Real estate pros Brian Dougherty and Nick Robert run a people-first operation with tech-savvy know-how.Brian Dougherty and Nick Robert

For Brian Dougherty and Nick Robert, the partners behind the Corcoran Group’s (corcoran.com) first Massachusetts brokerage, there’s a lot to look forward to. After their Newbury Street debut on April 1, they opened an office in the South Shore. They’ll welcome clients to another office on Cape Cod this fall, and plan for an expansion to Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard in 2025.

Throughout it all, the duo plans to leverage Corcoran’s proprietary technology— in addition to the slate of technological advancements the real estate industry has seen over the past few years—to o er sophisticated services to their clients. But where they’ll really hone their focus is balance: underscoring the necessity of human-centered business while utilizing technology as a welcome bonus.

“With all of the innovation happening, there’s still a need for the human touch,” Dougherty says. “This is still very much a people business—one where AI can’t take us down.”

The introduction of artificial intelligence has surely rounded up efficiency; everything from Aiboosted property descriptions to scheduling tools has helped agents do more. Still, Dougherty and Robert are careful not to go all in.

“With all of the innovation happening, there’s still a need for the human touch.” –BRIAN DOUGHERTY

“We recently coached our 20 agents in the Boston office to take a breath and not allow all of these advancements in technology to replace thoughtful, rational thinking so that we can maintain a wonderful premium service,” Dougherty says.

It’s their commitment to high-touch interfacing that sets them, and Corcoran, apart, they explain.

“At the end of the day, technology wasn’t at a client’s house on Saturday morning at 8 a.m. washing their windows in preparation for a showing,” Robert says. “It wasn’t meeting stagers and curating furniture placements, or helping clients pick out finishes for their kitchen and cleaning out closets with them.”

The Corcoran Group’s tagline is “live who you are,” which resonated with Dougherty and Robert before they signed on. They admire this human- first ethos, and they balance it by optimizing with technology sourced from Corcoran and beyond. Tools like virtual staging and Copilot, an AI-powered assistant that helps with client communication and project management, save time for agents. And Corcoran’s resources, like its in-house ad agency and a portal called MyCorcoran, which helps agents track business pipelines and prioritize outreach to clients, allow them to spend fewer hours in front of a computer.

“We really view the resources from Corcoran as a way to spend more face time with our clients and less behind the scenes,” Dougherty says.

Creating new client relationships and maintaining existing ones is something an efficient scheduling tool simply can’t do, especially in the realm of private and o -market transactions.

“[We’re] picking up the phone and leveraging our relationships with clients, brokers and fellow colleagues to facilitate special matchmaking,” Dougherty says. “We really haven’t seen anything come close to replacing that—the human trust.”