“They used to say that a lot of deals are done by the water cooler,” said Arbor Real Estate founder Chris Brigandi as he sat in the courtyard of his Newport Beach office complex in Cannery Village. “We say a lot of deals are done by the ping pong table. We haven’t played nearly as much ping pong as we want to.”
The ping pong table that sits in the company’s courtyard may be underutilized, but that’s because Arbor is busier than ever.
A handful of top real estate leaders have joined Arbor Real Estate to form what they call “a client-centered, digitally-driven brokerage powered by a select group of high-performance real estate professionals sharing a collective commitment.”
“I founded Arbor Real Estate with roots firmly planted in the values of community, collaboration and client service,” said Brigandi. “While our agents are the best in the business, what truly unites us is that we live, work, raise kids, coach sports teams, support local causes and love our communities with an unwavering passion.”
Joining Brigandi at Arbor Real Estate are Jon Dishon, Nicole Dishon, Ron Millar and Rob Montgomery. Kristin Barry continues as the firm’s broker of record.
“We have aligned and formed a partnership to make all of our jobs better, easier, more streamlined, and more advanced in technology,” said Brigandi.
“A lot of real estate companies are not in the trenches,” explained Brigandi. “We sell houses every day. We know what will make our jobs easier and make the customer’s search easier, so we have done that. Everything is digital, no need for paper.
We’ve created an infrastructure that makes our agents hyper-efficient. We don’t have a big juggernaut of a corporate layer. We are a collective head of bosses who have come together and asked how can we do this better?”
In this case, better means digital, which is where marketing expert Derek May comes in. He created a state-of-the-art website for Arbor that is responsive and designed with mobile in mind, and – after being challenged by Brigandi to come up with a digital listing presentation – devised a method of using tablet-to-tablet communication so a client can instantly view a presentation that was put together minutes before (instead of several days using the old manual method).
“Arbor Real Estate has built one of the industry’s most advanced digital platforms,” said Barry. “Our listing presentation is 100 percent digital, we update our website and app with the latest market data every five minutes, we can deploy marketing materials for our listing quicker than any other firm.”
“We can produce a flyer that would take a regular company a week to produce, ours takes 15 minutes because of the technology we have incorporated,” said Brigandi. “The big companies cannot turn the titanic quickly, but we can because we’re way ahead of it. Real Estate is time sensitive, so this will be really attractive for other agents. We are purveyors of information. The quicker we can provide that information, the better. People want tomorrow’s information today, and that’s our goal, to be better at what we do.”
Arbor uses Google Docs, DocuSign, and other secure e-platforms throughout the transaction process which adds to the speedy response time.
“We pride ourselves on doing things differently at Arbor. Not just for the sake of a great advertising headline, but because we truly believe that doing real estate differently is better for our clients and our communities,” says Brigandi. “At Arbor, we are inclusive, not exclusive. We work with clients in all price ranges, we work across all area neighborhoods, and we collaborate with agents from every brokerage. Arbor is not real estate as usual.”
For more information on Arbor Real Estate, visit arborrealestate.com or call (949) 673-7600.
