Real Estate Will Always Be a People Business

When CEO Spencer Rascoff got up to deliver his mainstage presentation at this year’s Premier Agent Forum, he told the audience he wanted to talk about something different. Something more personal.

He told the story of his father, Joseph Rascoff, who passed away in April after a more than 20-year battle with cancer.

The emotional nature of the subject was a departure from Spencer’s past presentations at Forum, during which, he said, he usually extols the size and scale of Zillow’s consumer audience and talks about the company’s mission.

Innovation, bravery and the human connection

Yet in talking about his father, a trailblazing businessman who transformed the economics of the music industry over a 45-year career, Spencer hit on universal themes of innovation, bravery, and, most of all, the power of the human connection.

The relationships between a client and an agent, Spencer said, form the lifeblood of the real estate industry.

https://youtu.be/1PeUMqyq5o0

Zillions + pillows

In fact, the name ‘Zillow’ was born out of a conscious recognition that real estate sits at the center of the transactional and the emotional, Spencer said. The name is a portmanteau, a combination of two words derived from “zillions” and “pillows.”

There’s the left brain – the quantitative side of ourselves – which is the math, the data, the Zestimate, the dollar-per-square-foot, the mortgage amount, the title insurance, Spencer explained.

“That’s the zillions,” he said.

Then there’s the right brain, or the “pillow” side of real estate. This is the emotional side; the side that helps you choose which is the home where you want to rest your head at night. It’s the side that feels like a certain home is the right place to raise your kids.

Real estate is emotional and transactional

Agents power the industry’s emotional side of the equation, Spencer said. Those who can embrace the rapid-fire changes in technology – innovations that help with the purely transactional side of the business – will be the most successful, he said, because the differentiator will always lie in the relationships agents have with their clients.

Over the last six months, as Spencer sat by his father’s bedside, he asked his dad what he was most proud of in his career.

 “Time and again, he kept coming back to the people,” Spencer said. It was the relationships he had with his team, his clients and his business partners that he most valued.

Spencer stressed that this investment in human connections will continue to drive success in real estate.

“Whatever comes next, people relationships are what’s going to matter,” he said.

Watch the full video of Spencer’s Premier Agent Forum 2017 presentation.

https://youtu.be/6RD1FQKSJZg