Attend, if you please: OmniFocus for the iPhone. It will not only help you Get Things Done, it will tell you when to do them. No kidding. If one of your tasks is to ship a parcel at the post office, OmniFocus will sound an alarm when you are near one. Approaching the supermarket? Here’s your shopping list.
That much is just the idea of a PDA coupled with a GPS system. Still, it’s cool. But my dream for a hand-held computer is much larger than that.
Consider: I carry my digital still camera and my Flip video camera with me wherever I go. I have LowePro belt-mounted camera cases, so they’re easy to carry, never in the way. I keep those two cameras with my car keys, along with everything else I take with me when I put my car keys in my pocket: My wallet, my business cards, my watch, my phone, my Bluetooth headset and my MLS key. All of these things are small and portable, either pocketable or belt-mounted, so I have almost all of the tools of my trade upon my person when I leave the house. I look like a freakin’ cop — which is not always a bad thing — but I have my stuff with me so that I can work when I need to.
This is what I want for the iPhone — and for later iterations of the idea of a hand-held computer. A laptop or a notebook computer is luggable, not portable. Even the Canon and HP rechargeable printers are luggable, not portable. You might have a laptop and printer in your trunk — absorbing damage from every bump in the road and cooking in the summer heat — but you don’t have that computing power on your person.
My dream is simple: Everything that I might do on a desktop or laptop computer, I want to be able to do from a hand-held computer. I want to be able to carry my entire real estate business with me, every time I leave the house. This implies cloud computing, of course, since I will need for my data to be available to me — or to our clients or to anyone on our team — from any computer anywhere, but we’re headed that way already. I’m perfectly happy to give up printed documents if I can shoot PDFs in all directions at will. Ask me again in a couple of weeks, but I think we might be down to the sclerotic real estate industry itself as the only remaining obstacle: Realtor associations, lenders, title companies, and all of the many bazillion branches of government.
It’s common, when discussing ideas like this, to throw up technical issues. The technical problems are truly trivial. The problem we face in real estate is the dinosaur mentality of our putative overlords. Properazzi.com has an iPhone interface, as do Zillow.com and Trulia.com. The National Association of Realtors doesn’t even have a clue, much less a plan, even though the importance of the iPhone has been undeniable since January 2007.
This will happen, even if we have to push the NAR off a bridge. You may not particularly want to carry your business with you everywhere, in your purse or your pocket. But someday very soon, when you’re off visiting family for the holidays, you’ll be able to fire up your papa’s cranky old 486 and deal with an emergency entirely by remote control — without your desktop or laptop computer, without a printer or scanner, and without having to schlep any files.
This will happen because we’re going to make it happen, and because there is never any reason to settle for less than the best results attainable.
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology
Michael Wurzer says:
This is a great vision and I agree much of it will be doable in the near future. But have you ever tried typing on an iPhone? Beyond bad. The iPhone simply isn’t an input device. Much can be done with auto-population from the cloud but any serious amount of input will be painful until a better input interface is developed.
July 14, 2008 — 9:32 am
Greg Swann says:
There isn’t any serious amount of typing in real estate. I write a lot more language than most Realtors, but if I were writing something to be reused, I would build it in a file and copy and paste. For most people, and even for us for most jobs, there is almost no typing involved. A really good — Mac-like — input app would save past clauses, field-specifically, ranking them by how often they are used.
Also, I should qualify this to say that, while it might be possible, I don’t intend to create or revise a flier by iPhone. There are mission-critical jobs that are ideally done with mission-critical tools. What I want is not to be hamstrung by location in any way, such that, if I absolutely had to revise a flier from my iPhone, I could. And for everyday transaction management, I want for the process to be simple, transparent and fault-free from any machine, anywhere.
July 14, 2008 — 9:40 am
Michael Wurzer says:
Did I emphasize, really bad? Even simple typing is hard on that thing. Apple is great and the overall interface is a wonder, but the typing is non-functional. I worked with it a week and had to give up. I have many friends who carry both an iPhone and a BlackBerry because typing even a simple e-mail on the iPhone is an incredible pain. I’m certain a device will come along that overcomes these obstacles and the BlackBerry Curve with Opera Mini comes awfully close, but the iPhone’s lack of a decent input interface is one of those Jobs’ design decisions that only the most ardent Apple supporters can overlook and only then in public forums. On their own, the cuss and swear at the thing as they try to type. Remember the lack of a fan in the early Macs because Steve didn’t like the noise? Users had to install a cardboard stovepipe so the units wouldn’t melt down. The iPhone’s crappy input interface is a similar design decision.
July 14, 2008 — 9:56 am
Dylan Darling says:
I’m considering the switch to a “smart phone” right now. I think it’s valuable to receive leads and e-mails all hours of the day. I know I’ve missed a few sales because I was not able to check my e-mail while traveling. Technology is a big part of the future of the real estate business. Great article!
July 14, 2008 — 10:07 am
Matthew Hardy says:
We’re working on it.
We’ll have it soon.
Yes. This is a tease.
BTW Greg – would you be interested in providing offline input for the final product?
July 14, 2008 — 10:46 am
Greg Swann says:
> BTW Greg – would you be interested in providing offline input for the final product?
Yes, and Cathleen more than me. I’m pretty sure she’s going to commit to the desktop version of OmniFocus, too, so she might want to bug you about integration.
July 14, 2008 — 11:01 am
Hunter Jackson says:
Greg,
All I want is a picture of what you look like leaving the house in the morning.
July 14, 2008 — 2:42 pm
Greg Swann says:
> All I want is a picture of what you look like leaving the house in the morning.
Vide. This is all very small stuff — and that’s the point. If it’s small enough to bring along with no overhead, then it’s there to be used when it’s needed. Eventually, I’d like to see the camera, the video camera and the MLS key rolled into the phone as well. Ultimately, I want the phone mounted on my occipital bone with a virtual monitor floating 15 inches in front of my eyes. Just for now, though, I want to stop schlepping crap in my hands.
July 14, 2008 — 3:03 pm
Hunter Jackson says:
I currently carry a Murse (man’s purse) everywhere containing all the above plus a handgun. I cant keep my pants up with all that on.
July 14, 2008 — 6:46 pm
Thomas Johnson says:
“I currently carry a Murse (man’s purse) everywhere containing all the above plus a handgun.”
My kind of guy. The more it gets out that the friendly agent might be packing heat, the safer we all will be. Bad guys look for easy victims, not victims that can possibly rehabilitate them on the spot.
July 14, 2008 — 8:54 pm
Todd Carpenter says:
I’m going to have to disagree with Michael about the typing interface. It’s far from great, but almost as far from really bad. I have yet to curse it.
Also, I’ve yet to see RE.net cover it, but there’s an iPhone specific real estate search app called Puluwai that’s kind of neat. The exact sort of app that REALTOR.com should offer.
Greg, did you buy an iPhone?
July 14, 2008 — 9:51 pm
Greg Swann says:
> Greg, did you buy an iPhone?
Not yet. Would have done yesterday, but the inventory in Phoenix is wiped out. There are enough software glitches that I’m not weeping. We’ll be two white 16GBs when it happens. Because the browser is so good, I can solve a lot of my problems server-side in PHP. Beyond that, we’re winging it to try to work out a total transaction-management solution. We have pieces of this that we worked out two years ago. It will be interesting to see if we can make the rest come together.
July 14, 2008 — 10:10 pm
Todd Carpenter says:
I went with 8 gigs. Most of my photos are already in the cloud with Flickr. The music I listen to is largely in the cloud with Pandora. And I don’t watch many movies.
I have a pretty killer mortgage professional specific app idea that I’ll be happy to share with you in the near future.
July 14, 2008 — 10:24 pm
Michael Wurzer says:
> I have yet to curse it.
I congratulate and am happy for you. I couldn’t get there but also acknowledge I didn’t have motivation to try for more than several days and even then not without a backup. I imagine if forced into a no options scenario, I’d get used to it but not without pain, for me anyway.
July 15, 2008 — 4:25 am
jaybird Alexandria real estate says:
Any agent who is not using a smartphone is NOT providing the best service to their clients and is hard to respect. RE is a time sensitive trade. Often it is key to have a contract presented, countered, accepted and especially forwarded when received while you are out showing property to another client. And that is doable with a smartphone. Being able to push the contract to the other agent immediately while out with different clients or while at the pool can make the difference in ratifying a contract or ending up competing against a second contract.
Often while showing property spontaneous questions & interests come up by the buyer about other listings in the area or their parameters change on the spot. If you don’t have smartphone you cannot show the newly desired listings to your buyer on that trip without going back to the office and printing out listings again. You cannot answer the question of what home X that you just drove by is listed for or if it is under contract. Wireless access to the MLS is essential to providing the highest level of service on the field to your clients. You cannot pull up a bunch of comps on the neighborhood he likes on the spot without one.
I dare you to argue with me. And if you’re intimidated by the technology and that is holding you back from purchasing the smartphone–because it is certainly not $$$ anymore as they can be had for $100 with 2 year service contract or used. If you’re not using a smartphone I would postulate that your client needs a better and more qualified agent. If you’re purely a listing agent–not the future of the industry–the above arguments are valid, but not with the same degree of intensity.
J
July 15, 2008 — 5:00 am
Greg Swann says:
> I have a pretty killer mortgage professional specific app idea that I’ll be happy to share with you in the near future.
Good on ya. I have no desire to play in Xcode, but I’m hoping Cameron will get iPhone fever. I don’t have a problem with working on the file server, since we need the docs there anyway, but it would be cool to see that little box dance.
July 15, 2008 — 6:54 am