Recently, the Executive VP of the California Association of Realtors presented an interesting, but certainly logical finding. While attending, Tech Tuesday, a technology training and informative session, held before the California Realtor EXPO, they presented findings that according to their latest study, over 44% of a realtor’s business comes from the Internet. In fact the study also reported that the amount of realtors who find the internet to be an extremely important part in their business rose from 69% to 89% in the span of one year. About 97% of the realtors polled also had home internet access.

In this day and age, realtors need to be able to find, give, and receive information quickly and what better technology to utilize then the web. Realtors and technologists think that Web 2.0 will give them a great opportunity to make more transactions. For those of you not familiar with the term, Web 2.0 refers to the new sharing and interacting of internet users between each other and between the sites themselves, like for example: blogs (the study did note about 9% of realtors report participation here), pod casts, gmail, etc, ability to upload and download data.

These types of 2.0 usages are only increasing in usage/demand as more and more realtors are able to utilize hand held internet devices, email thru cells, etc to communicate. According to the study 25% of realtors use their hand held devices round the clock, while 28% answer client emails within minutes of receiving them and another 36% reporting that their response time is between 30 minutes to one hour.  

When polled about technology upgrades, additions, etc, 20% reported that a new computer was most important, followed by a hand free phone with 19%, and then lastly a handheld internet device at 13%.