I’m about to step into a debate with Peter Brewer later this afternoon about the traditional real estate office. My position in this debate is based on a simple, provocative claim:
The traditional real estate office will be extinct in five years.
Before you sharpen your knife, let me make sure I’m being explicit. My position is not an argument against people. It’s not an argument against place. And it’s definitely not an argument against community.
It‘s an argument against a very specific idea of space that no longer justifies itself.
The fabulous Samantha McLean is the organizer of this debate. So I asked her for a definition of a traditional real estate office. For impartiality, she turned to ChatGPT, which described “the traditional real estate office” as follows: “a high-street storefront, listings in the window, desks for agents, a reception area, and a physical anchor for local transactions.”
That definition really matters. Because if that’s the office we’re defending, then yes, I believe it’s on borrowed time. And I believe it should be.
Not because real estate is becoming less human. But because it needs to become more so.
The Traditional Real Estate Office Was Built For A Different World
As defined, the traditional office made sense in a world of information scarcity. You needed a place to see listings, move paper, and coordinate access. Knowledge lived there.
That world is gone.
The internet and AI haven’t just changed speed. They’ve changed where value lives. Discovery, comparison, scheduling, follow-up, and even a good deal of guidance now reside online. It actually has for a long time. Artificial intelligence changes the equation. AI brings that information alive in new ways. And in that online, mediated space, you can’t out-respond it or out-inform it. It just wins.
This is something I’ve been circling for years under the banner of Humaneering. The real disruption of AI is not intelligence. It’s how it feels. It’s intimacy. Mediated systems increasingly simulate human presence while quietly stripping away context, accountability, and relationship.
That reframes the real question. It’s no longer “How do I compete with AI?” It’s “where can I still be unmistakably human?”
Where This Thinking Was Shaped
A large part of how I think about this comes from watching a brilliant friend solve a parallel problem long before our new tech wizards forced it. About fourteen years ago, Brad Nix was helping reimagine what a community bank could be through a concept called Acru. It was magical.
Community banks were already losing relevance. Trust had been damaged. Consumers already had more access to information than ever before. The obvious, traditional move would have been to double down on efficiency.
Brad went the other direction. He designed a space that didn’t feel like a bank at all. Watch this.
As he put it to me recently:
We started with the role of the human, in our case it was a Wealth Strategist. This role needs to be trusted as a guide for someone’s money and life. People don’t like to invite strangers into their home. People also don’t default to trusting employees in an office. People establish trust through micro moments over a period of time and we needed a neutral space for that to happen.
Acru embedded a coffee house into the bank itself. Or maybe they embedded a bank in a coffee house. People could come in for coffee, meet a friend, sit down, or have a conversation about life that might involve money, but didn’t have to start there.
Brad explained the logic this way:
If we can’t use an office or expect to be invited into people’s homes, then where does life happen in a local community? Coffee, shops, and breweries. Neutral third spaces that don’t require a meal with larger expenses and expectations.
That insight still matters.
The goal wasn’t to trick people into financial conversations. It was to create a space where trust could form naturally, without forcing a transaction.
Or as Brad put it:
What if we just worked alongside the community in a space they actually want to be in? No pressure, no expectations, just co-working and co-living like humans want to do anyway.
That experiment worked. Not because it was trendy, but because it was human.
And when it eventually faded after the model was sold, it wasn’t because the idea failed. It was because it was hard to replicate, hard to operationalize, and required skills that many institutions didn’t have. Still don’t have.
That doesn’t make it wrong. It makes it instructive.
AI Will Own the Web. Humans Must Own the Room.
If you accept, as I do, that AI will increasingly dominate mediated interactions, then the implications for physical space are unavoidable.
The future of real estate does not belong to offices designed around transactions. It belongs to spaces designed around trust. It belongs to spaces designed around humans.
Judgment. Empathy. Presence. Context. These are not features you scale through workflows. They emerge in spaces. They grow through conversation. They require environments that invite people to stay, not hurry up and leave.
Most traditional real estate offices sit empty most of the day. They are expensive, underutilized, and optimized for a version of work that no longer defines the profession.
Meanwhile, agents are already doing their most meaningful work elsewhere. Coffee shops. Living rooms. Kitchen tables. Community spaces. Neutral ground.
That isn’t a rebellion. It’s an adaptation.
What Dies Is Not Space – It’s Bad Space
This is where the conversation usually derails. When people hear “the office is dying,” they hear “place doesn’t matter.”
That’s wrong.
Place matters more than ever.
But not all places deserve to survive.
A desk farm behind glass doesn’t create belonging. A reception area doesn’t build trust. Flyers in a window don’t create a relationship.
Spaces that survive the next decade will justify their existence even when no deal is in the works. They’ll earn foot traffic without demanding it. They’ll feel less like workplaces and more like the third spaces Brad talked about; places where life already happens, and business emerges naturally, not transactionally.
That’s not a theory. I witnessed it. I felt it.
Humaneering, Made Physical
Humaneering is about designing systems that preserve what makes us human in an automated world. Most people apply that idea to software and policy.
But space is a system too.
When space is designed around efficiency alone, it quietly trains people to behave like components. When it’s designed around humans, it creates the conditions for trust.
That’s the shift I’m arguing for. Not the elimination of offices, but a reinvention.
The future real estate space will not look like some bygone showroom for listings. It will look like a place you’d go even if you weren’t buying or selling a home. A place where conversations feel natural, trust is earned, and presence still matters.
Why I’m Taking the “Extinction” Side Of The Traditional Real Estate Office Debate
Debates almost necessarily force false binaries. I’m choosing the “the traditional office will not survive” side because I believe it’s true as defined.
That model is fragile. It’s economically inefficient. And it competes directly with systems that will always be faster and cheaper.
But extinction isn’t the end of the story. It’s the beginning.
What replaces the traditional real estate office will be more human, not less. More relational, not more technical. More lived-in, not more polished.
And that, ironically, is excellent news for agents who want to remain irreplaceable.
The future of real estate isn’t fewer spaces.
It’s better spaces.
And we’ve already seen what that can look like, if we’re willing to learn from it.
Add your voice...