The other day in MLS Council I heard a broker say that the way things are going soon people are just going to buy their houses over the internet. I realize that he was probably being glib but that got me thinking will people ever buy a homes online? If so will it revolutionize the real estate industry like e-commerce did retail?
I suppose some people may purchase a home online if for nothing else then the novelty of it, but for the most part I doubt online home purchasing will be commonplace. I consider myself a pretty technology savvy guy and really comfortable in general with the entire online shopping scene. Heck most of my family and friends know to check my Amazon wishlist for upcoming birthdays and holidays, my wife even bought her car online. The face of the Web has certainly changed since I first sat in front of a browser at 10 years old and tried to remember you had to type ‘http://’ and was using lynx on my vt450 terminal, irc on the open freenet, and webspider to search in a prerelease version of netscape in a pregoogle world.
Today we are surrounded by always connected always available sites with self-updating information, virtual tours of virtual homes, virtual properties, mapping searches and the sophistication of the internet seems to be daily increasing. I work with tools daily that allow clients of members to recieve autonotifications of new properties, perform property searches on their own and much more. This is all really cool but really is that what selling a home is all about?
When my wife and I bought our current house I had access to the MLS, I had access to REALTORS who were willing and able to assist me to find the home we wanted at the price we needed. After all the tools were said and done what sold me on the house was my REALTOR taking the time with my wife and I visiting homes and imagining the possibilities. When we first visited our current house it had old stale carpet in the kitchen (of all places) but we were able to see past that and see the potential beneath.
Sure there are tools like DesignMyRoom.com which can allow you dress up a room to see the potential below the surface but nothing is like standing in the house with your REALTOR who is also a neighborhood expert telling you about the schools your kids will attend pointing out the park down the street the walking trails around the way or the killer view from the patio area. Also no neighborhood evaluation sites are going to tell you that the streets are clean, the kids are well behaved and people are genuinely friendly.
Call me naive but I doubt in my lifetime or my children’s lifetime we will see people buying homes like they purchase cars online.
Don’t get me wrong people may find their house through the internet and many will find their REALTOR online, but ultimately I doubt that the majority of people will buy a home sight unseen. They will want to go out and walk through the house, check out the rooms and the neighbohood. Stand on the second story and see if they can hear the traffic passing by on the freeway, or stand in back yard and hear godawful screaming like a cat is being strangled with no apparent source, or if their neighbor enjoys playing bagpipes in their backyard (my wife and had each of these experiences and more in our epic search for a home) and ultimately experience the house to see if it is the home for them.
So while the industry may be promising the you can indeed buy your home online, most people find homes they want to check out and contact a REALTOR they can work with online. As REALTORS I see that now is a time full of opportunity, people are looking for homes and have access to so much information so much so that it can be information overload. You can provide the insight and guidance to go from a list of should have features to a home that they will raise their kids in.
So while the Internet may be great at showing us videos of people doing funny things, making information available like no other time in human history; I doubt seriously that any site or tool can ever replace the insight and wisdom a professional REALTOR brings to the table. So you all worry about being market experts and selling the houses and I will worry about providing you the best tools for the job.
Mark Flavin
I will add this as counterpoint. I think that a certain percentage of residential home property transactions will occur online, and in fact already are.
Certainly REO and foreclosure properties have been transacted for online. This is not the focus of Mark’s article, however.
The question that he is posing is ‘Will the prototypical homebuying consumer ever buy the house that they are actually going to live in ’sight unseen’?
I say yes. And moreover, I think that the this will only empower the local REALTOR.
Because of course, it is not sight unseen. Mark makes a good point - I certainly wouldn’t be likely to buy a home without visiting it in person with the ‘virtual alternatives’ available to me now. By virtual alternatives I mean the photos, virtual tours, illustrations, and other media that professionals work to collect and post as a part of properly marketing a home.
But we can do better than that. We need to imagine what it is like to go beyond two dimensional ‘virtual reality.’
Lets flash forward five years. Computing horsepower and graphic technology has grown so affordable that I, the local REALTOR, have built a cave in my office for about what your currently pay for a great pc.
By cave, of course, I am referring not to a Paleolithic rock feature, but a ‘virtual reality cave.’
Moreover I am taking advantage of the breakthroughs in high resolution 3d projected (lasered) projectors (http://www.pinktentacle.com/2006/02/aist-develops-3d-image-projector/). A laser focuses at a programmatically defined point in space and ignites the nitrogen and oxygen molecules in that precise focal point. It then moves on to the next point in a kind of real time 3D (and I am going to have to coin a term here) ‘virtureal’ projector.
So on the walls we have very high resolution images of the exterior neighborhood (when you are ‘walking’ outside the house), and of the interior of the home (when you are inside). In the empty space between the walls Key 3D details are filled in by virtureal projection.
So most days I spend alternating between working to acquire the high quality video walkthroughs that power my true virtual tours, and walking clients through as many homes as they want to see without ever leaving my office.
My clients spend on average an hour in the cave, standing or seated, while viewing properties. A ‘home tour’ can be done in as little as 30 seconds (if you don’t like what you see), or a buyer can spend hours viewing the details of the house that I recorded just last week.
This is all made possible, of course, by the fact that the local REALTOR knows what the buyer is looking for in the houses they show, and so have taken the time to properly record those details with high resolution cameras.
Will most people actually ever make the purchase at that point without ever visiting the home? Of course not, under most circumstances. But under a handful of scenarios buyers might certainly make an initial offer on a home under these circumstances. If nothing more, it may prove to be a great way to narrow the field of prospective homes to visit by ‘virtureally’ visiting them.
Excellent perspective Mike, and when you get your virtual cave setup let me know 
The cave I could build now. I was lucky enough to watch one of the very first caves built when my brother worked in the Naval Architecture and Marine engineering department for the University of Michigan. This was back in 1990 using high end SGI workstations and very expensive (at the time) 1 megapixel steroscopic lenses on a boom. Technology has come a long way since then, specifically in the horsepower/rendering department and in the cost of imaging and display solutions. A quick google search shows that not only are there already caves available commercially, but someone has built a nice mobile version in a semi trailer: http://www.fakespacesystems.com/mobileFlex.htm
The ‘virtureal’ projector for genuine 3-D imaging is a ways off, I will admit.
~Locke
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
Leave a comment
3 Comments