While the pace of the market has accelerated, creating challenges for both seller’s and buyer’s agents, seasoned agents say their experience is helping them succeed.

Massachusetts’ incredibly tight market has challenged real estate agents competing for listings and clients, forcing some part-time agents to step back from the market even as others have seen their businesses grow. 

Technology quickly took center stage last spring, allowing people to stay safe while shopping for, and selling, homes. Videos, 3D tours, social media marketing and Zoom became as essential as real estate itself. Matterport and ShowingTime became more common in the real estate vernacular. While real estate professionals understood the importance of a strong online presence before the pandemic, it’s intensified as a priority over the past year, said Paul Grover, founder of Robert Paul Properties, now part of Berkshire Hathaway Home Services.  

“In our industry, the winners are the people who have continued to invest in the website, and in the quality of the video and photography on it,” he said. “Because the buyer and the consumers demand it.” 

Support from All Sides 

To help agents at Jack Conway & Co. manage this transition, Executive Vice President and COO Al Becker invited all 700 Jack Conway agents to an optional weekly Zoom call. Initially meant to orient agents to home WiFi use, touchless marketing and keeping in touch with past clients, the event evolved into a “company-wide call for leadership,” complete with invited guests. Thanks, perhaps, in part to that support, 95 percent of Jack Conway’s active agents had returned to the field by the middle of last fall, Becker said. 

Amy Mizner, a senior vice president at Gibson Sotheby’s International Realty in Weston, credits similar leadership with helping her to stay educated, “ahead of the pack” and growing her business over the past year.  

In some brokerages, support staff bolstered agents with the necessary technology know-how.  

“We’re lucky enough in our company to have a marketing support person and two administrative people who helped the agents bridge that technology gap,” said Gail Lockberg, broker/owner of Berkshire Hathaway Home Services Town and Country Real Estate Wellesley.  

Grover agreed: “It’s just bringing in really tech-savvy people” as non-sales staff as a resource for his team of roughly 130 agents.  

Part-Timers on the Sidelines 

There’s a stereotype that younger agents have adapted more quickly while the veteran agents most comfortable with an analog approach, based on extended time with clients, have floundered amid real estate’s hyper-digitization. 

“We did see a decline in business from some of those folks,” Becker said.  

“It wasn’t just older folks, it was also people who had young children at home,” he added, noting that pandemic family demands edged some agents out of real estate. 

Lockberg saw a certain slice of veteran agents abandon their work amid the change; those who weren’t necessarily at the end of their careers, but had stepped back to work part-time.  

“Now, that doesn’t mean when things straighten out a little bit they may not be back,” she added.  

But Mizner suspects that part-time real estate agents, regardless of their age and career stage, will not return.  

“If people are just looking at this as a part-time job, they’re going to give up and move on – and they should,” she said. “I think the quality of the real estate agents out there will be elevated, because they’re going to be the agents that see it through.”  

She urges those who aren’t comfortable with a fully digital platform to hire someone to manage that part of their business. For her part, Mizner launched the Mizner + Montero team under the Gibson Sotheby’s umbrella with leading Back Bay agent Will Montero amid the pandemic, to serve the flood of city-dwellers looking for luxury suburban homes.  

Other types of partnerships also emerged as agents realized what the pandemic required of them. Grover highlighted symbiotic partnerships between veteran and younger agents. Younger, more digitally minded agents could seamlessly adapt to new tools. Yet some of the most successful agents are older, with deep networks built up over decades, he said – and they realized the benefit of working with younger, tech-savvy agents. 

Extreme Market Challenges Agents 

Most of those interviewed for this article agreed that, as challenging as the need to adapt to new technology was, the extreme seller’s market was tougher, from pricing listings to working with lots of disappointed buyers and guiding sellers through a bevy of offers amid historically low inventory. According to the Massachusetts Association of Realtors, March 2021 had the lowest number of single-family homes and condominiums for sale since it started reporting data in 2004, with condo prices at an all-time high.  

“That whole dynamic of the market is what everyone’s dealing with right now,” Becker said. “That’s the biggest shift we’ve seen and that’s where all our training has gone.” 

Some agents have no listings right now, Grover said. The agents most likely to not be in that situation are “agents that have been at it a very long time, who’ve always remained active in their market and have done the right thing in terms of staying close to the client and always following up,” he said. 

Mizner said that experienced agents are thriving in the extreme sellers’ market.  

“Because of low inventory, relationships matter, so a lot of things are selling off-market. It’s the intel of knowing what’s coming on the market and being ready for it,” she said. 

Emotional intelligence, a skill that often develops over time, has also been important throughout the pandemic, with people more on edge than they normally are. Putting deals together requires more handholding, nurturing and empathy, and experienced agents are more likely to step up with the necessary emotional nuance, Grover said. 

Whatever their experience level or comfort level with technology, MAR 2021 President Steve Medeiros sees a commonality among the agents thriving right now. Amid the early pandemic’s widespread fear, as work nearly ground to a halt, they retooled their businesses.  

“They said, ‘I’m going to stay in touch with my clients,’” he said. “And they just went at it from a position of care and caring about their clients.”