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Real Estate News and Advice |
October 10, 2008 |
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 Why REALTORS Must Learn to Trust the Internet
by Blanche Evans
If you are a broker, an association officer or an MLS executive, you want to know how to make your agents more competitive in an increasingly technology-oriented world. The first thing you have to do is help them overcome their fears of the Internet, and the best way to do that is to lead by example. If you are an agent, just beginning to feel your way around the Internet, this article will speak directly to you. Over 18,000 new people a day are getting on the Internet - without lessons or training classes. The fastest growing segment of Internet users are over 50 years of age. If they can do it, any agent can do it, too. The first step is letting agents know that real estate buyers and sellers are already using the Internet. According to the National Association of REALTORS®, three out of four buyers visit the Internet in their home buying quest. According to Realtor.com, the official Web site of the NAR, over 6 million visitors a month visit Realtor.com, which has 95% of available listings. Homes are viewed as much as 130 times a month. Realtor.com estimates that over 12 million visitors a month are visiting online loan and real estate sites. Obviously, the Internet is the place to be to reach homebuying consumers. Yet less than 11 percent of agents actively use the Internet to conduct business, according to recent studies in Florida. These figures are echoed by management figures - only 10% of broker/owner members of the Real Estate Brokerage Managers Council have and use email, I learned in an interview six months ago. If managers haven't cut over to the Internet, it's hardly surprising that agents aren't following. In some recent seminars that I have given about the benefits of using the Internet, I informally polled Realtors to find out why they aren't using the Internet to enhance their businesses. The five most significant reasons I've found that prevent agents from using the Internet are: 1. Fear of being disintermediated Let's take these fears one at a time and explore the solutions. Fear of being disintermediated Many Realtors believe that the Internet will come between them and the consumer. If the consumer can go on the Internet and do things for herself like shop for homes or shop for a loan, or research home buying strategies, that leaves the Realtor out in the cold. They fear that the value of their services will go down. In fact the opposite is true. The NAR has found that Realtors who use the Internet actually earn more money than nontechnology-oriented Realtors. If an agent uses the Internet, his/her value goes up, because that agent has taken the training, invested in the technology and employs the most state of the art methods to communicate and deliver service to customers. According to a recent survey at RealEstate.com, home buyers are tapping into the Internet. Out of 1,000 buyers polled, 90% plan to use the Internet in some part of the home purchasing process. People aren't using the Internet just to find homes - they are also using the Internet to eliminate homes, which ultimately save any agent working with consumers time. With very little training, a Web page, a digital camera, and email, an agent can quickly use the Internet to market homes to buyers and show sellers that they know how to get their homes where the buyers are, and putting links to favorite lenders and other service providers is crucial to online transaction management. Indicative of this trend is Prudential Real Estate which just signed a strategic partnership with Chase Manhattan and mortgage.com. Why would they involve an online loan company if they didn't think that online loans would be preferred by many of their home buyers? Realtors want to be the first point of contact, but it is no longer a question of whom the consumer will call, it is where the consumer will first go for information. The Internet is quickly gaining as the first point of contact for consumers because they can perform a number of searches using the same medium. The only Realtors who will be disintermediated will be the Realtors who aren't available to help these consumers once they are on the Internet. Also See: Stop Worrying About Disintermediation Fear of learning something new Fear of the Internet is based in lack of understanding how the Internet works and what it really is. Sure you may be only a click away from unpleasant or undesirable content, but the Web is also the residence of legitimate businesses too numerous to count. What makes the Internet unique is that it is the only medium in which a Realtor can advertise homes and services and make contact with the customer instantly. you can't do that on TV, in the newspaper or on the radio. Two-way communication via the miracle of email is the joy of the Web. And all it takes to be able to do it is a modem, a keyboard, a mouse and a screen and an email program. If you can turn on your computer, and left click your mouse, you can navigate the Web. I believe this fear closely related to losing the personal touch. Realtors have little time to invest in training that doesn't immediately profit them. And the Internet can seem overwhelming. Although many people use a computer, they don't realize that on the Internet, much of the work is done for you. Fear of losing the personal touch Realtors are "people persons." They often don't understand how the old skills like personal service translate to the new online world. How will they be able to retain the personal touch in the high tech cyberworld? Well, nothing could be more personal than instant contact. When a consumer clicks on a home, there are links embedded in the ad that carry the consumer straight to the Realtor’s home page where she will have a chance to show her services, other homes for sale, schools, crime statistics, community information and other areas of interest that will hold the consumer’s attention. The beauty of the whole thing is that this communication tool is virtually free for the consumer and the agent! Email is as important a development to the Realtor as the cellular phone, yet did you know that the number one complaint by online homebuyers about Realtors is that they don’t answer their email? Would you fail to return a call on your cellular phone? You’d be surprised that some Realtors don’t believe that emails are leads, but email replies are considered the gold standard of the Internet. It's been proven that online buyers will typically work with the first Realtor that responds to their email. If you are into personal service, then you should know that nothing loses the personal touch faster than ignoring an email message. When you get an email, you have a buyer on the hook. Don’t let them get away. Fear of the costs Every time you turn around, someone is hitting you up for money. Now you have to learn a whole new medium - the Internet and it looks expensive. According to the NAR, 90% of Realtors own or lease a personal computer, so buying a computer to access the Internet isn’t a problem for most. Many have Internet access at home for $20 bucks a month or less, so that cost isn’t a big deal. But building a Web presence and advertising on the Web, that’s a different story. But is it? Is Web advertising expensive? It doesn’t have to be. Remember, your listings are already on the Internet for free, reaching over 30% of homebuyers. All you have to do is augment with a personal Web page. You can start with free or cheap Web pages. Realtor.com has just enhanced its Web page, web hosting program called Agent Simple and upgraded it to iLEAD a multiple page Web site. It’s $250 a year, but your Web site will be linked to every one of your listings. This is to compete with HomeAdvisor.com and HomeSeekers.com, two home listing sites that have joined services to give free Web pages to Realtors. A custom site can cost as much as several thousand dollars, but if you stick to template sites, you'll have a choice of two or three styles. You can upgrade your Web page on HomeSeekers for a nominal cost. You can always get a custom site later. Speaking of costs, what are your classified ads costing you lately? Did you know that there are numerous places on the Web to place free classifieds ads? Try classifieds2000.com. Actually, on the Web, you don’t even need classifieds. Your homes are already on there for free. Add a link to your personal Web page and you are in business. The primary advantage Realtors have on the Internet is a means to generate leads. That is what your Web site can do. Whether you start with a template site, or a custom site, you can add attractive content like school data and homes for sale and other information that most real estate consumers would want to know. Did you know you can probably link to your MLS listings, and if you can't, you can have your listing created on HomeAdvisor. Just supply the information and you have an instant listing on the site. Instead of creating packet of expensive literature for clients, you can refer them to your Web site for information. You can use your Web site in listing presentations and in buyer’s meetings to demonstrate your services. If you need handouts, you can download material from your site. There are plenty of free things on the Web that you can do to enhance your site. You don't have to buy content or write your own. Realty Times, www.realtytimes.com, offers their news service free of charge for any agent to put on their site. We also have a monthly newsletter, that you can sign up for that puts your photo and contact information on a monthly newsletter. Every month we send you the link and, and you can send it out to your email farm, and put the link on your Web site. We also have a printable version of the newsletter for $200 a year. Now these are stories and information for buyers and sellers, so you can print the stories, and it has your photo and contact info at the top. You can mail it out, or you can make copies of certain stories for buyers presentations or to give to sellers when you list their homes. These stories are written by top journalists and industry personnel from all over the nation. They are designed to help you do business. Support from the MLS With the Internet, Realtors and their information management associations have the ideal opportunity to store and manage listing information online, cheaply and easily. Browsers can enable even the most tech-deficient agent to get around the Internet as easily as Bill Gates. Yet, incredibly few agents are able to use the Internet for business, except to email clients from their laptops. They simply aren't getting support from the very associations who are mandated to serve them. The reasons are many. Some associations are tied to contracts with information service providers that shackle them to expensive and outdated software and hardware. Others think they must purchase systems that serve all the technology levels of all agents, so they purchase multiple softwares to access the information. The irony is that the simplest of these softwares is always much more expensive and complex than any Internet solution. So, they are out hundreds of thousands of dollars for information management solutions that could be had for a fraction of the cost, if they would only do a little investigating. Few have the foresight to go ahead and buy their way out of these contracts and put their agents with cheaper, more efficient Internet MLS services, which are safer, easier to use, and much more cost-efficient. Since many of these organizations are comprised of volunteers, there are few board members who know enough about technology and the way information management services really work to do a good job for the members. They often base their information system decisions on myths, misinformation, or worse, MLS revenues, little realizing that by choosing information services that are unnecessarily expensive, they are, in fact, in violation of their fiduciary responsibilities to their membership! But who knows enough to call them on it? With today's advances in technology there is no reason why all MLS information isn't on browser/servers or Internet-enabled client/server systems. These associations and MLS organizations have their collective heads in the sand, hiding from a growing reality. All information systems will one day soon be Internet-based. For some it will simply be sooner than later. Meanwhile, they are telling themselves and their membership that Internet MLS is unproven, that it can't handle large databases (tell that to Realtor.com with over 1.3 million listings!) and that disconnects are still too frequent (how's your dial-up lately?) Across the country, there are already little rebellions. The Middle Tennessee Association of Realtors put all of its members on an Internet MLS over a year ago, a decision railroaded without regret by its gutsy CEO. In North Michigan, 95% of the Traverse City brokers have adopted a parallel MLS system, separate and apart from their MLS system server, in the pursuit of better service. In Florida, the Florida Association of REALTORS has created its own parallel Internet MLS to market to associations who are behind in technology solutions. Even the MLS information system providers are driving the trend toward Internet-based services. GTE Enterprise Solutions claims that its parallel Internet MLS systems are enabled to cutover to full service anytime. VistaInfo's CEO Tom Gay, has vowed that when his company completes its purchase of Moore Data, one of the nation's largest MLS information system providers, that the company's products in the future will all be Internet-enabled. Internet MLS means the difference between being able to interact instantly with consumers, which is what real estate is all about. Information systems that are more tied to being proprietary than easy to use are a drawback for Realtors who need to search, process and share information quickly and efficiently. There is no excuse for any information system for Realtors to require that the agent shut down one program and open another to communicate with a customer or to process a report, or to post a listing. When information manipulation is that difficult, it is discouraging for agents who don't have a facility with computers and programs. Again the Internet can come to the rescue. If an agent can hunt and peck on a keyboard, turn on a computer, and click a mouse, s/he should be able to use those minimum skills to access the Internet, complete fields of information for reports and email clients with the information instantly. If the real estate industry is really interested in keeping the Realtor at the center of the transaction, they should be moving at every level to get agents positioned to master the Internet and to prepare for the inevitable future of the online transaction. MLS organizations and Realtor associations should make sure that information is easily accessible and retrievable for agents at the least cost. Brokers should step up to the plate with excellent Web sites and listings services to help agents get their homes online, and perhaps reward agents who can use the Internet for marketing, and post and maintain their own listings. And, agents should be learning on their own time to use the Internet, because it is only a matter of time until using the Internet is a necessity, not an option. Remember, you are in charge of your future. Also See:
Published: August 12, 1999 Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws. 
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Blanche Evans is the award-winning senior editor of Realty Times, the Internet's leading independent real estate news service. She is featured daily on the Realty Times Video Network in the "Realty Viewpoint" segment.
