Back in the days before the internet and before Boligsiden, Boliga and all the other portals, you found your dream home by going to the area you were interested in and stopping by all the real estate agents’ shops to see what was for sale. The real estate agents’ only way to sell homes was through their stores and newspaper ads that they hoped would reach the right buyers.

For real estate agents, all paperwork was collected physically and all matters were handled manually. Because you couldn’t easily send things via email and because you had to have physical stores to sell homes anyway, it didn’t make sense to have parts of the tasks gathered at the head offices. Every real estate agency store therefore had all functions at the offices.

Both for the sales work and for all the administrative work, each store had considerable costs, so selling your home wasn’t cheap.

However, times have changed. Today, 98% of all buyers find their homes online through the portals where all real estate agents list their homes for sale, Boligsiden, Boliga and others, or through digital ads that have been tailored to reach them. Documents for listing a property for sale are retrieved digitally and email and other communication methods allow you to gather administrative functions in one office to be more efficient per property.

Yet the real estate industry has stuck to structures that do not reflect how homes are sold today. They have gathered in large chains whose name is seen as a seal of approval for the individual store and owners. These chains have swallowed up many of the small real estate stores. Although these are often more or less empty, the chains have retained the large offices on every street corner and retained a structure where each store has high costs for staff and specific functions. On the other hand, the chain office is very well paid for the chain name. This means that many of the individual stores, despite retaining the high salaries from before the internet, still struggle to make ends meet. However, the head offices are doing well. The large profits are being used to expand the store and open even more offices.

The problem with this structure is that it is unnecessary and promotes inefficiency. It’s fine for head offices as business grows and profits increase. But the big problem is that it’s the sellers who are paying the price by paying up to $100,000+ to sell their home.

At Brikk, we think this is a problem. So when someone asks us how you can sell your home for so much less with Brikk, it’s not because we provide a worse service, or because everything isn’t included or because we don’t have physical agents. We have all of that too. However, it’s because it doesn’t cost DKK 100,000+ to sell a home. What you pay so much for as a seller is the big offices, old-fashioned structures, lack of innovation and, in reality, the continued growth of the big chains.