Flip back through time, to the Orlando Convention Center, in the year 1999.
Thousands of members of the National Association of Realtors have gathered for the annual convention. Two huge banners, draped across the entrance to the convention center, greet them.
One banner touts the virtual-reality tours developed by bamboo.com., while another huge banner is designed to draw conventioneers’ attention to IPIX, another creator of virtual-reality tours.
No matter that just before the meeting, the two companies merged.
The Orlando, Fla., convention, and the 2000 meeting in San Francisco, was filled with high-tech. Who needs postcards when you have Web sites, or business cards when there is e-mail? Heck, you can bring your laptop to the seller’s house and do a full presentation just by turning on the machine and stroking a few keys.
Skip past the 2001 convention in Chicago, turned into a nonevent by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks less than two months before.
It’s 2002, a record year for sales of existing homes, an industry that helps keep the flagging economy from total collapse. At the Morial Convention Center in New Orleans, 22,000 Realtors converge on the exhibit hall. And what do they find? Postcards, business cards, photocopying machines and row after row of gifts for clients at closing and the oddest-looking Realtor ties.
And cookbooks. Jumbo Jack’s Cookbooks of Audubon, Iowa, allows Realtors to produce cookbooks for their clients — either three-ring or spiral-bound — as closing gifts, said sales manager Michael Ruddy.
Cookbooks like these are typically used by small organizations as surefire fund-raisers, but are easily turned into real estate marketing tools.
Other gifts: membership in the National Arbor Day Foundation ($10) and a tree ($25).
“I noticed there were a lot of little places offering appointment books and jewelry,” said Allan Domb, president of Allan Domb Real Estate, who leads seminars at the conventions each year. “And lots of places where you could order gift baskets of food or candles for your clients.”
Oh, and if you are a female Realtor and on your feet for too many hours of the day, there was a booth selling Easy Spirit shoes, just in case you didn’t have time to stop by the Cherry Hill Mall.
Virtual tours? There were some, sure, but three years into it the idea has become old hat. The emphasis is not on 360 degrees, but on coming up with a tour that doesn’t tie up clients’ computers for hours.
Still, the virtual-tour technology was impressive, Domb said.
“Did you see Egg Solutions’ virtual-tour camera?” he asked. “Just $500.” As technology gets more established, it becomes less expensive.
As one exhibitor put it, old-fashioned direct marketing has been combined with technology to create a “total marketing package.” Still, there are more postcard and business-card vendors than there are dot-coms — thanks to the great shake-out of 2000-2001 — and the result is less techie bragging and bravado and much more nuts-and-bolts real estating.
In many cases, technology has transformed traditional marketing techniques. Few real estate agents will eschew computers. Randall R. Russell works for Jentec of Addison, Texas, which can replicate brochures and listing presentations on a CD-ROM the size of a business card.
Actually, it is a business card, with the face and all the necessary information, but once you put it into the computer, it gives the client a direct link to the agent’s Web site, Russell said.
The tools of technology — toys, if you will — were tucked away into a small section of the exhibit floor.
It was technology that can be used by everyone.
What appears in the exhibit hall at a Realtors’ convention is a pretty good gauge of the state of the economy and the direction in which it is heading.
For example, several companies — LandAmerica being one of the largest — had information booths on 1031 Exchanges and their various permutations.
Simply put, Section 1.1031 of the Internal Revenue Code allows owners of certain types of like-kind real and personal property to sell their property and buy other like-kind property without paying the capital-gains tax.
“That means there are a lot more investors in the market, now that stocks are no longer such a sure thing,” Domb said.
There were several firms providing information on zero-down-payment assistance for first-time buyers (the Realtors’ association’s new president, Cathy Whately, is pushing affordable housing during the coming year).
Mold has made Realtors nervous, and several firms, including EMSL Analytical in Westmont, N.J., were passing out information on environmental testing.
Still more companies were looking for developable land, since building sites are fewer and more expensive to get ready for housing.
The sluggish economy and resulting unemployment has spurred growth in the number of Realtors from fewer than 700,000 in 1996 to what NAR spokesman Walt Moloney estimates at 870,000 this year.
But real estate isn’t the only business benefiting from the influx of the jobless.
Two Men and a Truck, a Lansing, Mich., firm that franchises small-scale moving companies around the country, is being inundated with requests for information, a spokesman said.
The initial franchise fee: $28,000.
