In real estate years, the Internet is 10.
That is, a decade ago, Chicago real estate brokers began unveiling a then-exotic commodity, the Web site. In honor of that anniversary, I re-read a story I wrote at the time that scoped out the future of online real estate. What a hoot. Examples:
– According to my breathless reporting, around the world at that time, there were 500 to 700 home pages dedicated to home-selling, and the Web consisted of 30,000 sites, overall. I Googled the term “real estate” a minute ago and came up with 301 million hits. I know, it’s not quite a direct comparison, but you get the idea.
– The National Association of Realtors then was planning an online service for its 800,000 members that would have 2 million to 3 million home-sale listings. Today, the NAR has grown to 1.2 million members, and that site, the Realtors Information Network, or RIN, became a colossal financial flop. Its successor, realtor.com, has fared significantly better, becoming the 800-pound gorilla of listings.
Just over the hill, however, there’s always competition: Re/Max has plans for a similar national Web site, with listings from many brokerages, not just its own.
– Nobody was predicting that the Internet would replace real estate agents, but 10 years ago, one soul said he expected that “we probably will be seeing a very much smaller number of real estate brokers and salespeople.” See previous item.
One thing that I did get right was that this new-fangled Internet probably would have a huge impact on how homes are sold. Of course, today it’s an indispensable tool for anybody’s house-hunt.
And, increasingly, for the “pre-house-hunt.” I’ve shied away from signing up with brokerages’ Web sites in order to look at listings because I just don’t want to fork over the personal information that they require. But maybe I’m in the minority: Baird & Warner Real Estate, for example, recently announced that its HomeFinder property search has 100,000 active subscribers.
People who sign up for such searches are known in the industry as “leads,” and they’re like gold. The Web’s assistance in finding these would-be customers — even if they’re only vaguely thinking about buying homes — may be as big a boon as the online searches themselves.
Baird & Warner CEO Stephen Baird said his company is toying with other ways to use the Internet to foster consumer loyalty. “The next question is, will [the Internet] fundamentally change the way people choose real estate agents?” Baird said. “The way they choose them now isn’t a whole lot more sophisticated than throwing a dart against a wall.”
Baird says he’s looking to eBay. “In the beginning, eBay had a problem: How do you trust your customers? So they did this feedback loop of rating buyers and sellers. That’s the untold story. Without that, eBay doesn’t work,” Baird said.
“So we’ve been talking about using an eBay-type model of rating agents and getting customer feedback.”
A tantalizing possibility, though it could be one of those “be careful what you wish for” moments.
“We’re just in the first generation of tracking these things,” Baird said. “Our level of sophistication at this point is crude.”
Even so, here’s one great stride in the passage of those 10 years: You hardly ever hear anybody call it the “information superhighway” anymore.
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Hear Mary Umberger on WBBM Newsradio 780 at 6:21 p.m. and 10:22 p.m. each Thursday and Friday and 7:20 a.m. each Saturday and Sunday.
mumberger@tribune.com
