Online Real Estate Technology

I recently came across a comment in my travels that I’ve used quite frequently in my presentations and I believe it hits the spot, “Real estate agents will not be replaced by technology, they will be replaced by agents with technology”. 

When I really started to look at this in more detail and the impact it would have on business if an agency did not start to embrace it, got me into looking at the consumer angle on all this technology and was there an overload of information. This is only an assumption on my part but I believe the answer is yes. The real estate agent role has changed from controller of the information to the facilitator, and if an agent could communicate this more effectively through their marketing both on line and off would it provide more leads and or listings.

Some interesting research on the buyer/seller relationship comes from the California Association of Realtors, their Traditional Vs Internet Buyer research showed that whilst 81% of buyers search the Internet to find homes, 56% of these same buyers search the net to find a real estate agent to either buy from or to list or to use as an information source, so it seems to me that we should focus on demystifying the technology and bring it back to real life. 

There’s an interesting blog on this if you would like to read about the consumer angle:

http://transparentre.com/2008/08/23/consumer-internet-fatigue.aspx