If you’ve purchased property in New York in the last decade, you’ve probably worked with a Voro agent. You just might not know it.
Now, Voro is coming out from behind the curtain and putting its name on the sizable segment of the real estate market its agents have captured. The real estate technology company’s brokerage model provides the resources of a large agency while putting 100% of the commissions into the hands of agents and quietly working behind the scenes to help them build relationships and close deals. The Real Deal sat down with Voro.com Founder Daniel Shamooil to learn about the philosophy behind the company and how its model is perfect for agents navigating today’s real estate market.
Building a Better Brokerage
While overseeing a thriving traditional brick-and-mortar retail brokerage in Manhattan, Shamooil developed the concept for Voro. In the conventional broker-agent relationship, commissions are divided with a significant portion going to the brokerage in exchange for the agency hopefully providing meaningful lead generation, marketing and back-office support.
Voro flips this relationship on its head, creating a new model that puts power back in the hands of the agents and gives them a competitive advantage by leveraging tech.
By providing agents with the same back office services as a traditional brokerage, Voro frees its agents from the commission structure and allows them to focus on what they do best: working with clients to close deals. The first website launched in 2012 and quickly expanded from a simple “brokerage as a service” model to offering a wide range of support services on par with what traditional big name brokerages provide their agents.
“Other brokerages put their hands in agents’ pockets, while the agent produces the leads and does all of the hard work to close the deal,” explains Shamooil. “Agents are the ones running around with their sleeves rolled up.” Voro is breaking the cycle of brokers taking the lion’s share of the commission. “I realized that it wasn’t sustainable, that the industry needed something better. At Voro, you are in business for yourself, not by yourself.”
Similar to how Netflix surpassed Blockbuster and Uber overshadowed traditional yellow cabs, Voro is wagering that agents will flourish with its digital real estate engine, establishing an ecosystem where they have autonomy over their schedules and earnings.
“We provide every tool that an Elliman or a Compass would, without any embellishments,” explains Shamooil. Voro offers two memberships, a totally free ‘Basic Plan’ that nets agents 85% of their commissions, with an $8,000 dollar annual cap, and a Pro Plan allowing agents to keep their entire commission for a fixed $150.00 monthly fee.
“Whether they’re on a paid membership or a free membership, every agent gets the same set of tools, resources, products and services,” says Shamooil.
Voro’s Value
While working for one of the big name traditional brokerages comes at an economic cost, top performing agents can often leverage brand recognition and exclusive listings to make commission split less painful. Looking through the lens of an agent, Voro stands out distinctly from what Shamooil characterizes as “smaller independent firms”, which constitute a substantial segment of the industry and are often chosen by agents for their convenience. Shamooil highlights that “for many of these agents, who handle around three rentals per month, the disparity between retaining $3,000 and $6,000 is of meaningful significance.”
Shamooil gave us a stark example of how Voro’s platform can radically change the scale of an agent’s growth. Unlike EXP Realty and Real Brokerage, Voro is not offering a revenue share model, rather agents are offered an opportunity to invest in real estate and become real estate owners; true revenue via distributions from cash flow and not recruitment. “One of our members is a commercial investment sales agent, and he was working with a client on a big industrial deal,” recalls Shamooil. “We worked with him throughout the process, providing research, marketing, setting up tours, and everything that any other big agency would have done and more. Except at the end, the agent walked away with a $400,000 commission, and we didn’t take a cent because he’s a Pro Plan member.” When asked why Voro is set up this way, Shamooil replied, “If agents thrive, we thrive. That’s Voro’s mission and our core belief. Agent empowerment. Period.”
Thanks to its subscription structure, Voro is a great option for those “mom and pop” companies as well as individual agents. “Those teams can plug into our platform and hit the ground running,” Shamooil explains. “That way they can really focus on getting listings, working with buyers, building their referral network, and starting to invest in properties.”
Built for Today’s Market
In the 12 years since Voro launched its first website, the brokerage has grown steadily, expanding into 12 states including the major markets in New York, California, Texas, and Florida, and has a network of over 1,000 agents. Voro has also broadened the scope of services it offers agents to include lending, insurance, and lead generation, which, along with research and analytics and licensing, accounting, and other standard back office services, puts more power in the hands of its subscribers.
Today, with the real estate market that’s tighter than ever and recent changes in NAR and MLS regulations, many agents are leaving traditional brokerages and joining Voro as a way to maximize their returns while still having access to the services traditional brokers provide.
“In a time when other companies are seeing tremendous turnover, ours has exponentially increased,” says Shamooil. “We’ve almost doubled our number of agents in the last two years, during one of the toughest climates for real estate. I think that speaks volumes about what we’re offering.” Voro’s nationwide sales numbers have grown as well, with the brokerage overseeing 10,000 transactions in each of the last three years, representing over a Billion dollars in sales each year.
One of the paradoxes of the Voro model is that, by empowering individual agents, it has become one of the leading brokerages on its home turf in New York almost without anyone noticing. “Voro has quietly been a top 5 sales producer in Long Island in the last few years, and was consistently in the top 10,” says Shamooil. “That’s not even counting rentals and leasing.”
Now, with plans for a nationwide expansion as well as the establishment of footholds in Canada and Israel, Shamooil says it’s time for Voro to come out from behind its agents and stand alongside the other real estate brands with which it’s competing. “It’s kind of a funny problem,” he muses. “By giving the power to agents to brand themselves, we’ve flown under the radar. We weren’t advertising as much because we wanted our agents to get the credit, and now we’re coming out and letting everyone know we’re here.”
Learn more at voro.com.