Real Estate RelatedTechnologyWindermere Real Estate April 2, 2011

Why is Windermere investing in technology?

A recent article form Geek Wire talked about Windermere and Brett Eddy the new CTO for the new company Windermere Solutions. After reading the article I began to read the comments. It was amusing to me to see the wide gap between the individuals that want to change the way we do real estate and the existing companies who have been successful in real estate for some time now. I’m included in the latter.

For everyone else who read this article I just wanted to make sure that the direction of Windermere was understood.  There were claims that we are behind the times, that we only want to hide information from the customer so  we can continue to run our old school ways of doing business.

I want to step back in time to 1997 when real estate wasn’t on the Internet and the Internet was in it’s infancy. Windermere was the reason for (IDX) Internet data exchange.

The  NWMLS was the first multiple listing services  in the US to get the brokers together and share  listing data and display the address. At that time this  was (Crazy talk).  With the help of John L. Scott and CB we all agreed and became the first region in the US to share listing data  on the Internet. From there it opened the flood gates and frankly IDX was the catalyst to the new breed of companies like Trulia, and Zillow, and many others.

Windermere is of the mind set that the more information for the customer the better. However lets be smart how we deliver that information and make sure it provides value. We are and always will be a company that keeps the customer in the front of our minds as we push forward to be creative and ever changing. I remember how exciting it was back then, and how driven we were to do something different. Well that time is here again and with new technology and our amazing ability to create strong everlasting relationships with the communities we serve will prove to be a successful combination.

I understand the proof is in the pudding but make no mistake we do not see technology as the silver bullet, there are many components to being successful in the business today  and technology is just  one of the corner stones to a strong and successful real estate company.