Innovation, Authenticity and Technology

Jensen Property went to Sydney this week for a conference about up to date technology innovations and sales & business methodology innovations in property marketing.

The REB Re-innovate 2016, MC’d by the ABC’s New Inventors presenter James O’Loghlin  was held this Tuesday at the Star Hotel in Sydney.

The two main conceptual threads at this full day seminar were innovation with regard to technology but also innovation with regard to understanding and providing market sentiments.

Major Market Trend

A major market trend now is that people are seeking a genuineness, a humanity. With so much information and the ability to compare service providers online, the major decider for people is trust, respect, and honesty. So much of us are in business, we’ve just got to be real to each other.

In this age of hyper refinement, of hyper mechanisation and algorithmic systemisation, where technology is pursuing perfection in capability,  market insight and sentiment studies conducted by brand strategists ‘The Lab’ based in Sydney, revealed that consumers are starting to need and want authenticity, realness and honesty. The age of pretending to be perfect has past.

The embrace of the concept of Wabi Sabi was an interesting inclusion in the event. The Japanese term describes the concept of imperfection as a desirable thing, or rather, as not a completely undesirable thing, and in the marketplace, consumers will be seeking this feeling.

We see this pattern. While on one side technology is advancing and the impossible is becoming possible, on the other side, businesses are becoming more relatable, more honest, more trustworthy. This is the burgeoning zeitgeist of our age, and there is a pleasantness to that that self-perpetuates.

Larger companies are already preparing for social changes where in the next several years increasingly electronic servants (robots) will be taking the reins for a lot of our more mundane tasks. People will be replaced in the workplace with robots. There are bots which teach themselves to program themselves to a capacity well beyond the capabilities of human programmers. There are poetry bots which can write poetry indistinguishable from Shakespeare, there are robots out there which can recognise emotion in the human face, our homes and all manner of basic products will be filled with sensors and know exactly what needs to be bought, ordered and delivered without us lifting a finger.

Virtual Reality

We are able now to quite inexpensively create virtual tours of homes. Either by directly photographing a home and stitching together the photographs or, using a basic floor plan to create a completely digital 3D version of a property. Potential buyers can walk around the home from wherever they may be in the world using their touch screen devices like smart phones or iPad.

By Dinnypaul – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42710423

For a more immersive experience, we as property marketers can offer the virtual reality experience with worn 3D goggles. In the not to distant past, offering a property vendor that ability to allow buyers to digitally  ‘walk through’ their properties was an infeasibility due to cost, now, we can do it with our phones.  Buy google cardboard for about $15, a cheap cardboard product developed by Google that we fold into virtual reality googles,  an agent can download an app on their phone, use it to photograph a property, download another app, create the virtual tour (with relatively little complication) provide a potential buyer, here or overseas with the google googles and a link to the tour, the potential buyer can then place their phone in the cardboard googles (or fancier plastic ones if they are keen).

The process may seem a little clunky now. Who is to say a buyer is ready for virtual reality. The stress of understanding app technology can be overwhelming for some buyers and investors this virtual reality process may in fact be alienating.

Of course it is necessary to be discerning in your decisions when marketing your property. Some buyers will embrace these techniques and may already be ahead of the curve, some may not be ready. What we can be sure of, is that virtual reality will make its way into our everyday lives and we may as well start understanding it now so that we can evolve our methods with the technology.