The real estate industry is in the middle of a massive transition from the old traditional bricks and mortar business model to the world of high tech in the clouds. Of course, many other industries are in transition, too, and none of them have been handling the transition very well. It has been a long slow transition, and painful for the real estate industry.
There’s no question that the rapid changes we have seen since the public launching of the Internet in 1994 started a revolution that is far from over. I would argue that changes of this magnitude have not occurred since America’s Industrial Revolution. Even that comparison falls short, because the Industrial Revolution built momentum and leveled out for decades.
Our virtuality is not slowing down at all, and there’s no end in sight for the new inventions, new technologies, and gigantic paradigm shifts that happen almost constantly now. The technology news cycle is only 24 hours, and it’s hard to keep up with all the news broadcast every single day on Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, and on independent journalists’ sites. The main street media is so far behind, hardly any of us are reading the print newspapers or watching CNN, MSNBC, or ABC anymore.
In the midst of dramatic changes in business, and in the processes and the technologies, few business owners have been prepared to address the changes in real time. It’s usually after the fact that we start to comprehend what has been happening and what we need to do to survive and thrive. It’s like we’ve had a massive earthquake, but no one wants to talk about it. When people don’t understand a massive underlying sea-change, they will pretend it didn’t happen and forge ahead as though its business as usual. But it’s not.
Last Updated on August 14, 2019 by Chuck Marunde
