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Forget the Buffet (of Services)...What's Your Secret Sauce?

What's Your Secret Sauce? ... Wow, last week's Dispatch Is There a Dot Com Threat to Real Estate Services? (August 30), sparked a bunch of e-mails with a wide range of perspectives, from "You can't kick dirt with a computer" to "Whether we like to admit it or not, real estate services is a commodity product." Hey, relax. Read excerpts from two corporate real estate folks below.

From Walt Spevak at Autodesk: "Expertise ultimately is probably the greater value-add of the human part of the industry. Someone who works in the business full time is going to have more fully developed relationships and expertise than someone like myself, a corporate real estate director, who only spends part of their day on the deal aspect of the business."

From Steven Hufendick at ReliaStar: "I do not think the dot.com threat takes the form of disintermediation. The threat is just as it always has been -- good ole' competition between Comm RE businesses that have adopted better business practices to serve their customers and those that haven't. In this case, the enhanced business practice is the improved communications and logistical capabilities afforded by digital/Internet technologies."

So outsource your data and use the net to deepen your personal relationships. ... As Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, wrote in the WSJ (September 1, 1999) "outsource everything that's not a core competency." And, if you're a real estate service provider, information gathering and management is probably not your core competence. Instead, as McNealy urges, stick with "the stuff that gives you an edge over your competition. ... your secret sauce."

More Dot Com Ideas? ... Send e-mail to me at , and I'll report in future a Dispatch. Thanks!

--Peter