Guest Author - Katie Murphy

Technology is a double-edged sword. Technophiles live for it. Technophobes dread it. Wherever you fall on the technology continuum, it is important to know that recent advances have made buying and selling real estate a whole new experience.

If you were born before Devo was popular, you probably remember meeting with a Realtor who pulled out a book of multiple listings (MLS), which was printed on newsprint and thicker than the phone book.

Perhaps the agent lit up a cigarette and you both settled in to flip page-by-page of black and white listings to find your dream home. You probably needed a gallon of coffee and a pack of smokes yourself, as the process took longer than preparing Thanksgiving dinner.

The days of MLS books are long gone. I dug one out of my broker’s closet the other day and showed it to a 20-something Realtor, who had never seen or heard of it. She rolled her eyes and laughed. You’re probably doing the same thing right now.

In the last 15 years property marketing has moved from the MLS book to a full-on media experience. Today, approximately 80% of home buyer’s begin their search on the internet. Today’s home buyer will read blogs, look at photos, virtual tours and videos, and receive text messages on their cell phones.

A good place to start your search is Realtor.com, which is a tool developed by the National Association of Realtors and it captures MLS listings from local real estate boards. The site allows you to search by City and State, as well as your own specifications. I have a few issues with this site. The large majority of listings have only one photo. This makes it difficult to get a real sense of the individual homes. You must know what City you want to search, which makes it difficult if you want to move to say, the Atlanta area, but don’t know exactly which town.

You can also find sites to view videos of homes for sale. Two popular sites are You Tube and Yahoo. Recently I found over 30,000 videos associated with the search query “real estate” indexed into Yahoo.

If you like virtual reality sites, you can go to a site like Second Life, where you can do almost anything you can in real life, including buy and sell real estate

Tech-savvy Realtors® have dynamic interactive websites, which will alert you by email, instant message or text messaging when a listing comes online matching your criteria. It’s the same sort of technology that airlines use to alert you when they’re changing your flight. It’s relatively easy to automate. An associate enters a buyer’s profile into a system programmed to send out the alert.

A really cool tool is Google Earth®. This allows anyone with a computer to zone in on a specific address and zoom in on a bird’s eye view of the property. Just “google” Google Earth and try it.

Buyers can soon look for street-level map views provided by Google®. These maps will allow you to navigate around a city, virtually walking the streets, checking out restaurants, landmarks and homes.

We’ve come a long way since the 80’s. In the old days, it might take you the better part of a day to look at a few homes in a nearby neighborhood. Today, you can virtually go in and out of hundreds of homes in various cities, states and countries in minutes. If you really want to streamline your search, find a Realtor you want to work with and tell him/her your wishes and have those listings emailed, instant messaged or texted to your phone.

If your are interested in Florida real estate, please visit my website at www.Keys2Fla.com.