Online Real Estate Technology

Around this time of year, a lot of people and blog writers all look back on the year that was, so to do something a little different, I’ve decided to look into the future. I’ve pulled out my crystal ball,well actually it is pewinternet.org’s crystal ball and gone forward to 2020. This great research group has looked at how the internet will evolve over the next 11 years and what we can look forward to. Here are the results of the survey, taken by asking some of the leading internet experts in the world today and the invitations to these experts was via Facebook and used social media to interact with these contributors.

Here’s the key results from that survey: 

• The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the Internet for most people in the world in 2020.
• The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.
• Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the Internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.
• Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing “arms race,” with the “crackers” who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.
• The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who’s connected, and the results will be mixed in terms of social relations.
• “Next-generation” engineering of the network to improve the current Internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch.

There you have it ladies and gentlemen,the way the experts see the evolution of the net into 2020. If you’d like to read the full report, click on the link here: http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_FutureInternet3.pdf

Thanks to the great research undertaken by the team at www.pewinternet.org

Now here’s my take on the next 12 months for real estate offices and agents:

1. Video will become more sought after by consumers and agents will start to look at how they can integrate this media into all their on line marketing as well as the integration of office video profiles.

2. Use of social media tools such as blogs, podcasting and vlogging will impact on office marketing. Facebook and YouTube will also become part of the daily marketing routine.

3. Agents will have to work smarter with their property marketing and employ best practice policies within their on line marketing. As the online consumer gets smarter about the type and quailty of information they can get from the net, they will demand more from agents. Frequently updated content will be a requirement.

4. All real estate agents will need to look at their SEO and SEM and take a more indepth look at their own web sites and how to use these as a local marketing tool. Agents will need to demonstrate the “Local Market Expert” tag. Start to work your own marketing and not rely so heavily on the major web portals to deliver leads.

5. On Line Reputation Management will become vital to all on line business’s not just real estate. This is the practice of monitoring, managing and reparing your on line reputation.

6. Real Estate Press will slowly start to lose business as real estate agents realise that by moving away from this medium they don’t lose market share. However, you’ll need to start embracing more on line marketing techniques and improving your current marketing attempts to capture a greater share of the on line researcher.

7. The industry should demand more from the on line portals next year, these sites have had it way to easy for too long,  demand better up to date technology, more tracking tools for agents and more accountability. Rates are going up, but in a lot of ways service and technology has not improved. Products are being released not to help you or the consumer, but to find ways to take more money off you, But do they really work??      

 As always, let me know your thoughts and ideas on these suggestions.