My car is not a real estate office. In 2010, my car is going to become a wi-fi-enabled mobile real property exchange and conference room.

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is the car we bought for me in July. It’s a used Kia Rondo, a semi-unassuming wannabe minivan that I have denominated with this demanding appellation: Prometheus.

My favorite god, as you might have guessed, from all of human history. Prometheus, you will recall, stole the fire of the gods from Zeus and gave it to the people. An alternate reading of the Greek cites Prometheus as having borne the gift of mind to humanity, a rendering of the tale I like even better. If you are a life-sucking real estate broker or any other functionary of the life-sucking National Association of Realtors, the memes that move me will tell you a lot about my long-term plans for you.

But: Sometimes a minivan is just a minivan. I chose the Rondo because a client of mine rented one when he was in town, and I realized it was the perfect real estate car. I had looked at more expensive so-called “crossover” vehicles, but we have practiced and perfected the art of being cheap bastards. At ten grand out the door, the Rondo seemed like the optimax choice.

And this has it proved to be. I’m in it a lot, and it is a very comfortable roaming office for me. I don’t know how other Realtors deal with all the lengthy phone calls that go into selling real estate, but I take down a whole bunch of them from my car. I can make anywhere from one to five calls between stops, and if I were not doing those calls from behind the wheel, I wouldn’t be doing them at all.

But wait. There’s more. I bought the Rondo because I knew I would be doing more and more real office work from the car. The vehicle has three cigar lighters, and I have 300 watt 110 volt power inverters plugged into two of them. That is to say, two three-prong outlets in the front seat and two more in the back. I could be working on my laptop, an assistant on another and a client on a third, all of us plugged in to retain battery power.

I haven’t actually had this happen yet, but I’m sure it will in due course. With ZipForms and DocuSign, I don’t need to schlep a portable printer, something I’ve done for years. But I’m sure that, very soon, I will be in situations where an assistant will be sitting in the car writing a contract for the last house we saw while an investor and I are inspecting the next property. When we get back to the car, the investor can e-sign the contract from his own laptop as we drive to the next home.

Which brings us to the next level of integration. Bawldguy Jeff Brown got me thinking about this this week: I want to take a wi-fi router that accepts a 3G wireless card and put that in my car. Prometheus, minivan, will become its own rolling hotspot — and everyone in the car will be able to connect to the internet through the 3G connection.

Don’t tell me about slow transmission speeds. Lo-tech don’t mean no-tech. Housechick Kelley Koehler used a set-up like this to spank the hotel’s in-house wi-fi system at BloodhoundBlog Unchained this year. I don’t need the ideal ultimate best internet connection, I just need something that works reliably as we roll down the road — or, practically speaking, cruise slowly from house to house.

There’s more to my little truck — from the tiny medicine chest I keep up front to Mister Lister in back, my tool box for dealing with signs and flyer boxes — but the essence of the thing is that I will be able to do most of the work I might otherwise have to run back to the office for, all from behind the wheel. When I add an assistant, one or the other of us will be hands-free to work while the other drives — in the HOV lane! My clients will be able to work, too, most especially on the paperwork I will need for them to attend to. And all of us will have wi-fi available for both our laptops and our phones.

It’s plausible to me that I could spend 1,000 hours — or more — in my car in 2010. Thanks to tiny, low-power computing hardware, my time on the road will be more productive than ever.