Web of opportunity
When real estate agencies first began offering virtual tours of properties on their Web sites in the mid-1990s, they knew they were onto something big.
Their clients raved about the new technology, which allowed them not only to explore every room of a for-sale property without leaving their homes but increased by orders of magnitude the number of properties they could view in a single day. Sales jumped dramatically, as did word-of-mouth business.
What REALTORS® hadn’t fully appreciated was just how big an impact multimedia would have on their industry. Within five years, a REALTOR®’s ability to grasp and incorporate emerging computer technologies would become the dividing line between having a successful business and going the way of the dinosaurs. In real estate, multimedia had found the perfect home.
“Our latest statistics from the National Association of REALTORS® show that more than 85 percent of homebuyers are going online first before physically looking at a home,” says Jenny Getz, a REALTOR® whose Valencia, Calif., agency, Jenny Getz It Sold, is affiliated with Keller Williams Realty.
Getz, 32, came of age just as online media was coming into its own, and her success in the Realty business was and remains intimately connected to the success of the Internet.
Her Web site, JennyGetzItDone.com, is a virtual catalogue of newly perfected and emerging multimedia technologies. From her home page, visitors can view her “Deal of the Day” video pod message; sign up for RSS feeds allowing subscribers to share and distribute Web content; link to Getz’ online discussion forum; view foreclosure listings in the Santa Clarita area; and, of course, “virtually tour” countless properties.
Getz is, in a sense, a poster child for how to leverage the Web. While her business is definitely hurting from the market downturn — she expects to close half the deals this year over last — she credits her tech-savvy approach to real estate with keeping her company firmly in the game.
Getz and other multimedia experts see the near future of real-estate multimedia, and what they see has two names: Web 2.0 — a broad term for Internet technology and design that allows for the instant sharing of information and collaboration with other users and hand-held devices.
“Right now, the big thing is IDX — Internet Data Exchange,” she says. “We’re directly linked to the Multiple Listing Service, and our agents have the capability of going in and doing automatic updates of information. I can look up Suzie Smith, who’s looking for a home with a pool for under $500,000. If an agent puts an update on such a property at 5 p.m., Suzie gets an e-mail at 5:01.”
TourFactory.com, a Spokane, Wash., firm that holds some of the original patents on virtual tours, is focused heavily on hand-held technology as a way to ride the next big wave of industry-altering multimedia.
“If you look at the way the Web has evolved, it’s become something that you can take with you, something with iPod-style multimedia,” says TourFactor.com Chief Information Officer William Haney. “We’ve made a product, based on virtual tours, which creates video available to download on your iPod or whatever you carry with you. You can have your company’s entire inventory available to you wherever you go. If you have Web 2.0 available, you can plug your virtual tour in and constantly update on your site — you just plug into one of its forms. A lot of people have custom Web sites, and a lot of the newer sites are enabled with XML, so somebody gets a little block of code, drops the code in and the inventory will be maintained. It’s constantly kept up to date.”
The technology is so cutting-edge that even Getz says she hasn’t fully exploited it – yet.
“One of the things we’re working on is having updates that are sent through e-mail to cell phones,” she says. “We’re already using text and working on getting pictures and such. That’s pretty new. If you find an agent doing that, they’re pretty savvy.”
Not for long. Metro Brokers Real Estate Inc., an association of more than 2,000 independent real-estate brokers operating in Colorado, announced on July 10 it would adopt the Terablitz home-search application for iPhone. Terablitz is a Silicon Valley-based software firm.
But despite the tech industry’s focus on all things new, virtual tours remain the Internet darling of the real-estate industry.
“In this economy, I think everybody’s trying to save money,” says Haney. “Virtual tours serve the purpose of consolidating marketing efforts. You can bring in more potential customers to centralized locations, get the word out through different syndicated options, and still maintain your reach among newer generations, Gen X and Gen Y. Even in the market downturn, you have to be responsive.”