Recently I was in Orlando at the Florida Realtors midwinter meeting. While there I saw the updated membership stats for the Realtor boards here in South Florida. Would you believe that across all three counties there are about 70,000 Realtors?
Periodically I take a look at the competitive situation here in WilMa. Does any one Realtor dominate the market in the Island City? Does any one brokerage company? Just how fragmented is the business and what implications might that have for Realtors and brokers (and customers too)?
I looked at all sales of single family homes, town homes and condos for calendar years 2014 and 2015 combined. I wanted to see who was doing what – how many transactions, how much sales volume. No I won’t name names (but I do know them).
Over the last two years, more than 650 Realtors were involved in at least one sales transaction here in the Island City. Those Realtors represented more than 250 separate brokerage companies. Of course, most of those Realtors (and companies) were involved in exactly one WilMa transaction in that time frame.
Holy Fragmentation!
But how does the business distribute overall? The two pie charts here spell it all out. Considering individual Realtors, the Realtor who did the most Island City business the last two years had just under three percent of the total market. The “Top 10” have 18 percent of the market. The “Top 50” have 41 percent! Bear in mind it is a fairly large market with more than $100 million in annual sales volume (Multiple Listing Service sales only).
Clearly no one Realtor (or even group of Realtors) dominates.
When you consider market share in WilMa for the various brokerage companies, even that would still be considered a fragmented market by the standard definition. The leading company in the Island City does about 11 percent of the total volume. Yet the “Top Five” firms do only 41 percent, and more than 250 companies have at least a small piece of the WilMa pie.
by 