THE RISE OF THE TECHNOLOGICAL MONSTER DURING 25 YEARS OF ESTATE AGENCY! By Mark Welton
This year I am celebrating 25 years in the estate agency business, a quarter of a century no less, in helping people sell and buy homes!
Looking back has got me thinking about the biggest changes and developments in our industry over that period, and this surely has to be how technology has totally changed the face of the industry.
Younger buyers and sellers accustomed to today’s world of internet, emails, mobile smart phones etc will probably not believe how the property industry and estate agents use to work when I started in the profession.
I began my career as a trainee estate agent in a small but successful agency in Haywards Heath, West Sussex, where the most sophisticated item of technology used was the telephone! The market at this time was quite busy, yet the process of marketing someone’s house was so labour intensive that looking back it was quite “medieval” by comparison to today.
Property details were prepared by us agents using an extendable “surveyor’s ruler” to measure room sizes and the description of the rooms and accommodation was written out by hand. I recall many incidences of “measuring up” some of the larger properties, trying to maintain an air of professionalism whilst struggling with painful cramps in my hand and arm, the result of furious writing! In fairness in a year we had embraced technology by using battery operated Dictaphones and rolling tape measures which allowed us to measure up to a hundred foot!
The photographs were taken with the use of 2 cameras, a black and white one and a colour one for properties over a value of £175,000. Most sellers were happy with the black and white photographs on their property particulars and accepted that colour was the prerogative of the luxury end of the market only!
The next step was to remove the film roll from the camera and take it to a local developer. The concept of reviewing digital photographs immediately and deleting where appropriate and uploading to on screen particulars was as remote then as day trips to the moon! I distinctly remember that after every measure up, I had to drive the black and white camera to a local Polish chap called Jon who made a lucrative business from a small “dark room” converted from the back of his garage. Here he would develop a black and white “dot screen” photo suitable for attaching to the sales particulars so that they could be copied without distorting the image. This process was normally completed by the end of the following day, although if it were really urgent I could prevail upon him to have it back that day underwritten by a bribe for supplying him a packet of his favourite cigars! The cost of producing this important “dot screen” photo and 2 smaller images for advertising purposes was as I recall £7.95 which was pretty expensive 25 years ago!
For those properties deemed worthy of colour photography the film was taken to Boots or Dixons who would produce 20 – 30 small colour images with removable sticky strips for attaching to the sales particulars.
While this unthinkably protractive process was taking place the branch secretary was wading through my often eligible written instructions and typing on a type writer (we had graduated to an electric one by then!) the master copy of the sales particulars.
In all, preparing a set of property details with everything involved would take anything up to 4 days depending how busy we were and how quickly the photographs took to come back. Fortunately there was no requirement for vendor approval of the details prior to marketing at that time. The details were sent with a covering letter by second class post to the seller and if they wanted to make any change, which they rarely did, then they would scribble on the particulars and send them back to us!
So how did our applicants and buyers get to know about the houses we were listing? Today our customers have the luxury of up to the minute email alerts which can be opened to reveal the sales particulars in PDF format as soon as they are available. Back then we relied heavily on the telephone to notify applicants when new properties became available. However at a time when mobile phones were not in general use it was often very difficult to communicate effectively with the market.
Envelopes carrying sales particulars were addressed by means of a hand operated “Roneo” mailing machine. This effectively printed a buyers name and address details by means of carbonated paper. By turning a handle at the side of the machine the poor agent could churn out one envelope per minute, so a general mail out was a particularly time consuming process to say the least! The margin of error was complicated by the fact that the carbon paper often tore or smudged the address details. However, people eventually received their sales particulars in the post and we sold property despite all the odds.
I look back on this era in my estate agency career and compare the almost complete absence of technology in running our business to how heavily we use technology today to great success.
The internet and email have revolutionised the estate agency world, as it has most businesses. Marketing via social media options like Twitter and Facebook and employing mobile technology in the form of “apps” and “QR codes” have facilitated a truly, global twenty four hour marketing and presentation process. Yet the reality is that we are only scratching the surface at the moment!
Mishon Welton embrace the ever changing and evolving technologies and have implemented many new and exciting technological features, constantly aiming to enhance the estate agency experience.
Why not get in touch to find out more.
With you Every step of the way............