Educated consumers = less work, more money for Canadian real estate professionals

Lloyd Frink, president of Zillow.com, posted an interesting article on RISMedia.com, entitled ‘For Tech-Savvy Consumers, Real Estate Agents are Still the Experts’.

The article discusses the recent phenomenon of websites (including Zillow.com) offering consumers easy access to a wealth of information on local housing market conditions, neighbourhood information, and other homebuying tips.

This is a drastic change from the pre-Internet days when real estate agents were the gate-keepers of this type of information.

Should real estate professionals be concerned?

Not so, explains Mr. Frink: 

“A recent study by the California Association of Realtors reported that home buyers who used the Internet as a significant portion of their home-buying experience spent an average of two weeks with a Realtor looking at homes, compared to those who did not use the Internet, who spent an average of seven weeks looking for their home.

The wealth of tools and information available online takes away a lot of the “hand holding” traditionally expected of real estate agents, which allows them to take on a higher volume of clients, and ultimately, make more money.”

In fact, single property websites from UniqueHomeSites.com offer Canadian real estate professionals the ability to harness the power of the Internet by automatically ‘pulling’ together relevant information from a variety of sources into a neatly packaged website, dedicated to a single listing.

With a UniqueHomeSite, consumers can browse everything related to a specific property, including photos, property descriptions, video, local schools, neighbourhood demographics, plus much more.

Not only do consumers benefit from the wealth of information available on the site, recipricol links back to the agents website makes it easy for them to make contact when they are ready to engage the agent to start a transaction.