Office space for 12,000 in the Virtual Space

Roberto Saracco August 8, 2018 Blog 568 Views

The Auditorium can accommodate as many people as needed. Just a few click to expand it to fit the audience. Image credit: eXp Realty

What could be more brick and mortar than a real estate company? One would expect that a company in the real estate brokering business would have offices disseminated in many location to attract sellers and prospective buyers.

It turns out that one of these companies, a big one having over 12,000 employees, has its campus in the cyberspace, hosting as many offices as required, bars and coffee shop, an auditorium that can be resized as needed (and even duplicated if there is a need to run two events in parallel…).

EXp Realty was founded back in 2007, at the time of the collapse of the real estate business, with plenty of foreclosures as people could no longer afford mortgages as the bubble exploded.

Glenn Sanford, the founder, thought that the time was right to enter the market, with so many sellers, but it was not good to own properties that were getting devaluated by the day. Hence he decided to place its company in the cyberspace. Using the cloud and collaborative working tools he assembled his workforce from all corner of the US asking them to meet prospective clients physically at “their” place and go with them in the cyberspace first to show the many real estates available and then if interested take them physically to experience the property on site.

In 2015 he decided technology was mature enough to create a virtual campus for the company and with the help of VirBela a SecondLife-like campus was developed with no constraints in terms of space and amenities! You want a pub to meet some of your colleague to discuss business or football, be my guest. Actually, the eXp Realty campus has been named best place to work in 2018 by Glassdoor based on reviews provided by employees.

Isn’t this amazing? Creating office space in the cyberspace, seasoning them with Virtual Reality, can be appealing to workers that have the flexibility of working from remote with the sense of presence and collaboration that comes from inhabiting the same office space.

Clearly there is basically no office cost (eXp Reality only has a sort of a storeroom plus some empty space where a physical location is required by law) and also very important it is possibile to expand the office space with a click. The kind of growth that the company -now a 1 billion company- experienced in the last year, doubling its employees from 6,000 to 12,000, could not have been possible if offices were needed in the real world. In the virtual campus it was no problem at all, with the additional benefit that each employee can customise her office space at whim (and change it without needing a budget or asking permission).