According to Clareity Consulting, the typical agent spends 3 1/2 hours using a combination of telecommunications devices - cellphones, office/home phones, e-mail and FAX machines, making them among the largest consumers of telecommunications services. Can costs be minimized?

That's the focus of a new report by Clareity, done in cooperation with Cisco Systems.

"While the future of telecommunications is very exciting," says the Clareity white paper, "today's process of providing telecommunication services for agents has long been a painful and expensive experience for the real estate broker. Managing different phone systems in multiple offices, each with their own voice mail systems, unique billing schedules and incompatible hardware is a costly and time-consuming exercise.

"IP Telephony may be the solution," recommends the report, "potentially a free solution. In fact, IP Telephony systems typically pay for themselves within 12 to 18 months."

The report goes on to describe IP Telephony as "the newest technology that can dramatically reduce telephone costs and allow for greatly enhanced capabilities such as unified messaging and reduced cost voice mail systems for Real Estate offices. Implementation of an IP Telephony solution allows compressed voice and fax calls to be routed over the Internet, thus eliminating the need for multiple systems or networks."

Here's a diagram that would show how it would work, according to Joe Cusack with Cisco Systems.

Instead of expensive digital voice communication through the Private Branch Exchange (PBX,) brokers could switch their telephony services to Internet Phone software or IP. Using the Internet, brokers could "eliminate much of their communications expenses. In addition, they could use the bandwidth of their communications channels more efficiently through converging audio, video and data."

IP telephony is not without problems, cautions the white paper, due to "lack of connectivity between an IP telephony network and the PBX." Enter Cisco (and others) who developed routers "which contained voice-processing cards and provided the necessary interface between the IP telephony software and the PBX." Another hurdle was clarity of voice. "Unlike PBX, the packet-switched nature of the Internet Protocol hindered reliability and posed a significant concern for the level of quality. Newly developed network components and protocols, have improved overall quality of communications. The quality of IP Telephony is so good, that it is now almost impossible to distinguish whether an end user is on a traditional PBX system or using IP Telephony."

So how do brokers benefit? Brokers can bypass their long-distance carriers by routing long distance calls through the Internet or the company intranet, suggests Clareity. An IP network benefits every user and it can increase productivity by network support staff as much as 33 percent. Also, IP employs voice compression techniques that require less bandwidth than normal voice transmissions.

The return on investment, estimates Clareity and Cisco, is 12 to 18 months.

Another benefit is the ability for agents to "roam offices" by allowing their phone extensions to travel with them. Office space can be reduced and remain unassigned, allowing more agents to sit down, plug in, do their work, and go. This can be done through "wi-fi" or wireless technology.

Unified messaging means that all types of communication data - fax, e-mail, phone calls - can be delivered to a single inbox, saving time and effort and space for brokers and their agents as they can respond to all these types of communications remotely.

The speed of delivery of such information as real time mortgage rates and MLS data through wi-fi technologies is still to come, as many devices are still on different standards and don't communicate with each other, but that day will come, insists Clareity.

Published: July 18, 2003

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