Real Estate Agents and Zillow - On the Importance to Stay Competitive in the Information Age
Journalists and real estate experts have been debating about Zillow, the new brainchild of Richard Barton, and its impact on the real estate industry. Even if Zillow is not as revolutionary as many had anticipated - for better or for worse - it is the latest evidence of how eager people are for information. So eager that the Web site crashed the day it launched because it received 300,000 page viewsmore than the server could handle.
The Internet has changed the way people access all kinds of information because it empowers them with data that was previously only available to specialists and professionals.
The real estate industry is not exempt from these changes. However, instead of being overwhelmed by new technologies, real estate agents have been using them to stay competitive. In a 2002 survey, the NAR found that 63 percent of Realtors have either a personal Web site or space for their own Web pages on their brokerage’s Web site. Furthermore, 94 percent of the survey’s respondents said they use e-mail to communicate with their clients.
But Zillow goes a long way in providing people with valuable information - although some might argue about the accuracy of some of it. Everyone can now do a home appraisal by using a tool called “Zestimate.” People can also look at the price change or the tax information of a particular property.
In the face of the “Zillow threat” the question is whether real estate agents and brokers are going to keep the upper hand in their business, or whether they are doomed to loose it to some newcomer.
In an interview with the New York Observer, Dottie Herman, chief executive of the New York brokerage Prudential Douglas Elliman, talked about Zillow and other real estate search engines on the rise. “There is no reason any of these sites should exist,” Herman said. “We should never have had that competition, because we should have had it on our sites. We should have done it a long time ago.”
Whether or not Zillow succeeds, its very existence should come as a reminder to real estate agents that consumer behavior continues to change because of the Internet. To stay competitive in the information age, professionals in the real estate industry need to provide the same kind of tools on their Web sites as those found on Zillow and other online competitors.
Kris Beldin is a PR coordinator for 10x Media, a marketing solutions company.
Estatblished in 2003, 10x Media has expanded its online presence through consumer information networks Inside Real Estate, Inside Finances and Grab Real Estate which contain thousands of pages for city and state specific real estate information across the nation.
