There are lots of trends in technology in the 21st century, but I am not sure that adding 21st century technology to Costa Mesa real estate may be a good thing. It seems the hot buzz word lately at the advent of 2016 is Artificial Intelligence.
Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is trying to create an Artificial Intelligence robot or some kind of personal servant. Amazon would like to automate it’s delivery of goods with drones to the doorstep. This year’s CES show in Las Vegas has over a hundred vendors focused on robotics and artificial intelligence.
Adding 21st Century Technology To Costa Mesa Real Estate
Real estate technology has a long way to go until we get to the vision of the Jetsons on TV
So how does real estate compare with other industries currently, and where are the technology trends in real estate going? The real estate industry has typically lagged behind the technology field by several years. Realtors are often slow to put cutting edge technology into place because it can be expensive and they are unsure how the market will accept it.
Here are some of the current trends that are in use today in certain markets:
Automated Showing: A company called hubzu.com and auction.com are trying to grab market share from Realtors. they are trying to create a system that will allow sellers to market and show their homes via technology platforms. It works so that a home is put on their web platform, shared to the MLS, and agents will be forced to use their platform to show the house. The platform generates a key code that allows agents, or buyers without agents, into the home. I have seen it in use most often on bank owned homes locally in Costa Mesa. It certainly has it’s downsides. I was trying to get some information about one of these homes locally in the Mesa Verde market. The home has been on and off the market for weeks in an auction style format, and I was trying to figure out if the home would finally sell by an auction process or not. I looked for the agent – the agent is actually in Atlanta, Georgia, and I called to find out information about the listing. I was instead routed to a telephone call center overseas in India, and they had no idea about anything to do with the house, other than what they had online. Helpful? Not really. If you look through the documentation, this is a major buyer beware kind of sale. Certainly difficult for a buyer. A human element would help a lot, but that is just my opinion.
On Demand Showing: In New York City, several agencies including NYC’s Naked Apartments have put into place on demand showing for apartments. It is an Uber-style app that allows a user to browse apartments for rent, then click a “show me now” button to set up an immediate showing request. I can see this trend hitting us in Costa Mesa in a handful of years, but this will always be limited. For vacant homes, yes, I can see it working. For owner or tenant occupied homes, this could be a pretty big disaster. A home that is not prepared to show (read: messy) doesn’t typically leave a good impression on the buyer. I can see this trend working a lot better with vacant apartments.
Transactional Software: Recently our real estate industry has gotten a lot better in two areas. The use and adoption of digital signatures (docusign) has been huge. It was a Supreme Court verified way to sign documents and it has made the lives of realtors, buyers, and sellers a hell of a lot better. It’s fast, efficient, and it speeds the process of buying homes and signing documents. There are also “signing rooms” and transaction rooms that allow all parties in the transaction to share the paperwork in one centralized location, which makes the process of collecting documents 100% better than using a paper based system.
Drone Photography: Drones are now an FAA approved technology, and Realtors have been using them the past few years to get overhead shots of properties. It’s been big in the luxury market in Orange County, more of a vanity thing, but it has significant usefulness in land sales and large lot sales. It does help a client get the full aspect of a total piece of property. You can see from a video example above how you can get a really different perspective of a home.
Adding 21st Century Technology To Costa Mesa Real Estate
So that’s where we are now – what about adding 21st century technology to Costa Mesa real estate? There are now computers that work so well with algorithms that they can actually start to predict what a buyer would want in a house. As an agent, I can see that as being a huge benefit to myself and to a buyer. So Algorithm Technology would totally rely at the moment on humans to input the distinguishing characteristics of a home, and there are lots of Realtors who could care less about inputing correct information about a listing, even today. But if a computer could use algorithms that predict what clients want, then that could help a human agent process information quicker and find the home faster, couldn’t it? ‘t a computer could use some kind of photo recognition tool that would pair a buyer based upon the buyers needs, that could be extremely effective.
What about a personal AI butler? I think if you look at Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of a AI personal butler, one who knows our wants and needs, then maybe you have created the perfect real estate agent. Maybe there is no need for a human agent in the process.
At the end of the day, in residential real estate, it is still about the emotion. It will be a long time before a machine or an algorithm can accurately measure human emotion, and that will always be a large part of the process when people are buying real estate.
Colin Delaney loves technology, but he loves helping people find real estate even more 🙂.