A Bird’s Eye View

So I was reading Marc Davidson’s 1000Watt blog post from last Thursday titled “Why agents will one day rule the real estate world” and I was in a little disagreement with Marc’s view of the real estate search world as it relates to consumers. Now Marc, who I’ve known for a few years, did not bash on real estate search but stated that maybe today’s real estate search sites might be complicating the process by offering too much information and too many filters. He thinks that maybe we should leave the searching to the professionals to filter through the search process.

Now I do agree that searching for a home is not the simplest task but I do know that huge strides have been made in the real estate search vertical since my wife and I were looking for our first home just four short years ago. Now granted we were first-time homebuyers in tech heavy Silicon Valley and I worked at a brokerage at the time so maybe we geeked out on the process more than the typical consumer. But I still have to believe that many people really want to feel involved in the process of the purchase of probably the largest asset in their life.

Am I off base? Is it only a certain consumer that wants this information or are the masses clamoring to educate themselves on the complicated process of buying a home? As I stated in my comment on Marc’s post, we still used an agent throughout the entire transaction but we felt very empowered when we found homes online that we were interested in and delivered them to our agent to evaluate. Now we never thought for a moment that we could do this all on our own but even our agent commented how much easier it was to find us a home because we were actively involved in the process. She stated that by bringing our choices to her, it actually helped her narrow the parameters of where we would eventually end up.

Were we an anomaly or is real estate search here to stay? It would be great to hear your viewpoint on real estate search and its place within the real estate process.