Coldwell Banker has announced the development of its own Surface application designed to help customers find homes and learn about candidate neighborhoods. You can see it in this video.Before I started working for CSG I was actually in talks with a realtor to develop a very similar application. This kind of thing could be effective at bringing people into the Coldwell Banker office, but as I understand it brick-and-mortar locations for realtors are pretty much a thing of the past.
Most realtors work out of their home (or more likely their car) and interact with customers via mobile phones and email. This is why the realtor I spoke to decided not to pursue a Surface solution.
It will be interesting to see if Coldwell Banker's implementation has a real ROI or if its just a gimmick that ends up having no positive impact on the revenues . That's an important question because developing Surface applications is not cheap. It would not surprise me if it cost between 250k and 500k to develop the one demonstrated in the promotional video.
2 comments:
I'd be surprised if it costs most than $250k. They didn't go in-depth in the video, so I couldn't tell all the features or how much integration there was, but I'd wager between $100k and $250k.
(Of course if some lucky company walked away with $500k all the better for them, but I would ask for a lot more than I saw if I were paying half a million.)
Hi.
From what I can tell, the application is a transformation of interactive features offered by the best of the real-estate search websites, on Surface steroids.
I found this information from a Coldwell-Banker realtor's blog that gives an overview of the application's features:
Coldwell Banker Leads the Real Estate Industry By Integrating Microsoft Surface to the Home Search
"...Over the course of the roll-out, the following features are scheduled to be released:
"Explore. Home listings can be viewed via area maps, specific search criteria such as city, state and price, and by standard number of bedrooms and bathrooms. With a simple touch of the screen, users expand or contract the search area and locate listings, Coldwell Banker offices and area amenities including restaurants, hospitals, schools – gauging the distance between them."
"Learn. Details of a particular property listing are displayed and arranged by screen touches. Images of the home are easily accessed, enlarged and moved by hand movements."
"Interact. File listings by "grabbing" content with their hands from the display and "dropping" it into the appropriate folder, thus creating an itinerary that they can email to a sales associate."
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