BBC’s incredible Blue Planet series captured the dramatic demise of a shoal of herring after having encountered a group of predatory tuna.
You may recall the images: a shoal of herring encountered a handful of tuna who corralled the herring toward the surface of the water. As the swarming ball of herring reached the surface, the tuna unleashed their attack. One by one the herring were picked off from the tuna below and from the gulls above. It was a total massacre. The lesson? You cannot rely on the same predatorial or instinctual behaviour when your environment changes!
The herring instinctually gathered in numbers to scare off the odd lone predator, however, such instinct was the exact opposite required in the environment created by the unfamiliar school of tuna. In fact, the herring’s best chance of survival would have been to have dispersed and made a lone swim for it.
With new predators entering the real estate market, will traditional agents suffer the same fate? Well, if they don’t learn to adapt to their predators new behaviour, then, Yes!
For years traditional agents have been swimming in their own ocean, free of predators; but now, monstrous predators emerge in the form of online agencies. The traditional agency instinct has been that of a solitary agent whose main concern was fighting for its own territory. Whereas the new online agencies consider physical territory superfluous. So the question stands: will that ‘traditional’ agents change their solitary behaviour and collaborate with other like agents to protect themselves from being gobbled up by the online agencies? Or will they continue to act oblivious to the present danger?
The answer currently hangs in the balance. On the plus side there is a general sense that agencies need to collaborate more – the Agents Mutual initiative of the OntheMarket portal was an example. Unfortunately, that initiative was botched and its failure has disillusioned many into believing that full industry collaboration will be impossible. Likewise, there are a large proportion of agencies that think they can out smart the online agencies or simply don’t recognise online agencies as competitors at all.
However, so long as there is a united concern for the survival of individual agents, there is hope for collaboration. And such hope was the catalyst to a new portal of collaboration — one that realises the pain points of the agent, the seller, the buyer and creates a mutual beneficial space for each party’s success.
Its name? Mutual Pre-Portal Property Platform.
Max Fuller is the Creator and Founder of Mutual Pre-Portal Property Platform