Hello and welcome to the Engel & Völkers Tech Blog! You may have heard about Engel & Völkers as a traditional premium real estate brokerage company or maybe experienced one of our more than 800 locations in 34 countries worldwide. However you most likely did not yet recognize Engel & Völkers as a company driven and inspired by technology.
Founded and based in Hamburg (Germany) in 1977, today more than 10,000 employees form our network that helps connect home sellers and buyers, renters and letters using cutting-edge technologies on a global scale. Given our market footprint, providing IT services to run an international company of this size by itself is a challenge. But our ambitions are far greater than that.
Our vision
At Engel & Völkers Technology we pursue a vision, that puts our customers in the center of our attention and strives to provide the best technology-driven platform for real estate brokerage on the planet. We believe that marketing premium real estate is people’s business, because the product is not as trivial as consumer goods, but instead is unique and investment is substantial. Customers are strongly attached to it and decisions are highly emotional. It takes people’s creativity, competence and emotional intelligence to individually match, market and sell.
Whether it is doing a VR viewing and finding the right house online, augmenting the work of our real estate agents with mobile apps, giving an owner anytime/anywhere/any device transparency of his/her property’s marketing process or enhancing transaction workflows to be executed in seconds instead of days or weeks, we at E&V Technology are willing, able and committed to rethink the business and bring it to the Internet-era.
What we do at Engel & Völkers Technology
We believe in agile technology culture and live by it! With the decent age of (soon to become) 17 this year, the Agile Manifesto and the 12 Principles of Agile Software almost attained majority and are anything but brand new. However most of the times we hear or read about agility in IT organizations, it is about changing the software development process to adopt SCRUM, SAFe or Kanban. We strongly believe that corporate agility is not primarily about performing a methodology like SCRUM (or comparable) but applying agile values in every part of your organization. This starts with your fundamental team structures and processes being able to iteratively try, fail, learn, refactor and improve. Based on a product-focused hypothesis, we changed our organizational structure to put customer-centric products in its core and kicked-off our MVP (or more adequately MVO - minimum viable organization). Successfully! Enriched by the leadership paradigms of Motivation 3.0 (by Dan Pink) to enable ownership through intrinsic motivation, we at E&V Technology are in the midst of becoming a tech company within a solid and prospering corporation.
We’re on an exciting journey to transform ourselves and the industry. Please be invited to regularly read about it here on our public Tech-Blog and feel free to reach out and contact us if you share our enthusiasm.
If you like to know more about our vision and our technology culture, please also see the video of the presentation we gave at the code.talks 2017 developers conference in Hamburg.
Best
Andreas
