It is good to hear recently that Estate Agents have finally been pushed off the top spot of ‘most hated’ and ‘least trusted’ profession’ replaced by politicians, not so good! But let’s stick with Estate Agents for now.

It is good to hear as having worked in Real Estate as a web designer and UX consultant since 1997, I met only 1, not very nice estate agent. The others were all empathetic, considerate and trustworthy, then why throughout the noughties did they get such a bad rap?

Well here are my thoughts

Working with Douglas & Gordon in 1997 on their first website, Prime Location was in its infancy and very few estate agents saw the need to go online. Estate agency was all about rapport, relationships and hard graft throughout your career and generations of families in your area. There was nothing you didn’t know about property on your patch.

One year after we had built the website for Douglas & Gordon more than half their enquiries came via their enquiry forms, which, as you know, exploded not long after to where we are now. 

So I believe the loathing of estate agents escalated with the rise of the faceless ‘online’ adoption and the quick hard sale style that rose out of this with tech savvy guys in suits getting a quick win (and high prices it has to be said) with little or no relationship.

Over the 20 years I have been in estate agent web design introducing 

• Property searching and filtering

• You may also like

• Email alerts

• Saved search

• Send to a friend

• 360 video tours

• Add to favourites

• Area guides and amenities

• Property matching

• Property shortlists

• Online valuations

• Mortgage and Stamp duty calculators

There is a theme running down these tools in that they are time saving, online options, with no need to talk to anyone. 

However, recently I have been asked to look into how to bring the human aspect back into the estate agent website.

With surveys and market research, generational interviews and analysis of what is considered good and bad about buying a property there are human characteristics that we can bring back into the process.

This new rise in fortune for estate agents (or drop from the top of the worst list) also coincides with a turning point online to a human centred or user focused digital experience. This experience of making the user feel respected, valued and looked after and this mimics the traditional ways of an estate agent which was:

• Knowledge

• Empathy

• Intuition

• Diplomacy

• Good negotiator

• Good listener

• Good adviser

• Trustworthy

• Good communicator

• Friendly

How do we bring this back into our online touchpoints? Here are a few suggestions but using the points above in everything we do online will help keep the human in the room.

• A trustworthy brand

• Trust pilot and reviews

• Pictures of the person you may be dealing with

• Access to phone numbers, to call and chat

• Holding properties off Rightmove, to make clients feel valued

• Branded follow up emails straight from the portals

• Video follow ups

• Predictive analytics

• Prescriptive analytics

• Property app with real time feedback and statistics

• Messaging app

• Greater insight of applicants

• Automation tools for the boring stuff!

• Blockchain for quicker exchange to completion process

• Smart voice interfaces, chat bots, virtual assistants

• Tone of voice and terminology

• Booking and ticketing systems for tenants and landlords

With a good proportion of property searches happening outside of office hours we need to leverage technology where we can, and as chatbots, virtual assistants and AI improves these human style technologies will become increasingly useful but for now let’s use technology to do what it is good at, data collecting and analysis, admin roles, reporting, repetitive jobs, data entry, and free up time for the estate agent to be the person they always were.

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Abi Fawcus is a freelance UX Consultant, Website Designer, Logo Designer and Graphic Designer based in Woodbridge, Suffolk. Contact me for more information.