I’ve operated as an estate agent for over fifty years and seen a lot of change, not all of it for the better. In this series of articles, I shall explore why technology has largely failed to improve the home selling and buying process which sees sales transactions now take over twice as long to complete as they did twenty years ago.

I’m going to start with the humble telephone and question why people seem to have become scared of using it.

There is now a huge over-reliance by estate agents on communicating by email, WhatsApp, text message and social media. This, it can be argued, is because this is the way the consumer wants it but, in my opinion, it often comes at the expense of agents failing to get to know their customers and clients as they rarely, if ever, actually speak to them!

The downside is immense. It devalues an agent’s service offering, makes it harder to differentiate as all agents seem the same and “dialogue” is just a series of “one way” messages not “two way” interactions that would improve understanding and outcomes.

Estate agency is becoming a “self-service” model and has seen a “race to the bottom” on fee levels. For the consumer it results in having to deal with poorly trained individuals with little knowledge, experience or understanding of what they, the customer or client, actually require. This is no wonder when agents spend all day producing Tik Tok videos of themselves or hiding behind their desks avoiding direct communication with the very people they should be helping.

In short, we used to use a telephone to converse and build relationships with people! When did the novelty of this approach wear off?