Now that everyone has digested the incredible amount of information presented in three short days at the Inman conference, many are asking “now what?” I love this particular conference because it brings together the best minds in technology, most of whom are fairly candid….ok some are maybe too candid. Outside of the tech leaders, there is a smattering of brokers mixed with an even smaller number of agents (using your fingers and toes to count would suffice).

When I first attended the conference last year I wondered why more agents did not attend. Then, toward the end of this years conference when I was in dire need of a defrag on my brain (or a cocktail), it hit me. How would most agents respond if they were sitting in the room hearing about all of these new technologies? Aside from a few tech savvy agents, I would bet the farm that a huge majority would feel the sudden urge to sprint from the room and order a double on the rocks pronto.

As I see it, the problem isn’t necessarily with the new technologies. A lot of them are intriguing, and some may actually get a house or two sold. Agents are typically solo or members of small teams, however, so implementing just a fraction of the new technologies would mean a steady diet of espresso and 20 hour work days. Very few of these new technologies work together and therefore force agents to learn and use multiple systems, measure their individual effectiveness, pay for them separately, and so on. It seriously brings into question whether or not a majority of today’s agents have a big enough appetite to consume everything that they are being fed. This leads me to ask the following questions:

1) What is the best way for individual agents to use the technologies instead of getting run over by them?

2) Should brokers be doing more to assist their agents with technology?

3) What other organizations (think Realtor associations) should be doing more to assist agents with technology?

I’m typically not an apologist for agents who do not effectively use technology to their advantage, but I must admit that the landscape looks pretty intimidating from where I’m sitting.

3 Responses to “Techno Panic” Rebecca Levinson Says: 1. Agents should communicate via a blog regularly and learn about social media as their business is a good part marketing, thus it does effect the core of their earning potential. For the rest of it, CRM, listing feeds, website design- they can outsource, contract a virtual assistant, or hire a marketing person immersed in all things internet. 2. I thinks some brokerages are making some valiant efforts to step up to the plate, more so in the past few years, think Real Living, Prudential and there are others. I am hopeful to see this trend increase. 3. Amazingly enough, some of the associations have even started to plug transaction management to their members, and you will find others adopting to technology to assist their agent membership. Now, this all being said, does the industry still have a long way to go- Yes, Yes, and Yes. But from where I am standing, it is starting to turn a corner- great example- activerain.com. You wouldn’t have seen that kind of participation, tech knowledge, or acceptance of technology in the industry back in 2002. You’ve come a long way baby. August 22nd, 2007 at 2:05 pm Lisa Merritt Says: I’m still learning about techno phobia among agents myself! As the owner of a free listing service for investment properties that lets individual agents upload listings, I spend a lot of time helping overcome standard upload questions! I’d love to hear comments if our site can be revised to be even more user-friendly. Thanks Lisa September 5th, 2007 at 8:15 am Tom Wolf Says: Lisa, I don’t know if your site allows users to establish automatic feeds or not, but this should be a requirement if you are going to get a meaningul number of properties loaded to your site. Companies like ours are spending a lot of time working with companies like yours to establish automated feeds so that our agents listings can be added to your site automatically without the agents actually needing to go through an upload process. Remember, there are a lot of sites out there that have listings, and having agents go to each one individually and upload their listings just isn’t in the cards. September 7th, 2007 at 9:04 am Leave a Reply Name (required) Mail (will not be published) (required) Website