Hard to believe: within the span of 25 years I learned to set type by hand as a graphic design student at a college in Switzerland and saw the profession of typesetter vanish. Despite having gone digital the typesetting business was wiped out by desktop publishing. Now anybody can and anybody does whatever with type. “When everybody will be a publisher we will remember why there were editors,” a speaker said at a computer conference I attended in New York City in 1984. How true. I saw a listing description recently that wanted me to change the name of the company to “Help-You-Shpell.” Now I am in real estate and it is “deja vu all over again.” Technology keeps spreading uncertainty and changing lives and livelihoods. Disintermediation was one of the many societal computer-generated effects. In plain English: taking out the middle man. Or should that be “middle person” now? In any case, that one is supposed to be gone. In the case of real estate that one would be I, the Washington Real Estate Salesperson. Not so fast, I say.
Old-Timers and Newbies
Since I started in this business about five years ago the number of real estate agents in the Seattle area, by certain accounts, has doubled. Some of the newbies were like me, second career with retirement age moved up to about 85, but many others were young folks attracted by the “hot market” and many of them with a full-time job in the high-tech industry that’s dominating the landscape around here.
My first day on the job, I realized that this was a “free-for-all” business. At the first sales meeting it dawned on me that those smiling faces were not my colleagues but my competitors. At least I knew their names and where they worked. Some cynical old timer told me to stay away from them as far as I could. Speaking of old timers, many of them felt threatened by technology. One liked to tell the story of how you could be successful even if you were parachuted into a strange area as long as you had a phone book. “Start calling from the back with the Zs, they rarely get called,” he argued. The threat that this and other old timers feared became reality with the Do-Not-Call-List.
And the Winners are:
As I see it, the technology has divided real estate agents into two camps. The established old guard with the local connections and the newcomers who do not only not fear the technology but embrace it. The winners will be the former who will add technology to their already formidable arsenal and the newcomers who can tear themselves away from the computer and make real human contact.
In support of my theory, I offer some anecdotal evidence. I had acquired a new client through my website. A highly educated individual, he was very conversant with technology and the internet. He used Google™ with whatever search terms and found my website. He contacted me via email. We met and, eventually, we found the perfect home. But that’s not the point I am trying to make.
And now for “the rest of the story.”
He only looked for another agent because the one he had worked with had stopped contacting him. What had happened? He had bought a new computer and, tired of the onslaught of Spam, created the strictest of email rules. Only people in his personal address book would reach him. If not eliminated before delivery he would ignore everybody else who made it through the electronic gates. That took his real estate agent out of the game. She had not made it into his “electronic little black book.” Her fault: She never called him to follow up, never sent him a note. He felt abandoned. I gained a client and closed a deal.
Long live technology; longer live the personal touch!
© 2006, Gerhard N. Ade
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