technology-general » Technology Tools for Real Estate

Real estate professional who market homes on the Internet should ideally have photos of the property taken and prepared for the Internet by a professional. That’s because there’s so much to know about the staging, lighting, and composition required to make a home look appealing in a photograph. There’s also a lot to know about digital images and how to prepare them for the Web.

For example, there are many possible file formats for digital images. Do you know the difference?

The best file format for an image depends on how the image will be used. Images that will be printed in a prospectus or other publication require a high resolution—200-300 pixels per inch (ppi). But images viewed over the Internet look just fine with a lower resolution (e.g., 72 ppi). In addition, the file size on Internet images needs to be low so the picture can download quickly when someone clicks on the page.

Here’s a primer on the four file formats you need to know about.

GIF works best if the image contains a limited number of colors—if it’s, say, a floorplan or a logo with just 2 or 3 solid blocks of color. GIF images are compressed to make them smaller for the Internet, but the compression used in GIFs limits the available colors.
JPEG is better for photographs and other images that contain many colors. The compression used to create a JPEG removes some of the pixels in the image, thereby allowing it to load quickly on the Internet, but retains the large number of colors.
PNG is probably the best format for photographs on the Web because it compresses images efficiently like a GIF, but it shows a wide range of colors like a JPEG. But because it’s a newer file format some browsers, particularly older ones, can’t show PNG images. Therefore, it’s not yet widely used.
TIFF files are sometimes not compressed at all, which means they can be quite large. However, they provide the best quality image. They also contain the digital information designers need to be able to expand or shrink them without distortion or loss of detail. If the image is being used to prepare a print publication, it should be created as a TIFF. But TIFFs shouldn’t be used on the Internet because they’re too big, they download too slowly, and because many browsers can’t show them at all.

This week Sony announced that it was ceasing Japanese production of its iconic portable music player, the Walkman. First introduced in 1979, the Walkman sold more than 220 million units worldwide and was to cassette tapes in the 1980s what the iPod is to digital music today.

Imagine if this holiday season someone gave you a Sony Walkman for a gift. You’d probably assume it to be a gag gift, right? After all, where on earth would you even get cassette tapes to play on it? But what if they told you it was a “real” gift—that in their opinion it was a great way to listen to music and they wanted you to have one. You’d probably wonder where that person had been for the past 30 years!

Real estate professionals with few or no computing skills create that same impression. When you say to a client, “I haven’t been able to check my mail because I’ve been away from my desk all day,” or “I’m having trouble getting my messages. Can you just drop that in the mail to me,” it probably makes them wonder. It’s challenging enough trying to navigate the current real estate market without a consumer having to worry that their agent is stuck in 1983.

So take a good look at your tech skills. Are you continuing to learn and to grow? Or are you a Walkman in a digital world?

There are two kinds of people working in real estate. There are the technology savvy agents—blogging, tweeting, texting, posting videos and working with digital signatures—and then there’s everyone else. This latter group includes people who struggle with e-mail, people who don’t use smartphones, and people who still say things like, “I’m not good with computers.”

These two camps have to co-exist in the same office and sometimes they even have to work together. What happens when you’re a techno-whiz and the agent working for the other party is just learning to use the fax machine? Changes are Agent Techno-Whiz is going to have to adapt. Here are some suggestions on how to do that.

Be Patient. You may be frustrated at how slowly communication progresses, but don’t let your emotions to poison the interaction.

Be Respectful. You gain nothing by deriding your colleague or making fun of her limitations. Adopting an attitude of respect makes it easier to be flexible which—let’s face it—you’re going to have to be.

Be Adaptable. Determine how your non-tech-savvy colleague prefers to communicate and adapt your work style accordingly. Understand and accept that you may have to work a little harder to keep the communication flowing. Be prepared, for example, to fax documents (or even deliver hardcopies) to keep the process moving. Follow-up e-mails or text messages with phone calls to review what you wrote in the message.

Think of it this way: if this person were your client, what would you do? My guess is, you’d go the extra mile to keep him or her in the loop no matter how much effort it took. So be at least as accommodating with your colleague.

I lay in the bed in the darkness before dawn this morning thinking how much I didn’t want to get up and go work out. My muscles were stiff and sore, as they often are when I first wake up, and it seemed as if it would just be easier to sleep a few more minutes rather than force myself to start moving right then.

Fortunately, I overcame the desire to take the easy way out. I got up, got dressed, and made my way to the gym. And guess what? It was the right choice: no stiff muscles now. I’m moving perfectly well and feeling great. And I have no doubt that had I given in to the part of me that wanted to whine, I would have had a slower, less productive, less successful day.

And so it is with real estate professionals who say they “can’t use computers.” Every day they delay learning how to put technology to work for them, they fall farther and farther below the bar. And yet it only takes a few baby steps—maybe trying one new thing each day—to grow in confidence and skill.

So, if this is you, stop whining. Get up, get your computer out, and try something new.

The end of the summer is upon us, and what a summer it has been!

Facebook surpassed 500 million users in July and Twitter logged more than 20 billion tweets. But what were the best technology tools for real estate and business professionals?

Here’s my list: the Top Ten Tech And Social Media Tools to come out during the Summer of 2010.

Number 10: Facebook Announces Places. Only days ago, Facebook announced its new location feature which puts it on a head-to-head collision course with Foursquare. Facebook Places has great potential for marketing and location-based ads, but as is often the case with new features on Facebook, many users have concerns about privacy. As a result, it’s too early to guess its true business impact.

Number 9: Make Bank Deposits With Your Smartphone. Chase Bank has put technology to work and created a system that allows us to deposit checks using an iPhone app and camera. It won’t be long before there are more time saving features like this on our phones.

Number 8: Make Phone Calls from Gmail. In the last week of August, Google announced that it had i ntegrated Google Voice into Gmail. It’s kind of like adding Skype to your email. Make free phone calls from your computer to U.S. and Canadian numbers and save your cell phone minutes; pay only two cents per minute for international calls.

Number 7: YouTube Ups its Time Limit. Couldn’t make it fit in 10 minutes? No problem. YouTube has given us all 5 extra minutes. This means we can add more time to the videos we make, but it also means we’ll spend more time watching other people’s videos.

Number 6: Google Allows Rich Text Signatures. Now your Gmail signature can include images like your company logo. Very nice touch.

Number 5: Google Expands Real Time Search. It’s been there for sometime. Do a search and Google includes what people are saying about that topic on the Internet. But now Real Time is its own application, which you can use to look up trending topics or to find out what people are saying about you and your company.

Number 4: Google Voice Opens Up. Google Voice lets you have one number for all of your phones so that callers can find you wherever you happen to be. It’s a great application for busy business people and as of mid-June, it’s available to anyone with a U.S. phone number without an invitation.

Number 3: WordPress Unveils Version 3.0. This newest version of the most complete blogging platform incorporates multi-user functionality and a beautiful new default theme, Twenty Ten.

Number 2: Starbucks Offers Free Wi-Fi. While other establishments were getting rid of wi-fi or putting limits on how long customers could use it, Starbucks was tearing down the barriers. They’ve invited us all to stop in with our computers, they’re giving us free one-click wi-fi, and they’re letting us stay as long as we like.

Number 1: iPhone 4 Hits the Market. Multitasking, HD video recording and editing, 5 megapixel camera with LED flash: can it get any better? Yes it can. The snazzy FaceTime videophone feature puts us up there with the Jetstons. Can Jet Packs be far behind? Even with its antenna problems, the iPhone remains the leader of the smartphone pack.

What’s your choice for the best tech or social media product of the summer?