Although many may not believe it, the real estate industry is actually one of the most tech savvy industries around today. The necessity to cover numerous territories and the demand to provide all inclusive services makes the real estate professional almost dependent on the technologies available to them.
This dependency has pushed many real estate professionals to jump on new technologies and quickly become familiar with the various ways to maximize their time and build their businesses by attracting new buyers, sellers and investors. The bi-product of this trend has been a strong demand from the real estate industry for technology companies to continue pushing the envelope to build faster, more efficient and more effective real estate marketing technologies.
Technology for the real estate industry has evolved so quickly over the past 10-20 years. We can still remember pagers being ‘high-tech’. Every Realtor seemed to have had one as it allowed them to be even more accessible than most real estate professionals probably intended. These types of technologies changed the way we thought of and worked with a Realtor. Now, our real estate agent is more accessible than ever, which leaves them with less time in the day to focus on important aspects of their business, like marketing their business and their clients’ properties.
Welcome new marketing technologies that make a real estate agent’s job more about inbound lead generation and less about call volume and how many business cards can be passed out in one day.
Real Estate Technology Goes Local
Chris Thorman, who blogs about property management software at Software Advice recently posted a very interesting article titled Searching for Real Estate Made Easy: Geo-Fences and Mobile Phones. This article sparked us to look deeper into new marketing technologies and share them with our audience. We feel that technologies like the one we’re about to mention will help to change the way real estate is marketed and discovered by prospective buyers, sellers and investors.
The real estate technology market has been flooded in recent years with “location-based†applications to help buyers find properties in their area. With little variation, they all work in about the same way:
- Start an application on your mobile phone;
- Utilize your phone’s GPS to determine your location; and,
- Have the application retrieve location-based real estate data.
What if a prospective real estate buyer didn’t have to initiate an application to get real estate data? What if the data just came to their phone automatically?
Sound far-fetched? Well it isn’t. Advertising company, Placecast, has developed a service called ShopAlerts and we think it has very interesting implications for the real estate industry. ShopAlerts allows users to opt in to receive marketing messages on their phone from retail stores that are nearby. For example, a person would sign up for alerts from Old Navy and would automatically receive tailored text message marketing notifications each time they were close to an Old Navy store.
This could work in the same manner for the real estate industry. Users could opt in to receive alerts about specific types of properties. And when they near those properties, they cross a “geo-fence†which prompts an automatic notification to be sent to their mobile phone.
Essentially, a person lives their life and in the meantime, receives notifications about properties they’re close to that match what they want. Is this ideal marketing or what?
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Where Is Real Estate Marketing Technology Headed?
The way we see it, real estate marketing is going to continue to evolve and improve to a point where just about every step of the marketing process becomes so automated that a Realtor can literally start and complete an effective marketing campaign in minutes from their phone or computer. We are a long way off from this currently, but with the addition of new technologies like the one mentioned above it will not be long before homes start marketing themselves.
- With all of these continuous developments and improvements, we have some questions for you as the real estate professional:
- What are your thoughts on these new technologies and where they are headed?
- Are you open to the marketing process being as ‘hands-off’ as possible?
- Do you feel that the marketing process can or should be ‘hands-off’?
- What technologies do you think would completely change how you do business as a Realtor?
We would love to get your take on these burning questions as you are the pulse of the industry. Simply drop us a comment below with your take on all of this. We will do our best to provide you with some useful insight on how to use the majority of these technologies to your advantage and how to leverage them going into the coming years and real estate market trends.
Gleaned from an article by Vinny LaBarbera
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