Real estate agents of the future

This is the way of the future - you can use First National brand for familiarity, but the next issue is keeping the customer, afterall there are several 'brands' in your suburb. What distinguishes them? Do you think its the 'brand'? Nope. Thats what gets them in the door; your door, but maybe they went into 3 doors. So the next trick is differentiating yourself from the rest. So what do all real estate agents have in common? Well here is a few issues where they might be similar or upon which they might differentiate themselves:
1. Nice to you
2. Treat you with respect
3. They go out of their way for you
4. They show an interest in you that goes beyond the sale - beyond the commission
5. They dont treat you like a tire kicker
6. They how sonething about the local property market
7. They know something about the economy
8. They have information (support) to bring you up to speed, information in your language
9. They have local data - just numbers mind you
10. They have visual presentations of data.

You want to know the future of business, well here is it. It does not lie with real estate franchises. They should be doing this, but they are too comfy in their entrenched ologopolies. No the future is where some smart real estate agent starts designing tools for the customer. That agent or programmer is going to be showing developing tools which bring data to life. A tool that turns those facts in databases into graphical mapping images, charts, pie charts. This will increase the useability and utility of agents and ensure they retain customers. Any takers?

There are a number of appealing aspects to using charts. The thing is that its far easier to create charts in excel and just copy and paste them as images into Blogger or webpage. Where dynamic data is more useful is where you have dynamic data. The way I could use the dynamic data is:

1. Real estate prices in different markets
2. Share prices for the stocks I like
3. Share indices

Here is the code to get you started - http://code.google.com/apis/chart/. Offered by Google, though its quite possible you will outgrow Google. Afterall everyone has access to the code. Who has the time to do it? Who is so organised and capable to oversee a programming exercise. Real estate just took on a new direction.
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Andrew Sheldon www.sheldonthinks.com