Notorious R.O.B. – Conversations on Marketing, Technology, Real Estate

There's An App for That

In my latest Inman column (link is for subscribers only, unless you made it in before the paywall dropped), I took issue with mobile for real estate, and called it the “eternal next big thing” for real estate.  I didn’t have the space really to address what I do think is the future of mobile in real estate, as I was already pushing my word count limit, so I thought I’d talk about it here.

I wrote in my column that:

Mobile is the eternal Next Big Thing is real estate – a tantalizing mirage promising untold riches that appear to be right over the next sand dune… until you get there and… oh, it’s right over there over that hill.  iPhone appears to me to be just the latest in the mirages built up about how consumers will use their mobile handheld computing devices to look for real estate.  The next one may be the Droid, or the Apple Tablet, or the Kindle, or… whatever is next.

But, what I was and am really skeptical about is consumer-facing mobile, the B2C applications:

I am skeptical about the impact of mobile on real estate, at least as far as a consumer application goes, because mobile has been the Next Big Thing for about as long as I can remember

What I did not have space to talk about is mobile as the future in the B2B market in real estate.  Let’s dive in, shall we?

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At last.

We have arrived at the destination of this series.  (See parts 1, 2, 3, and 4).

In Part 2 of this series, I spoke at length about institutional CRM and why that can be an unbeatable competitive advantage when properly implemented and used. In Part 3, we examined whether an institutionalized brokerage could shift the grounds of competition in such a way as to obtain a competitive advantage.  In part 4, we looked at specialization in real estate.

The culmination of all of these factors is something I am calling “systemic brokerage”.   Systemic brokerage is the future of real estate.

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