Much of what used to be done from an office window or in the local paper has moved onto the web, and from there onto mobile phones – a trend presenting the real estate industry with enormous challenges

In a world of remorseless change, it’s not only new technologies, but also new techniques, working practices and skills that could prove the difference between success and failure.

‘The chief areas of technology that people should be concentrating on are customer relationship management systems and a marketing set-up that allows them to carry out all of their marketing from just one place,’ says real estate technology guru Professor Bernice Ross. (See also her blog in this issue of Future World.)

‘With a one-stop marketing shop they should be able to carry out just one upload that places their listing on many sites, and they should be able to do the same with their videos.’

Some 90 per cent of buyers now go online as part of their search, but Ross – an Emeritus Professor of psychology who coaches real estate staff – says many real estate companies do not know what is generating their online sales, neither tracking leads nor finding out what is causing their conversion ratios.

‘They do not know what is generating their qualified leads and they think that technology is a substitute for connection,’ she says.

Research recently carried out by the National Association of Realtors (NAR) has found out that 98 to 99 per cent of those people who view a property online will drive by and see it, something that Doug Garcia, the director of research for San Francisco Bay area commercial Realtors Colliers Parrish states will routinely involve the use of a mobile phone.

Garcia says his company is now looking at both mapping technology to guide clients to a potential property and, in the future, the use of locational tags to alert a client to the fact that they may be passing a property.

However, the use of smart phones and internet mobile is also presenting the real estate community with issues. ‘The President of Nokia has referred to it as iPodification,’ says Ross. ‘All of your services should be delivered to one point. Because of that, there should be two variants of a real estate website – a full-blown version and a dot-mobi version, which carries short, one-line descriptions for mobile.”

Ross is not alone in picking mobile technology as a rich new area. Intensive research carried out by Future World has revealed that real estate agents are all trying to find ways into a device that is increasingly being seen as a pocketbook. New products and systems being promoted by the mobile phone industry itself should make that process easier, allowing text messages and adverts to be sent direct to mobile.

Internet websites being developed for mobile by companies such as Unity Mobile (also featured in this issue of Future World) are being closely followed by phones – from companies such as ‘3’, which open Skype and Facebook to show who is online without connecting to the web – which offer opportunities to real estate companies to connect via mobile.

This interest in social networking could help evade moves by governments in the US and Europe to regulate access to mobile due to privacy concerns: people will happily supply information via social networking applications that they would not dream of providing to market researchers.

Which comes back neatly to one of Ross’ other tips: the use of social networking technologies like Twitter and Facebook by the real estate industry. Much has been written recently encouraging the use of social networking by Realtors, but little about why they should. The answer is simple. Not only do the systems provide valuable potential leads, which many have already recognised, they also provide localised information that can be mined to provide an invaluable lifestyle resource.

Says Ross: ‘What we are going to see is the growth of community information. That information will come from co-creation by users, word of mouth, the picnic and cocktail party circuit, and from people who share common interests. Real estate agents are going to start drawing on that.

‘There are sites that are being put together now that are looking for people who are 35-50 years old, and who either work on Wall Street or are involved in the media, film or art. The idea is that they will form a community online and that they will also want to live near each other.

‘It’s “Where I’m doing business” and “What is my lifestyle”. Into that you will get local information being factored in, so you will get the local restaurant owner and other people who have local businesses putting in information, and people buying a property will want to know all about that.

‘The real estate companies that exploit this trend will be successful because they will become the manager of my zip code; they will become experts for that area and its lifestyle.’

Real estate agents would then add this community-rich information to a rapidly developing data mine.

‘Mapping is one of those components that has been around for a long time now and it is expected,’ continues Ross. ‘One of the very interesting developments is www.rottenneighbor.com which lists bad neighbours, sex offenders and foreclosures. That is a development that I think is going to really pick up pace because at the moment anything that is pushing from the bottom up is gaining momentum.’

The final area of technology development identified by Ross is the evolution of 3D.

‘Interactive 3D will have the same sort of role to play in providing local and specific information: it will also give people a competitive edge.

‘I am involved in a real estate business in Beverly Hills, and if I were wanting to advertise a $3-5m listing, then I would do it in 3D because that is what would give me the competitive edge.’

An opinion backed by some of the most tech-savvy companies in real estate, with many now researching the potential of 3D offerings from companies like Google and Microsoft to provide views of local communities, streets and neighbourhoods.

Taking people inside the houses in those areas – so that they can see the view from the window – is the next logical step as technology begins to populate the virtual world.

For those wishing to read Professor Bernice Ross’ full article click here.

For those wanting to know more about United Lane’s unique 3D technology, contact James.digby@unitedlane.com

If you have any queries regarding this newsletter, or would like to contribute, please email Peter Warren at peter.warren@unitedlane.com

3D technology is being hailed by experts as one of the possible answers to the credit crunch, as web designers look for that extra wow factor to give their sites the edge in the economic downturn

Having already been the victim of one false dawn eight years ago, 3D technology is beginning to emerge from the shadows as one of the most exciting developments on the internet.

‘The trend is very clear,’ says Karthik Ramani, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Indiana’s Purdue University and an authority on 3D technology.

‘The real world is 3D and, as humans, we want things to behave in the way that they do in the real world, so going to 3D is very natural. It is the next evolution of the web.’

Techno race
The claims have not gone unnoticed by internet companies like Google and Microsoft, which have developed Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth in what appears to be a race to capture the world in 3D on the web. These developments are now exciting traditional industries such as property sales and furniture design, and are spawning a whole new virtual world industry, far removed from current technologies like Second Life.

‘The rate of development of these technologies is already having an impact on the US real estate market,’ says Doug Garcia, the director of research for Colliers Parrish, a large real estate group based in the San Francisco area.

‘We’ve explored using 3D modeling on the market and are working towards a future where actual 3D tours will allow you to go to different floors of a building and look around the location using Google Earth.

‘Increasingly we think that people will want to use 3D to assess the value of a property remotely, and the challenge there will be in the refresh of the 3D worlds that will evolve, though I could see that happening with social networking for an area where people will work to contribute information.’

Superior interiors
And while companies like Google focus on the outside, other companies are now working hard to create interiors that show off properties and products. Here at United Lane, we want to form a closer association between 3D virtual environments and the real world.

‘Our aim is to make 3D technology available to anyone using the web,’ says Chief Technology Officer, Kresten Thomsen. ‘So, what we do is let people upload plans of their own houses from a 2D floor plan and populate it with real furniture and objects, change floors and wall colors and then render the whole thing in a photorealistic fashion, because people find that more compelling and attractive.

‘In our visualizations, we can even add the view from a window; that is how I see the internet going – it will be a believable mirror of the real world.’

Virtual world
While United Lane can make photorealistic images of buildings that do not yet exist in a remarkably short space of time, Vzillion, wants to go further. In line with the old vision of the internet bubble at the turn of the century, when developers promised a photorealistic world inhabited by lifelike avatars of real people, Vzillion envisages 3D with everything.

‘We think in 3D and we feel things in 3D. If you look at a virtual world you see an environment you are engaged with,’ says Antonio Collier, the company’s CEO.

Its offering for the future is a 3D virtual world where you are given the keys to a virtual flat that can be populated with the objects that you use in your everyday life. Objects which, according to Collier, will work in much the same way that they would if they were in your real room.
‘You will be able to go to Amazon and point and click and play a music movie on the TV in your virtual apartment,’ he says. Potentially, it’s a move to mesh the real world with Second Life – that might have implications for both.

3D thinking
Professor Ramani, whose resume also includes work at the prestigious Stanford Research Institute in California, says that the key factor in the use of virtual environments for people is the amount of data that a 3D world can convey.

‘I have worked with cognitive psychologists and we have looked at the way that people like to navigate 3D content. We gave them the ability to take snapshots from within the visualization and found that people always choose positions that allow them to convey the maximum amount of visual content.

‘Of course, there has to be some value for the 3D visualization to be useful, and we found that people considered the 3D interface much more intuitive than a 2D one.’

Part of the reason for this, according to a recent study carried out by scientists, is because our brains find 3D environments more reassuring. Their research suggests that the part of the brain governing vision is able to map out a copy of a 3D image by projecting it onto responsive neurons that can create a 3D model of an object.

‘Human beings are keenly aware of object structure, and that may be due to this clear structural representation in the brain,’ Charles E. Connor, associate professor in the Zanvyl Krieger Mind-Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, told Science Daily in October of this year.

In the study, Connor and colleague Yukako Yamane, a postdoctoral fellow, trained two monkeys to watch a computer screen while 3D objects were played upon it, while the researchers recorded the responses of neurons in the higher-level part of the visual area.

According to Connor, the research may ultimately reveal the reasons why our brains find some objects and views visually pleasing, yet dismiss others. The suggestion is that there may be an element of ‘pleasing comfort’ created in the brain among groups of neurons when they display an object.