There is no doubt in my mind that the internet is the single most revolutionary technology we have adopted in our modern society. Every other innovation since has been built off this highway of information. It has connected us directly to our neighbors and drastically changed the way we interact with others.
This information we can grasp instantaneously has also warped our perception of time. Everything now has to be available on demand.
If you haven’t been in the real estate market for a while, you may find this shocking, but you can use a smartphone for most of the home buying and selling process. The National Associations of Realtors reported in their 2022 Home Buyers and Sellers Generational Trends that buyers aged 23-56 used their smartphones the majority of the time.
Now if you are looking for a home, you find it via online listings. If you want to write an offer for a home, you sign documents digitally. If you want to go and look at a home, you type the address into your GPS. Year after year, we are finding ways to decrease the time to get from A to B and it can all be accessed by the supercomputer in our pockets.
Just a couple of years ago, closings were a long and tedious process that would take an hour to an hour and a half when a mortgage company is involved. Now, we are seeing the mortgage companies sending most of the documents to sign digitally before the closing. This has drastically shortened the process, and I would not be surprised if the rest of the documents were sent by the closing attorneys to be signed digitally.
The covid lockdowns forced real estate professionals to adopt virtual showings sooner than we had expected. Virtual tours became a necessity and videos of homes started to “get with the times,” as one might say. They became higher quality by taking advantage of the hardware and software that became cheaper and more easily obtainable.
Before covid, newly developed programs such as 3D tours were only utilized in high-end luxury homes. Now that these programs are more readily available, they will be used for most residential real estate. Within the online listing, you will soon be able to view the home in an exact 3D replica before ever stepping into the home.
We have come a long way from newspaper ads, mapping out directions, and waiting on open houses to search for houses. So far, we have done a great job improving the home buying and selling process. It is easier than it has ever been to exist in this marketplace.
In the future, we will see improvements in data security, virtual and augmented reality, and AI automation. Who knows how drastically things will change once they get implemented, but I am excited and optimistic to see it!
