Imagine driving through a neighborhood looking at houses for sale. You drive by a house and are immediately alerted via a text message that the house in front of you meets your requirements; square feet, bedroom count, etc. What if you drive into a subdivision and are sent a text messages that tells you there are three houses listed for sale that are within your budget? This could easily be accomplished with geofences. Geofences are used today, just not by the real estate industry.
There is an interesting discussion at SoftwareAdvice.com about Geofences.
What is a Geofence? According to Wikipedia:
A Geofence is a virtual perimeter for a real-world geographic area. When the location-aware device of a location-based service (LBS) user enters or exits a geofence, the device receives a generated notification. This notification might contain information about the location of the device. The geofence notice might be sent to a mobile telephone or an email account.
Geofences are currently used in several industries. Companies use geofences to make sure mobile employees (service technicians, delivery drivers, etc) stay in a specific geographic region. Some companies use geofences to help track their expensive equipment. The real estate industry seems like a logical extension for the technology.
It sounds pretty simple. When a house is listed for sale, the person listing the house would setup a geofence. (Hopefully, no one would abuse the system and enter a geofence too large.) Once a geofence is setup for every house you have listed for sale, alerts could be sent to anyone that opts in to receiving them.
Geofences could help real estate agents collect the needs of buyers online.
For example, a user could create an alert based on square footage, number of bedrooms, pet friendliness, special amenities, and zip code, to name just a few of the myriad of options available. Once they’ve entered their cell phone number and submitted those housing preferences, all they have to do is carry their phone with them to receive notifications. via Software Advise.
Geofences could allow a real estate agent to know how many interested buyers crossed into their geofence. Most homes for sale in my market have flyers available for potential buyers to take. Once the flyers are gone, they have to be replenished. Does the real estate agent know how many of those flyers were taken by serious buyers? No. Maybe noisy neighbors took some and maybe some got lost. With geofences, the real estate agent would know exactly how many alerts were sent to potential buyers.
I like the idea of information being pushed to potential buyers (if they opt in) vs. having to go out and get the information. How many times do buyers stop at homes listed for sale, pull the flyer or call the agent, only to find out the house is not what they are looking for. Geofences could help streamline the home buying / renting process by only sending them information that meets their needs.
I would image it would not be long until someone starts working on an application for real estate, if they haven’t already.
What do you think? Would you opt in to receiving alerts like this?
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This is so cool. The potential uses for this type of technology is endless. I can see it being useful for appraisers who are inspecting a property for an appraisal. If we could get notifications of homes that have sold recently around our subject property we could take their picture while we are out in the field. This is just one use I can think of.
Tom, What a fantastic idea! “If we could get notifications of homes that have sold recently around our subject property we could take their picture while we are out in the field.” That would be convenient and save so much time.
Their is a nice service/app from Zillow that I recently downloaded for my android smartphone (motorola droid). It’s related to what you are thinking. But not as granular and personalized yet, as far as I can tell. You can query for listing though.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJfrdcbfXsc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyoIlF3O2H8
This could be a great tool for keeping track of teenagers too. Just “geofence” them. :)
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