Online Collaboration: The Next Step in Savvy Real Estate Technology

RISMedia
Published: 06/18/2012
Posted by: RET Staff

Real estate professionals today know that making smart use of technology is critical to their business today. Very early on, the real estate industry had felt the tremors of “disruption” by the Internet, and since then, no real estate professional has been able to be extremely successful without a deep understanding of the central role of the web in a successful real estate practice.

For many real estate professionals, it probably started with a simple website. From there, the use of online tools grew as the tools themselves became more powerful. Video home tours, for example, took off along with video-sharing sites like YouTube. When Facebook came along, real estate professionals began to learn how to use social media to their advantage in business.

So what’s next? At the top of any list of important emerging technologies relevant to real estate has to be collaboration tools, especially video conferencing. (Modern video conferencing, by and large, has happened by virtue of the webcams being built into every new laptop.) In today’s connected world, home buyers and sellers expect information to be accessible anywhere and anytime. These new collaborative tools allow that to take place.

Video conferencing lets you see and speak with the person on the other end; you can also use the software to share materials, like PowerPoint presentations, between the two machines, so that each person on the conference is looking at the same thing. The benefits are many.

In the early stages of the client-real estate professional relationship, for example, nearly every agent prefers a face-to-face meeting over a phone call. But when it’s impossible for you and your client to get together, a video conference is the next best thing. Clients will more than likely already be familiar with the technology, considering how popular free programs like Skype for connecting on holidays, birthdays, or even day-in, day-out communications by friends or relatives separated by any distance.