What’s new is old! An Edmonton real estate tech report

I'm sitting in the lounge of the Banff Springs hotel over looking the mountains after several full days of presentations, meetings and seminars and admitedly a few late nights out at the Banff Western Connection.  A bi-annual conference of the Western Canadian Real Estate Boards.  As I type this Sara is catching yet another session.  She is such a keener. 

Many of the presenters preached increased quality (something we've been preaching for years). A few years ago when we came here you would be hard pressed to find anyone who had pictures of equal calibre to the ones we were taking.  Now you can definitely see a trend as some people are recognizing the benefits of properly presenting their clients' properties. 

When we came here two years ago I was the only REALTOR here with a tablet. Slowly but surely more people in the industry are catching on to what a valuable aid the tablet can be. Moreover, as we listened to the speakers talk about marketing and the coming trends we couldn't help but smile in knowing that not only are we there, but we were there years ago (in terms of getting our listings everywhere). Our welcome challenge is to continue to stay ahead of the curve.

For a small company we dominate search results that huge companies are envious of  Just google ….Edmonton homes, Edmonton real estate and so on to see for yourself.  More importantly though, we make sure that we're dominant in search results that get our properties found.  This is critical for increasing exposure.

A couple of years ago we were one of the very few real estate companies in Edmonton that were embedding links into MLS.ca to link our listings to the MLS.  We are still one of the very few that use easy to remember individual domains for our properties.  A few active examples are:

www.westedmontonhouse.com, and www.westendcondo.com.

What this means is when someone is searching on REALTOR.ca for a home and they see one of our properties with their incredible photos and they click for more information it goes right to the property not to our website where the buyer has to hunt for the listing they wanted to see.

I could go on but to us this is old stuff and we've been working on many more exciting avenues to better market our properties and to better serve our clients.  Two years from now I fully expect to be sitting here and reviewing what's new and cool.  I am certain that a large number of those will have already been implemented by us.

One thing you can't replace with technology though is a desire to succeed, a committment to service that goes beyond thinking of the deal, and focusing on what's best for your clients.  That low tech quality approach is in need now more than ever.