NEW YORK CITY–We caught up with Brandon Weber, founder and CEO of Hightower, at an auspicious time in the company's young history. It was the eve of the launch of Hightower.co.uk, the formalization of the online leasing firm's push to conquer the European/Middle East/Asia market. Weber, who will be a speaker at the upcoming CCIM Thrive Conference in October, is a self-proclaimed disciple of CCIM, and he believes, as you will read, that therein lies the path to modern brokerage.

GlobeSt.com: Brandon, with all the talk of disintermediation, where is the broker's place today and how do they capitalize on sites like Hightower?

Brandon Weber: You're speaking to a former broker. I was at CBRE for six years prior to starting Hightower. I also did a lot of tenant rep work, so I was a through-and-through leasing guy, and I've walked many miles in the shoes of the broker.

So most of my point of view on where the industry stands today and the gap between that and where it should stand over the next five to eight years comes through the lens of supply and demand, from representing both institutions and corporations.

And another wrinkle in that is that prior to CBRE, I was building software for the residential real estate industry at Zillow. That was an incredibly disruptive company, and frightening to the agent communities. The National Association of Realtors wanted to burn Zillow's name in effigy. Everyone believed they were going to be replaced by robots or their commissions would evaporate.

In fact, when we started Zillow, the predictions were that we would eliminate 50% of real estate agents and it would compress agency commissions from 3% to 1.5%.

GlobeSt.com: And then?

Weber: What ended up happening was completely the reverse. Platforms like Zillow and Trulia essentially just built a set of tools and technology and infrastructure to make the entire market more effective–first and foremost, the agents. It became a marketing platform for agents to get their brands out there, to have clients find them rather than the reverse and give them a set of tools to help them manage their internal business

As it turns out, there are more real estate agents today than before Zillow, commission percentages haven't changed at all and they've become dramatically more efficient. The average transaction time to buy or sell a home has dropped precipitously outside of outlier markets like Detroit.

GlobeSt.com: But that's the residential side. Commercial is another ball of wax.

Weber: When I stepped into commercial real estate it was like stepping into the land that time forgot, which is fascinating because commercial real estate is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than residential.

GlobeSt.com: And it always seemed to me a woefully tech-averse industry.

Weber: I argue a different point. It's an industry that's been delivered very little quality technology. Prior to this wave of technology companies, like Hightower, the technology that was delivered for commercial real estate was hard to use and it had nothing to do with the broker. Data providers do one thing ok, they aggregate a couple of data sets that are frankly a commodity in other industries. So brokerage has effectively had to hack other systems for their own use. They try to use a bland CRM to somehow monitor the lifecycle of a leasing transaction.

So I would argue that the two circles of commercial real estate and technology just don't overlap. But no one has delivered them any good tools. Now, as an industry, there is a developing focus on delivering specific value and doing it at 10 times the depth and quality of a horizontal product like a Salesforce or a Workday.

GlobeSt.com: So what can you tell the naysayers today? Where are you now in your growth?

Weber: We now have almost 2 billion square feet on the platform and almost 9000 brokers using it across North America, Chile, Mexico, Philippines, Singapore, Australia and lots of countries in Europe. And we can actually go back and quantify the return on investment in Hightower. We can quantify that inventory sits about four-and-a-half days less on the market when it is being run and powered and marketed through Hightower. It's super cool.

We also get data around NOI because we're comparing the budgets and tracking the deals and we have all the comps in front of us. Data we've received from our clients tell us that deals running through Hightower realize a 1.6 to 1.7% increase in net effective rent. When you cap that out and apply it to a multi-billion-dollar portfolio that's a massive ROI.

GlobeSt.com: You're officially opening the London operation tomorrow. Do you see any impact from Brexit? Will it disturb the plan?

Weber: It hasn't disturbed the plan. Will it disturb execution or outcomes? Right now we are trending toward not seeing a disturbance.

GlobeSt.com: What are we going to be looking at in terms of technology a year from now?

Weber: A year ago, we were less than a third our current size, both in terms of square footage and brokers on the platform. We were pretty nascent a year ago. Now we've got 25% of the top 200 institutional owners and another 30% are evaluating. So on the institutional side it's moving very quickly to industry standard.

On the brokered side, in a year, if you see yourself as a modern broker and you're not walking into a pitch with a tech platform as part of your offering, you'll be at a competitive disadvantage. I see it as a schism between the modern broker and someone behind the times.

There will be a tipping point built on how brokerage teams and companies leverage technology platforms to provide insightful consultancy services–and not just commodities.

To that extent, I am a CCIM disciple. I've always thought of it as a thought-leadership body. And a year from now thought-leadership bodies will have to provide their members Technology 101 and 201 programming. The new modern broker will be the broker who takes advantage of that. There's finally a need for new thought leadership.

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