When it comes to the rocky real estate world, The Business Insider, along with other experts and agents, are becoming confused over the future of this vital marketplace. Will it boom or bust, sink or surge, collapse or continue to take off as a valuable investment opportunity over the next few years? The Business Insider’s statistics from Bloomberg are all over the map when it comes to predicting the future of one of the oldest, strongest, most popular, yet unpredictable marketplaces.

In their “5 Essential Tools Every Real Estate Agent Should Have” article, Lifehack highlights technological advances that will lead the way in home sales and give advantages to these agents. Given the digital age, Lifehack offers examples of certain online applications as a solution to the many challenges in this marketplace, especially HomeSelfe’s energy app that assists both homeowners and their agents.

The Five Recommendations

Lifehack lists these five tools as absolute essentials for today’s real estate agent, which include:

• A Drone Patrol: The aerial advantages of these flying robotic photographers are undeniable in cost and efficiency. Not only useful outdoors, they can also be utilized to give potential buyers a room-by-room tour of a home on the market.
• An Online Avenue: A presence on the internet is simply a must have nowadays. Period.An Email Marketing Campaign: While some believe emails are outdated, they’re still a solid marketing tool that needs to be utilized by agents.
• A Plethora of Apps: The more mobile applications an agent has at their disposal, the better their avenue of offensive maneuvering becomes.
• Social Media: Almost everyone is on these platforms today, so this is exactly where agents need to be available to their clients, including outreach to past, current and potential customers. In this regard wordpens can help you for content marketing

Energy Matters

The number four selection from Lifehack recommends a couple of specific apps that include the HomeSelfe option, which helps current homeowners and potential buyers access a home’s energy efficiency. From a seller’s standpoint, it gives homeowners the opportunity to make minor adjustments that could add thousands of dollars to the asking price of a house. From a buyer’s viewpoint, this can leverage their offer given the results of a HomeSelfe energy audit.

Lenders, agents, buyers and sellers are all acknowledging the fact that utility savings, protecting the environment and using less power are becoming some of the key elements when considering this important purchase. Especially when it comes to the rising power making up the force of younger, millennial buyers. In a recent article from Bankrate, a leading real estate lender, an RE agent from California offers this important insight:

“Today, not only younger buyers, but buyers in general, are looking for energy-efficient homes,” says Jeff Hyland of Hilton & Hyland Real Estate. “And if they are not already set up (for energy efficiency), then the buyers will often factor those costs into their budgets so they can do it after the close of escrow.”

Like my father used to say, be sure to “use the right tool … for the right job,” and these technological advancements can make a big difference for real estate agents. Having these types of important instruments at their disposal can make or break the closing of escrow for today’s technologically-minded buyers and sellers.