Believe it or not, my chosen career and the tools of my trade date back to the late 1800’s, when real estate brokers would gathered at the offices of their local associations to share information about properties they were trying to sell. They agreed to compensate other brokers who helped sell those properties, and the first Multiple Listing Service (MLS) was born, based on the principle that’s unique to organized real estate: Help me sell my inventory and I’ll help you sell yours.
The MLS became a National Organization in the early 1960’s and “The Book” would be delivered weekly to the local Realtor’s offices and was generally out dated by the time it arrived! If you were a buyer, you had to go to the Realtor’s office and look through the Book to find a home and hope it was still available. Contracts were typed on a manual typewriter or hand written and you physically had to sit down with each other to get the job done!
It wasn’t until about 1994 that home searches began to be publicly available on the internet! That is less than 20 years ago! Technology has moved very quickly in the last 19 years…
1999 – the first Internet Lead Generation programs started making an appearance
Early 2000’s – Internet Data Exchanges (IDX) were launched for website
2005 – Google and MOTOVO brought map and neighborhood searches to a new level
2006 – Zillow begins the Zestimate for home value…BEWARE…the zestimate is not based on anything of value, it is an ESTIMATE and wrong 99.999% of the time.
2007 – Trulia adds Trulia Voices, their question and answer section.
The advent of the internet and it’s tools changed how we all live our lives, I now have websites, a blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and regularly Google myself to see where I show up and what information is accurate and try to change what isn’t. These are my two primary websites:
- vlrrealestategroup.com – this one is more educational and seller based
- vlrrealestate.com – this one is more buyer focused
Contracts are completed online, electronic signatures are commonplace, our office is striving to be paperless, everything lives in the cloud, “i” stuff, tablets, e-readers are becoming more commonplace than books and we have “smart” phones that I still feel to dumb to own!
And now I have an App? This is an amazing thing for me, computers were just coming into play when I started my career at Bank One, I had one of only two in our office! By the time I left the corporate world behind, the iPads and Tablets were becoming popular and now look at me…I’m an App!
Living in Indy 