Real Estate Technology...or Terminator in waiting?
as a Realtor we have to get back to public thinking of us a Professional and not just some commidity looking for a commission check and the phone line...i only keep a house phone for the fax machine
Are Real Estate Offices going to go the way of land line phones? With many families adopting a new austerity plan, dropping many if not all the services provided by their local home phone provider. We all have cell phones and office lines, who needs hard lines at home? Further evidence of this phenomenon are the young buyers and tenants I work with, when its time to change over utilities, they often opt-out of a local phone plan altogether.
How Many of you still rely on walk-ins for a portion of your income? I still find enough off the street traffic to justify a main street office. But I am increasingly sharing my commission with buyer agents that have no physical office. They have an excellent web-based service, and in affect are simply advertise my listings to drive buyers to them for inquiries.
If you don’t need a physical location or land lines anymore how long will it be before Realtors are unnecessary? What if we all decided to be buyer agents and close our offices…if we all decide to eliminate our overhead whose listing we will sell? The New Technology is great but selling homes can’t be shipped overseas (I’m in for the long run).
Reservation services are being chipped away, owners are booking on-line and changing locks to no-hard-key pads. Vacation homes needed rental service companies to complete the reservation between owner and tenant. Now owners use Cyber rental, VRBO, or Craig’s list, and have a cleaning service go in after the check out. The middle-man is out, and the service business suffers…the same way the home land line is going.
In the 1950 census the number one occupation was Farmer, in 2006 it was salesmen. We don’t make anything anymore…we just tack on our fee, repackage it and re-sell it, how are we going to stay ahead of the technology we created to make our jobs easier, from eliminate the need for us?
Every market may be local, but you had better be very good at what you do and what you offer or some software program is going to eliminate the need for your position. Who is a bit concerned, that we created our own monster…the machine built to help may be our very own Terminator in the end.
Your-White Mountain New Hampshire real Estate Expert
steve@alpinelakes.com toll free 800-926-5653 /cell 603-381-7898
MLS search and Realtor web site: www.alpinelakes.com
My outside Blog: www.steveswhitemountainblog.com
Lincoln NH & Local interest site: www.localism.com/nh/lincoln
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