A couple of months ago we surveyed our Fundamentals class asking why people were going into a real estate these days. (You can see our blog entry summarizing the results here.) With the real estate market picking up a bit, we’re inspired!
A few weeks ago we spotted an article in Inman News summarizing the results of a survey on tech use among real estate agents. The story reported that “75 percent of the 110 real estate professionals who participated . . . selected ‘iPad presentation’ as the marketing tool they would most like to have.”
This got us wondering. What are the tech habits of the agents and agents-in-training who come to classes here at Rockwell? So we surveyed one of our Practices classes to find out.
Here are the results!
· 24 out of 36 respondents owned an iPad or other tablet. The healthy size of that number, 66%, surprised us (me anyway). Presumably, as apps designed for real estate professionals grow in number and quality, tablet ownership will become the norm. Using a smartphone for web browsing and other Internet tasks is almost at that stage already, with 83% in our group reporting doing so.
· What software communication tools do our students use? Everyone stated that they used email—no surprise there. Facebook is also popular, with 61% using it; about the same percentage also liked Google+ and texting. On the other hand, considerably fewer used Twitter (7 mentions), blogging (4 mentions), and LinkedIn (9 mentions).
· Despite this wide array of software communication tools, plain old email was still the favorite means of communicating for 55% of the respondents. Facebook also did fairly well with about 25% naming it as their top pick. A handful of people noted texting as their first choice.
· Lastly, we asked a more general question about the marketing tools agents use (or plan to use). 37% chose real estate websites as their major marketing tool. Interestingly, despite 60% of the class listing email as the favorite communication tool, only 25% saw it as a major marketing tool. About a quarter of the class also mentioned flyers and craigslist as important for marketing real estate.
What about you—what marketing methods work? And what’s your favorite tech?
Rockwell Institute is always here to answer your questions about real estate training.
