Just wanted to give you a quick update on the diverging worlds of real estate and technology. I realize that most real estate agents are not very tech-savvy and that’s a huge benefit for my clients when either buying or selling their Smyrna Vinings homes, condos or townhomes.

To think that 92% of home buyers between the ages of 25-45 use the Internet during their home search, you can’t argue that technology has not had a huge and beneficial impact on the real estate market for the consumer.

Yesterday, I attended a conference, REtech South, with some of the top real estate technology folks in the country. It was a truly amazing event and I would like to thank Brad Nix for putting this together. Bravo.

Brad managed to bring some top talent in so that we could all share ideas, learn about products coming down the pipeline and get insight into some of the best practices being used around the country.

I personally learned some great stuff from the likes of Jonathan Washburn and Bob Stewart from ActiveRain, Mary McKnight from RSS Pieces, Rudy Bachraty from Trulia, Kevin Boer from 3Oceansrealestate.com, Pat Kitano from Transparent RE.com, Dustin Luther from 4realz.net and Jason Benesch from Real Estate Tomato. A lot of these folks are real pioneers and leaders in the world of technology and real estate convergence.

The ultimate goal is to be able to bring more functionality and better information to you, the consumer. We’re certainly hoping to provide some great new products and functionality to you in the near future that will be very beneficial to you.

But probably the most interesting perspective I took away from the conference, was that out of 40,000 some real estate agents in metro Atlanta, only a little over a hundred agents attended this inaugural event. Either the others are busy applying for another job or fail to understand how radically technology has changed the real estate market in just the past couple years and how much more impact it will have as we move forward.

Education and training is of critical importance to real estate professionals and quite literally, this was the conference to attend. But don’t fret, they’re already planning REtech South for 2009, which should be huge.

[tags]Smyrna Real Estate, Vinings Real Estate, Real Estate Technology[/tags]