All Brokers Collaborative agents have a minimum of 10 years experience.
Operationally, Brokers Collaborative focused itself on bringing greater marketing reach and office resources to it’s’ agents and clients. Of the two predominate listing services, LINK on-line and MLS pin, Brokers Collaborative was the very first office subscriber and the first downtown Boston office subscriber, respectively. Particularly in the case of MLS, Brokers Collaborative played a significant role in how online real estate information is sourced for Boston’s residential markets.
The first policy built from this attitude was an unwavering consensus that Brokers Collaborative would never disallow or discourage the participation of other real estate firms or agents in the pursuit of its’ clients’ goals. Similarly, Brokers Collaborative maintains a zero tolerance policy of the practice of maintaining secretly held listings sometimes referred to as “pocket listings”. Simply put, do not allow the prospect of improving the firm’s bottom line at the expensive of our clients’ bottom line.
As area firms continued to be distracted by propping up their spread sheets for mergers and acquisitions, Brokers Collaborative was keenly focused on delivering superior client services. The first building block was the concept that we put our clients’ interest first in every decision we make and set new standards for ethics and marketing practices in doing so.
Seeing both a need and an opportunity for a higher level of client services and with the addition of a third partner, Brokers Collaborative was formed and opened its’ doors on Newbury Street in 1999.
Brokers Collaborative was the working name of a concept for a real estate office shared by original partners Gareth Gorman and Pamela Emerson in the late 1990s. As practicing agents themselves at two of the larger real estate firms of the time, the two had become frustrated by two trends; the growth of an ineffective and ever changing middle management sector within real estate firms and a depletion of resources available to the brokers in order to (1) support the management structure and to (2) improve the balance sheets in hopes of pushing valuations higher to court or appease shareholders. In an effort to increase profits, at least one major Boston real estate firm went so far as to shield its’ listings from other cooperating agencies by disallowing agents from outside firms to show their listings when they first came on the market and by offering financial incentives to its’ own agents for selling property without the assistance of outside brokers.