Home hunters now expect to go online and control much of their search -- and real estate industry leaders have gathered in San Francisco this week, hoping to use that technological trend to their advantage.
Real Estate Connect, the real estate industry's largest technology conference, drew more than 1,700 people to a three-day conference that ends today at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, about 500 more than attended the event last year, organizers said.
It's a reflection of what's happening in the real estate market. The past 12 months has seen the launch of innovative new services such as Redfin and Zillow, which offer ordinary people access to home-related data once reserved for real estate professionals. Traditional brokerages have increasingly struck technology deals that they hope will help them deliver better service online and in person.
``The role of technology in real estate is becoming much more widely recognized,'' said Mike Edelhart, chief executive of Inman News, an Emeryville company that has held the conference for 10 years. Real estate is big business, and technology companies are eager to get further into it.
Last year, real estate agents, property managers and leasing agents did nearly $1.6 trillion in business nationwide, up from about $1.5 trillion in 2004, said Steve Cochrane of Economy.com. Topics of discussion at the conference included how real estate agents can use blogs in their businesses, the virtues of including aerial maps on broker Web sites, and how sites that combine e-commerce and classified advertising -- such as local company LiveDeal, based in Santa Clara -- might affect the industry.
``There's a feeding frenzy,'' said Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, a Seattle-based online brokerage now operating in the Bay Area, as businesses attempt to add more features to their sites.
The show proved to him that competition will be fierce in the future, not just from other technology-oriented start-ups, but from big traditional brokerages, too.
By M. Sese
http://realestatepress.org