Adam Empringham,
Director of Sales at Image Property.
Why real estate technology lagged behind other industries
By Adam Empringham, Image Property
Technology has changed the way each of us lives and work in unbelievable ways, hasn’t it?
Those of us of a certain “vintage” remember the days of no mobile phones, computers, or the internet.
Technological advancements have fundamentally changed nearly every part of our lives with some industries being at the forefront of this revolution.
However, real estate wasn’t one of them – it seemed like our industry was stubbornly stuck in the past for decades longer than it ever needed to be.
In fact, some real estate agencies still are holding on tight to a system that has been mostly obsolete and overly time-consuming for years.
What I’m talking about is still relying on laborious systems and processes that involve double-handling and even, eek, reams and reams of paper!
Just like a trusty old ship, some industries take a while to make a turn, but it seems that real estate took longer than it ever needed to.
The reasons? Well, it’s most likely to do with the antiquated systems, including rudimentary customer databases, that was difficult and expensive to move away from – even if they no longer served their original purposes.
Expensive overhauls
Without disparaging some of the long-standing real estate franchises out there, part of the problem was that upgrading systems for a huge number of offices were always going to be a tricky thing to do.
Not only was it a very costly exercise it could also have negative impacts on the day-to-day business practices of their franchisees while the update was underway.
Some agencies simply opted to band-aid their systems or upgrade some parts and ignore others as a “sort of” solution to the issue.
However, such an approach was never going to hold long-term.
All this plotted history was one of the main reasons why we established Supported by Image, using technology at our very core to support our people. This is what matters in real estate; it’s at our very core, and it’s what we do well.
We decided early on that agents who joined our model would be provided with cutting-edge technology to help drive their professional success as well as to streamline all of the processes that are involved in real estate transactions.
Fundamentally, this meant that we invested heavily in technology, including ensuring it could be easily upgradable as time went on, so we would never be repeating the mistakes of the past.
In essence, the technology that is available via our Supported By Image model is an entirely mobile network that allows agents to complete every component of their role on a daily basis – from anywhere at all.
What this means in practice is that it doesn’t matter if they are in the office or on the beach; agents can still be working and can still be connected to all the technology they need to do so.
Without question, our system is a truly mobile-connected opportunity across all platforms, whether it’s mobile, tablet, or PC.
We have taken the time to connect all of the sales technologies together to talk to one another while ensuring that agents have the support they need in the background.
There is no time-consuming double-handling or literal paper trials that agents need to forever keep on top of.
That’s because our Supported By Image model was developed for the third decade of the 21st Century – and not an old school real estate period that is fading from view with the passing of time.
