theurbanhousewife.comTechnology has always been a catalyst for change, businesses and industries sometimes have troubles when they need to adapt to said change. With the advent of the internet and ubiquity of smartphones, the average person is always connected to the rest of the world and is more informed than ever. Businesses started taking note and are reforming to suit today’s world, and to offer services that the average consumer is used to. The Real Estate industry is an industry built on face-to-face contact, and modern technology has mitigated the need to speak to an agent in person.

Technology will continue to change the Real Estate industry, which has remained practically unchanged for ages, and here are some reasons why:

Transparency

With the amount of information posted for free on many websites it has become much easier to browse for the perfect offer, while avoiding shady ones that might prey on the ill-informed. There are dozens upon dozens of websites that curate every offer with different filters, like availability, pricing, size, etc.

Speed

Transactions used to take a long amount of time to close, and in response, plenty of websites were created to avoid specifically that. Sites like Ten-X are using tools that have a great impact on speeding up the process to make a deal, and it’s having a huge impact on the industry as a whole. However, sending your financial information online can be dangerous, so you should secure this information with a Virtual Private Network. For those wondering what is a VPN, it essentially forms an encrypted tunnel around your traffic so the details you send to real estate websites are secured.

Too many salesmen

The Real Estate industry is an industry that thrives on personal contact, where salespersons close deals with all sorts of people, sometimes even with people that don’t really want to buy property but are persuaded by the salesperson. Being able to peruse offers from the comfort of one’s home is a game changer for the industry, and is a prime factor in changing how the infrastructure of making real estate offers work.

Having to view the property in person

Since forever, in order to get the most information on a property, visiting in personally has always been the best way to do so, but with today’s technology, we are able to view the property from our computers, and not only on pictures and videos. Specific software and websites allow for exploring the property from the comfort of one’s home by using virtual reality technology that allows a person to walk around and see the property from every angle in a faithful recreation of the property. It doesn’t completely mitigate the need to personally seeing the property, but increasing availability can only benefit the consumer.

Real Time Data

The majority of research used to be focused on what happened to the past, but with today’s real time data, it has never been easier to obtain all sort of information, from availability and price, to soil stability and all sort of analyses for all kinds of statistics. That used to be a costly endeavor in the past, so many companies avoided it, but today it opens up possibilities that in the past were unheard of. That in itself is a huge game changer, and is a factor that many real estate businesses have to account for in this dramatically evolving world where technology influences every aspect of living.