Sustainability Promise
We have a big mission to revolutionize the real estate industry with a promise of sustainability. To us, being A National Cloud Based Real Estate Brokerage™ means eliminating the redundancies of traditional real estate brokerages and moving to a paperless, low carbon footprint, highly efficient ecosystem leveraging today’s technologies.
Innovative Virtual Office Environment
Being Green, Carbon Footprints or many of the other buzz words currently circulating however that doesn’t mean that those terms and ideals have slipped through the cracks. There are real reductions in things like Carbon Footprints by working in a Virtual Real Estate environment.
Everyone benefits from less driving to and from and office. Assuming an Office is an average of 5 miles from one’s home there is likely a savings of 10 miles per trip to the office. Assuming having to run into the office once per day that is a savings of over 200 miles per month on your automobile. Using the tax deductibility of 55 cents/mile as the loaded cost of driving that means that as an agent you will save an average of $110/month. This overall deduction is based on the price of gas, oil, maintenance and depreciation related to driving however even if the true costs are 1/2 of that that is still $55/month savings or a net increase of $660 – $1320 / year to the real estate agent and staff members. It also means fewer Carbon emissions.
Paperless
In real estate we still haven’t been able to get totally away from Paper but we are certainly making progress. Many offices still make multiple copies of a contract: One for the agent physical file, broker file, escrow officer, lender, buyer, and seller. By creating a shared cloud file we are able to reduce the number of copies considerably. And as early adopters using Ecosign or Docusign we eliminate printing all together.
Corporate Travel
The virtual home office eliminated the need for big ticket travel. The reduction this year in Corporate Travel has already been significant. We have reduced our big ticket travel by 50% through the adoption of Virtual Office strategies and we expect to drive them down even further as a % of overall expenses without giving up many of the benefits of physical travel.
The significant time and money savings is huge as well. By not having to travel to the airport, parking, picking up a rental car, getting a hotel room / conference room is huge. These translate into net real savings for eXp Realty and an increase in the financial splits to agents and staff.
Sustainability Promise
As you can see there are very compelling reasons for going Green, however how one goes Green may have greater financial impact then simply going Green. We have adopted strategies which will change the way brokers, agents and consumers think about the way real estate brokerages of the future operate, and we promise to continue to lead the way.
