How Technology Changes How You Buy or Sell a Home
Dewayne:
Have you ever bought a house sight unseen?
Welcome back to another episode in our series, 60 lessons that we’ve learned over 60 years’ worth of real estate experience. And today we’re going to discuss our lessons in technology and real estate.
Kirk:
I mean, we talked a little about it in Lesson 37. We spoke about what we did, what we learned in marketing. It’s still kind of the same thing; now we want to show the importance of it.
Dewayne:
So we’re always trying to stay ahead of the curve. And we’ve implemented a lot of technology over the years to meet the consumer with how they’re viewing properties online. And one of the ways is we’ve utilized 3D tours since, I think, 2015 now. We were the first people to utilize it here locally.
So the importance of that, it’s kind of twofold. You have buyers that are out of town, or we’ve talked about it, maybe one spouse is in town and another one is out of town and they can both go through the house together. And the second is, as far as for our listings, I can’t speak for others, but for our listings, buyers can go through ahead of time and either eliminate it or add it to their list at showing, which for our clients is a benefit because now you have buyers that have already basically virtually seen the house before they’re coming and making that appointment.
So it just helps our sellers with vetting the buyer. They’ve already seen it. They want to come see it. And I think that helps-
Kirk:
And think about this, we’re more of a computer-based society now. 10 years ago, or 15 years ago, people weren’t used to getting on the computer. Now everybody gets on the computer and they’re sending us information that they’ve found on the computer. So it’s very interesting; it’s really changed over the last 10 years.
Dewayne:
Yeah. And not just for buyers. We have sellers that feel like, “Oh, we need to fly into town and meet and talk about listing our properties.” I mean, we’re doing listing strategy sessions all through video. We’re screen-sharing, we’re going over charts, data, strategy. And then again, it’s really easy to show them the technology whenever you’re already online. So not just for buyers, we’re utilizing it for sellers as well.
And then technology on the backend, meaning technology that the consumer doesn’t see… Because whenever you’re doing 250/300 transactions per year, it takes a lot to keep that those transactions organized.
Kirk:
Yeah. And I’m thinking about, we have sellers that are out of town and they want to do a listing. So we’re able to go through the property, take a look at it, and then we’re able to show them all the charts for the entire listing presentation without ever meeting them. Because it used to be, they’d say, “Hey, we’ve got to show up for this listing appointment.” Not anymore.
Dewayne:
And I think the last thing that we do virtually is all of our coaching calls. Whenever we meet with our coach, that’s all video conference.
Kirk:
Same with our team. We’re doing virtual coaching now with the team. So everybody doesn’t have to come into the office. So for instance, we’ve got somebody that’s in the North end of the County, who would drive an hour for an hour-long meeting and drive an hour back. So it’s three-hour time waste. We can do it all in an hour for the meeting. It’s really productive.
Dewayne:
Yeah. So I think the lesson here is, is just to continue to grow with the technology for what the consumer wants these days.
Kirk:
Yeah, again.
Thanks for watching. You can always comment with questions.
Join us next time, or next week when we learn about when the market changes, how we pivot our business.
Dewayne:
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