Most real estate professionals are excellent when it comes to multitasking, but sometimes there are situations when there are too many tasks to perform but not enough time or manpower to handle these duties. And this is where Blok comes in.
Headquartered in Franklin, Tennessee, Blok defines its mission as offering support to “real estate agents, teams, and boutique brokerages by combining the skill of talented people with the latest technology to provide the branding, marketing, back-office service and compliance they require.” Shaun Minnie, the company’s founder co-founder and CEO, recently took time from his busy schedule to talk about Blok’s role in today’s real estate industry.
For the benefit of our readers who are not familiar with Blok, can you introduce us to your company?
We started building the solutions we’re now offering to real estate agents and brokerages about three years ago, and we came to market with the first of those solutions in early 2023. If I have to summarize that in a sentence or two, I would say that Blok offers customized solutions to agents, teams, and brokerages to ensure they are doing the really important work of attending to their customers’ needs and selling real estate. We take care of all the other parts, from setting up their branding through to closing transactions, sending them a P&L and all of what goes with running a business. So, we’ve freed them up entirely to focus on those important parts.
I think an important point is that is we customize the solution according to their needs. We’d never create a box and put them in their box – we get to understand exactly what they doing, what works and what doesn’t around their unique environment, and we then customize the solution.
We insert our proprietary tech at the right places to make it more efficient – build out those workflows, build out those processes – and then we manage that in the background. We’ve got a bunch of really talented people to manage each part of their business, whether it be the marketing piece, their website piece, their transaction piece, the financial piece – all those pieces they wish for us to manage. We will integrate their staff and their technology pieces if they wish, and they hand off to us the pieces that they feel really slow them down.
It’s a very customized solution, compared with anything else that I’m aware of in the market.
You recently announced a new partnership with Energy Realty in Houston. What are you doing with this company?
Energy Realty came from Side, a significant unicorn in our industry who gave them support in terms of a version of the version of which I’ve just described. The major differentiator is that with a company like Side or Keller Williams, if you’re a brokerage, they hold all your licensing and all the vendor relationships – it’s their processes. Energy came to us and said, “I want to claim my business back – I want to own the actual brokerage, not just an LLC version with some assets in, and I want to build my brand out in terms of who I am and what we offer.”
Our relationship with Energy was built around much of what I said in the first response, We took all the heavy lifting off their plate and they now own 100% of the actual brokerage. We’ve inserted everything from a broker for the licensing piece to a financial manager to transaction coordinators, rebuilt their website, rebuilt the marketing, and they’ve now got a team of six people that work around them all. It’s literally everything other than sitting in front of agents to recruit – we actually get the agents to the table. And in terms of managing the staff and ensuring deals are done, we take care of all the rest of it.
Who is your core market within the U.S. real estate industry?
Our customers are individual agents, doing at least three million and above, and for them we’ve got a bunch of really cool tools and services that we can bundle up to help those agents get from three to five and then five to 10.
This is entirely aimed at residential agents – we’ve got a good understanding of them. I can’t imagine we would take on a brokerage with beyond 150 agents today.
If we were to pick up this conversation a year from now, where do you see your company?
We’ve got a very aggressive three-year view. We think that the lawsuits currently will change how the industry has to operate. It is my personal opinion that the train has left the station on that and that there’s no turning back to the way things were. If I’m right about that, every agent irrespective of being at a big brand or on their own will need to articulate their particular value proposition to the marketplace and say, “This is what I know, this is my experience, this is what I can offer you.” At the end of the day, every agent will need to decide themselves what they can charge and then have to put that out in some format that they’re able to move forward to potential customers.
I think to that end, the opportunity for us to gain significant agent traction over the next 12 months is real. I think we’re solving a real problem with a good brand, with good messaging and good platforms like our websites to deliver that messaging.
Then thinking in terms of brokerages, that’s a longer sales cycle. We’ve only got a handful of brokerages at the moment, a couple of large ones doing north of 150 million, and we think we can grow that maybe three or fourfold to the end of the year. We think we can grow agent numbers quite significantly, and team numbers quite significantly. So, by the end of this year, I think we’re delivering to an audience of about 1,000 agents.
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