On the desk is displayed a sign directing you down the hallway to announce yourself.

Overhead you hear the soft sounds of jazz standards coming through overhead speakers.  The lighting is subdued to accentuate a collection of artwork, framed books, and a still shot of my CNN appearance, to proudly but subtly display our credibility to our clients and visiting agents.  What you won’t see is a receptionist at the desk.  In almost four years in our current location, we’ve had a total of three walk-in customers, so it doesn’t make sense to pay someone full-time to greet them.  We don’t have agents on duty either, as we feel it is our job to help them make money and not be a free secretary for our company. [In the four years we've been in this location, we haven't missed a single customer walking in, and not having a receptionist has saved us over $120,000 in salary and benefits.]

The furniture, music, and decor is much like you would experience at an expensive law firm.  The furniture matches.  The chairs are expensive-looking but uncomfortable, specifically chosen to project a professional and productive environment.  We don’t want to communicate the idea that it is a place to hang out or drink coffee (and gripe), but rather a place to come with a client to write a contract, or to turn in a contract and pick up your mail.  It is a business environment.  If you see an agent, he or she is with a client or dropping off a contract or commission check.  In other words, the only time an agent uses our offices is when they’re making money.

Our office branches off into five mini-conference rooms, each set up with a small round conference table, four chairs, and a small computer work station, complete with a broad band Internet connection, and networked to our main office printer and copier.  Agents are able to access their online virtual office software (Pipeline Pro) as well as Real Fast Forms online.  Any additional forms they need are saved as PDF documents on the computer desktops, and can be printed on demand.  [There are no shelves full of obsolete real estate forms to be continually updated and straightened up.]

The computers are configured so that they never have to be touched, and agents are unable to inadvertently download mal-ware, spyware, etc.  They are all set up identically and can be remotely accessed by our technical staff to perform updates, maintenance and to solve any problems.  The computers are fastened to the furniture and the wiring is all tied up and hidden.  The computer desktops all display our company logo and show a professionalism not found in most real estate offices.

There are also 4 additional conference rooms, ranging in size up to a full-size executive conference room that can accommodate the largest commercial real estate closing or negotiation.  Inside we have our own in-house law firm and two mortgage offices, each subleasing space and contributing to the overhead.  The entire building is covered by multiple wireless access points so any agent can bring his own laptop computer and access the Internet and printer from any point in the building.

The office layout is sensible and convenient: The smaller conference rooms, mortgage offices, and attorneys offices stretch around the perimeter of the building, while the full-size conference rooms, the secure file room, the video production studio, the agent mail and copy room, and the accounting department that handles the disbursement of commission checks are located centrally.

The atmosphere is always quiet and professional, and it is rare to find more than a handful of agents in the offices.  Consequently, our building can fully accommodate up to 200 agents without adding more space.  [We have growth plans to triple our size before slowing down.]  Our national technology support staff, our managing broker, and our accounting staff are on hand to help agents whenever needed during normal business hours, and there is a genuine spirit of cooperation.  Our agents love the company, which is evident in our low agent churn rate.  (Our company’s agent turnover is about 10% per year as opposed to the industry’s 40%.)

Our company runs its own state-approved real estate academy.  Three of our agents are state-licensed instructors for pre-licensing and post-licensing classes.  Our philosophy is to grow our own agents while assimilating as much transfer growth as possible in the process. We’ve found that training new agents is easier than converting traditional agents to practice real estate the new way.  Our large, comfortable classroom accommodates 40 students and is equipped with digital surround sound, ceiling mounted projection, camera lights, and a raised camera platform.

Through another key-pad door you’ll find our executive wing, where the national staff works.  As you enter the executive suite, the carpet changes and the wall color drops to subdued taupe.  Matching artwork punctuates the foyer.  While the door to the executive suite stays open during business hours, it is set up so that agents are reluctant to enter without good reason.  The first office in the executive suite is the managing broker.  Next is our Internet Technology office and server room, where we house over 500 servers that support our national technology platforms, our media website, and our corporate websites.  We have redundant Internet with bonded T-1 service and high-speed business class cable.

The executive offices are spacious and well furnished in mahogany and leather.  All are well decorated and immaculate.  At the end of the hall is my assistant’s office, which opens into my office through glass french doors.  My personal assistant is my gatekeeper, though she also performs multiple functions for the company.

In all, we have a total staff of managing broker, web developer, and a three-person customer service and coaching staff.  In 2006, one of them moved away and now works remotely from her own virtual office.  She is constantly in touch with our office through instant messaging, email, and telephone.  We have three people in our accounting department, although one is only part-time.  Finally, I have a personal assistant.  Including me, our entire staff adds up to a whopping 10 people, and only 9 full-time.  Everyone wears multiple hats and serves in various functions.  My head of agent coaching also is chief editor of our media brand.  My customer service manager is also our director of communications.  My personal assistant is also our graphic designer and does our video production, while managing my schedule.  Because of the technology we use, everyone can see what everyone else has done with various agents, and everyone is linked together and able to work effectively whether at home, at the office, or on the road.

Our virtual company is able to support over 14,000 technology users, coach hundreds of agents, build new technologies, write and publish best practices content, run a national real estate media website with over 2.2 million page views per month and over 975,000 subscribers, and continue to run our local brokerage operation while expanding our virtual office real estate model into other markets with a total staff of 9 1/2 people.  That is the power of technology.  The amazing thing is that we will be able to quadruple in size without expanding personnel by more than one or two people.

Our agents each have their own electronic fax number and their own Pipeline Pro account allowing them to generate their own low cost customer leads, and manage them fluidly with the integrated contact management solution.  Each has his own website as opposed to sharing a company site.  Through our advanced phone system each agent receives his own calls as opposed to having them mismanaged by a poor receptionist or stolen by another agent sitting at the duty desk.  This model is the very picture of agent empowerment: each agent manages his own independent business.  When you walk into our office there are no desk phones and almost everyone works on a notebook or laptop computer.

We outsource our payroll to a national payroll service, so agent 1099s and W-2s don’t shut down our accounting department for the month of January.  We don’t hire any sales staff for our technology company.  Instead we have outsourced our technology development to another company who does a fantastic job and shares in the revenue.  When the web development chores are beyond the capacity of our one full-time developer and the other two of us who can do development, we have a global firm who works with us remotely from Jordan and India to supplement our development.

Our managing broker is able to oversee all the activity of our agents by the stroke of a few keys.  Our technology platform is designed so that he can generate a new customer lead, assign it to one of our agents, monitor that agent’s progress, and then pull the lead back from that agent along with all the notes and activities with another click of the mouse.  Then he can reassign it, history and all, to another agent.  And he can do it from anywhere, whether he is at home or at the office, or from his Blackberry while sitting at lunch recruiting another agent.  Last weekend while I was at the beach on my sailboat, I completed my latest blog material and posted it to three different syndicated sites without ever stepping off the boat.

We are a virtual company.  We still have an office, of course.  We value human interaction.  But we have all the advantages of the traditional office structure without any of the negatives.  And because we leverage technology and offset office overhead with affiliate business revenues, our business expense are a fraction of our competitors and we are extremely profitable, all while paying our agents over 20% more than the average company.  It is liberating, and it is very, very cool!

But the fact is that going virtual is a mindset.  Instead of following traditional overhead-intensive methods for accomplishing a task, we look for a virtual way of doing the same thing while saving money in the process.  You could do the same thing if you reprogram your mind to think that way.  It’s easier than you think.