Corcoran Group – “Gone a bit too corporate...”

Pros

Managing Directors are great and very caring towards employees. The brokers also tend to be very helpful with one another and understand that to be successful in the business, you must collaborate with each other. There is also a lot of pride in saying that you work for Corcoran because it has a good reputation in the industry and has done a wonderful job of marketing its brand. They also provide a generous ad budget.

Corcoran also does a great job of providing agents with excellent marketing tools/sheets, as well as offer an array of training courses for new agents, as well as legally mandated courses to keep up on new laws which affect the industry and individual agents. The offices are always very clean/ well kept, which is a big plus when you bring customers.

Cons

The database can always use improvement, and it wasn't until recently that you could logon to it on a Mac, which is was just "too bad" for anyone who only had a Mac but needed to continue working from home in the evening which is often the case in real estate. Nonetheless, there is an nearly $2,000 "technology fee" that you have to pay on a yearly basis. There have always been "improvements", but the bugs and kinks never seem to be quite fixed. You can lose an hour's worth of research if it decides to freeze up and re-load itself. Where's that tech fee going to again??

The overall concensus is that the company has gone a bit too corporate- this change started shortly after the departure of Barbara Corcoran and it has become very corporate now. Of course, it is expected that with increased use of technology, internet, emails and texting, the personal touch is somewhat lost, but it is just about the bottom dollar at this point and I don't know that the loyalty which brokers used to have to the company is still as strong because of this shift in the company's dynamic.

Advice to Senior Management

When you have the annual rewards party or are communicating to the brokers, remember that you are communicating to people and not just a corporate audience. Oftentimes, it feels like Pam Liebman is addressing shareholders instead of the bread and butter of the company. It is important to acknowledge and reward the people who are progressing in the "smaller" end of the sales volume scale in order to keep them motivated and excited about Corcoran. It is not just about the big sharks- everyone who sells/rents contributes to the success of the company. I'm not suggesting that you recognize every single person, but look at the big picture and perhaps broaden the horizons.