Charline Li has an in-depth post about her recent experiences with online real estate tools and the impact of social computing on traditional real estate business models. The post is worth reading just for the thorough review of real estate sites and tools, but she also makes several interesting points. The real estate industry is going through a major shift driven by social computing. The power is moving from the realtor to the consumer and surprise, surprise, many of them are women.
Today, most buyers do a tremendous amount of research online and don't want or need a realtor to lead them through the househunting process as a captive audience. Instead, the best ones are providing more personal services to help buyers narrow down home choices via email and video tours reducing the time needed to go door to door. Realtors and good mortgage brokers help navigate the closing process more easily too. They know that if they provide top notch service, handling all of the details, that there is a good chance that you will work with them again when you purchase or sell a property or refinance.
This is especially good news for women of all ages especially single or divorced women. In fact, single women are buying homes faster than any other demographic group. As USA Today noted, nearly one in five homes are sold to single women. The percentage of single women buying homes has nearly doubled since 1981. Realtors, mortgage companies and retailers have taken note of the trend and are offering a variety fo services targeted to the single female homeowner at every income level. Custom financing packages are especially important to low income women according to the Detroit Free Press. They reported that '25% of single mothers spend more than half their income on housing, compared with 10% of single fathers who do, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.'
With the surge in home buying by women and the availability of so many useful social computing tools for real estate research and services, you could imagine iVillage adding a real estate microsite to their Home and Food section. They could cross market Craftsman tools from Sears with Martha Stewart towels from KMart and fresh tulips from 1-800-Flowers.com.
That would be pretty interesting but Sears is already well aware of the economic importance of women homeowners. In a survey of women homeowners they did in 2003 and repeated in 2004 they found that:
In fact, a survey conducted by Lowes as long ago as 2002 indicated that 94 percent of all female homeowners are do-it-yourselfers, completing a home improvement project on their own at least once every five years. Being an avid do-it-myselfer, I've got to believe that this statistic is still pretty accurate.
For more data on trends in home buying by women, you can visit the National Association of Realtors website where they host an online Field Guide to Women Homebuyers. With that title it sure sounds like they think of women as prey - not such a good idea for making women feel comfortable with realtors.
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