Real Estate Goes Tech for Today’s Idaho Agents

By Grigg, Dani

In a world that’s spinning faster and faster, real estate is slowly yet surely inching up on a new frontier. It’s looking beyond billboards and newspaper ads for advertising. It’s leaving behind the endless books of listings and the colorful fliers posted in info boxes outside of for-sale homes. It’s even drifting away from conversations on the oh-so-last-millennium telephone.

Realtors around Idaho are looking for ways to keep ahead of the tech-hungry generation, trying to connect with clients in a way that makes sense to children of the Internet age. That could mean anything from blogging about local trends to posting a house tour on YouTube to facebooking an open house to sending a virtual version of oneself out to show a virtual version of a client a virtual version of a house.

OK, maybe that last one isn’t exactly the norm in Idaho yet, but the point is, it could happen. And realtors who are prepared for things like that are going to be the ones who thrive in the future.

“(Being a realtor takes) thinking outside the box, staying on top of new technology,” said Lindsay Dofelmier, a 20-something real estate agent in Boise. “The world is changing so quickly, you have to think: how are people buying homes, how are they finding homes, how are they spending their time and how do you capture that audience?”

Dofelmier is a member of the Boise Urban Agent team, which gears its services toward forward-thinking homebuyers. On the Urban Agent Web site, in addition to the huge supply of pictures, maps and information about properties, visitors can follow the agents’ every move in a Twitter status update (or “tweet”) sidebar. They can get to know the agents by following the links to their Facebook and MySpace pages. And they can read the agents’ thoughts on life and real estate in frequently updated blogs. All this in a hip, graphic- rich environment designed to facilitate relationships with the strange new generation that will fuel the next real estate boom, the generation sometimes referred to as Generation Y or the Echo Boomers.

“This is a generation that grew up with video games, and virtual reality was a possibility,” she said. “Everything that’s on TV has tickers at the bottom, and there are so many distractions and so much color. MySpace was a huge transformation, where you have a space to create something of your own and to grab other people’s attention. Those are the norms we have to work within if we’re trying to capture that generation’s attention.”

Dofelmier said their Web site, advanced though it may be, is an “alpha alpha” version of what she envisions. She’s got a brain full of ideas. For example, her next project is to get a Vortex for each agent on the site – basically that’s a widget that grabs articles and stats on topics the agents select and combines it all in a feed with their blog entries, tweets and social networking links.

And she said eventually they’d like to explore a large-scale virtual reality network like the 14 million-member Second Life. Second Life allows users to craft a visual online persona or avatar that can then walk or fly through a user-created computer world, interacting with other avatars and the real people behind them. Dofelmier said she envisions users checking out a virtual Boise and stumbling across the Urban Agent avatars in their virtual office in the process. The virtual encounter would play out just like it does in real life, she said.

But before most realtors can leap into a virtual universe, they’ve got to work on the new basics.

Coeur d’Alene realtor Christina Ethridge of the North Idaho Dream Team at GMAC Real Estate Northwest said she doesn’t understand the agents who don’t make much of an attempt to use the Web as it should be used. She’s been blogging about real estate since 2006, and one of her recent blog entries was about a topic that drives her nuts. She had an out-of-state client looking to buy a high-end home up north, and she found a $10 million property with all of two pictures posted on the Internet.

“The client was appalled,” Ethridge said. “I just don’t get it. A $10 million listing should have every conceivable photo up there.”

She estimated at least a third of agents don’t have Web sites, and of the two-thirds that do, only about 10 percent use the site to any semblance of its potential. A lot of agents simply slap a brochure up on a page and call it marketing genius, she said.

“Some people get into the business and don’t adapt to what’s needed,” she said. “Honestly, they’re not going to make it. … (Buyers) want to see homes for sale. When they’re searching for a home, they want to see them. They want answers to their questions, they want information freely given.”

And they want it fast. That’s why text messaging is becoming more and more a part of real estate. When a client wants quick information about a property or a meeting, the generation that grew up in front of a computer screen instinctively wants to skip the small talk and simply text their realtor. That agent can then immediately send out a quick reply without stopping what they’re doing, be it sitting in a meeting or shopping at the mall.

Text messaging is also starting to fill in where fliers and info lines left off. With smart phones and PDAs finding their way into more and more hands, realtors can set up a system where a potential homebuyer can stumble across a for-sale home and text a number on the sign for more information, including a link to a Web site with interior pictures. And the texted information method appeals to buyers for more reasons than one.

“The same generation that texts is the same generation that is really conservation minded,” Ethridge said. “It saves plastic flyer boxes, it saves paper for fliers and it saves gas from driving out to refill the box.”

It’s not just the younger realtors that are seizing the new methods. Agents with decades of experience have been known to give younger realtors a run for their money.

“They are texting maniacs,” said Sarah Kestler, communications director for the Ada County Association of Realtors. “They can text with the best of them from what I’ve seen. I’ll be online and look over and see (a more experienced realtor) texting and be like, ‘are you writing an essay? I’m not sure.’ You have to keep up with technology or you’ll stop.”

Credit: Dani Grigg

(Copyright 2008 Dolan Media Newswires)

(c) 2008 Idaho Business Review, The. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.