Agents Need To Step It Up
Technology has revolutionized many industries throughout the course of time. It’s permitted for the development of new realms of employment and opportunity, while simultaneously doing the exact opposite. We’ve replaced bank tellers with ATM’s, cashiers with automatic registers, industrial workers with computerized assembly lines and manufacturing technologies, accountants with accounting software, and now potentially real estate agents with online buying and selling platforms.
Services such as BuyerCurious.com are clearly out to replace the age of the agent. This web-based platform allows for buyers and sellers to execute efficient real estate transactions and services while taking agents out of the picture in every aspect. Why? To remove the commission rates and keep more money in everybody’s pockets. Well…everyone except the agents. Though this service hasn’t reached Canada yet, one can only predict that the appeal this style of product offering has will entice the development of a Canadian version thereof in the near future.
The livelihood of real estate agents is sadly coming to a crossroads where the incessant usability improvements and revolutionary concepts applied to publicly available online services are threatening their existence. So now we need to ask ourselves: Will real estate agents make like the dinosaurs and run from the asteroid, or rise up and literally fight the machine?
This question has no easy answer, but it’s becoming very clear that if real estate agents want to stick around and justify the commission rates they reap they need to pick up their socks and present unprecedented value and services to their clients; things that websites and computers will never be able to provide. Obviously commission rates are a touchy topic, hence the public’s weening away from them, so to earn these rates agents need to renew their personas into that of marketing experts on their clients’ behalf rather than playing the typical role an overpaid tour guide.
To stand the test of time agents need to step up their game or pack up their things…there doesn’t seem to be much middle-ground at this point. Have some ideas on how agents can overcome this technology wave? Shoot us a reply in the comments below or on Twitter @enviromint.
image courtesy of DucDigital
