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Leading condo marketing firm Rennie has announced it is laying off a quarter of its head office staff. blaming geopolitics, economic factors and artificial intelligence.
“It was a necessary step in response to a changing market, but no less painful,” the company said in a post to the professional networking site LinkedIn.
The post did not indicate what departments would experience job losses, but noted that Rennie is reducing head office staff to 92 from 123 and added a plea for anyone hiring to consider its “thoughtful, talented contributors who helped shape our culture and our business.”
Rennie , founded by condo-marketing mogul Bob Rennie, made the announcement at a time when real estate sales have declined and the development sector has seen its inventory of unsold condominiums soar. The Urban Development Institute estimates the number of completed, unsold condos will soar 60 per cent to 3,500 by the end of the year.
Rennie analyst Roman Melzer, in an item published on the company’s website, recounted the “collapse in consumer confidence,” that followed the Jan. 20 inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump and the air of uncertainty that came with his trade tariffs.
In April, sales fell 24 per cent in Metro Vancouver from the same month a hear ago to 2,163 transactions. The so-called benchmark price, a type of average for typical homes sold, was down 1.8 per cent to $1.2 million for all property types.
However, the company, in its post, said the “moment is part of something bigger in the industry,” referring to geo political, economic urban affordability and AI-driven factors.
“The shifts we are seeing in real estate aren’t temporary, they are structural,” the post said. “And yesterday is never coming back.”
The post said Rennie is “responding with clarity, not caution, reimagining how we work, becoming leaner and more focused and embracing the tools that will help us serve better and move faster.”
In March, Rennie announced its launch of an artificial-intelligence product under the name rCatalyst, which it called an “AI-powered sales and marketing platform,” that will learn from the company’s “30 million (plus) proprietary data points,” to refine sales approaches.
However, it is still too soon to estimate how disruptive AI will be to the real estate sector, especially with the extent of the downturn in development, according to Tsur Somerville, Real Estate Foundation of B.C. professor in real estate finance at the University of B.C.’s Sauder School of Business.
“On the marketing side, there might be some AI uses, but a bigger thing is nobody’s pre-selling,” Somerville said. Marketing campaigns “have completely dried up, and that is a whole bigger part of the story.”
Rennie, headquartered on West 1st. Avenue in Vancouver, operates in B.C., Washington state and California with more than 300 advisers in 10 locations offering advisory services to developers, presale marketing and property sales.
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