There has been a paradigm shift with the way we have been spending our time and preparing to best assist our clients. We are learning new ways to provide services in our advancing technological world—from better ways to capturing statistics, making better use of our smart phones and cameras, increasing usage of virtual and video tours, blogging, to being greener by sending documents for digital signatures via email and the Internet without the need for printing, faxing, or sending documents in the mail. Webinars, podcasting, and online classes are also becoming more popular. In addition, we regularly take continuing education courses.
Many agents are taking the time to sharpen their skills not only on the fundamentals but also to increase their technological skills. Others are taking the time to specialize in specific areas of interest to include listing foreclosure properties, working with seniors or first-time home buyers, or getting up to speed with the various communication methods that their clients prefer, for example, texting, email, or telephone.
Other ways agents are staying busy is by spending more time learning about our various real estate forms. For example, in November, we had four new forms added to our REALTOR library as well as others forms that were modified that we need to keep abreast of to better serve our clients. Our association routinely schedules classes to help our members with our multiple listing software and other technology-related items and educational classes of which we always have quite a few of our members in attendance.
A number of our local real estate offices hold weekly meetings where they have expanded the focus beyond the standard sales meeting to include more training and educational sessions about marketing, the economy, distressed properties, mortgage programs such as loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which have picked up dramatically due to low down-payment requirements, and more.
Several of our real estate offices are busy either currently using or setting up a secure online transaction management program for tracking their files and managing their clients’ paperwork. This also has a green component to it in a field where paper can be rather overwhelming. Ask any real estate agent, buyer, or seller in a real estate transaction about the paperwork involved and you can see how having the ability to upload and download the documentation online could be an enormous benefit.
We recognize that the real estate market has changed, and we are changing with it. Real estate is not stagnant and neither are we.
Beverly Scott, Agent/Manager
Oakhurst Real Estate
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