Today I was able to be a part of a title company’s focus group that wanted feedback from Idaho real estate industry leaders on ways they could improve their systems while working in tandem with lenders and real estate agents. They showed us some pictures of a major banks new take on banking while introducing customers to banking “cafes” which are completely modern and open and offer a variety of comfortable meeting areas. While most of the older folks in the crowd said they wouldn’t bank that way, many of the younger folks liked the idea. They even had very large touch screens in which folks could search the internet, pull up apps, or just check out pertinent banking information. The title company wanted to determine how they could improve their customer experience modeling after the banks approach. I certainly have my boutique brokerage input and loved most of the ideas. My hang up is how does it get paid for. I think of the low fees at my brokerage and the monthly revenue and know we could not afford to implement anything close to these changes and in order to do that, we need to raise fees or the amount of agents we have. I guess, I’ll work on the latter since I like offering my agents a great commission split in which they take home most of their commissions. I do expect changes down the pike as technology improves. More to come. We learn every day and one day I will know enough that I find that happy medium where my agents get a lions share of commission and we make enough to offer state of the art space and tools.