Posted by Leonard Steinberg of URBAN COMPASS on November 2nd, 2014
At URBAN COMPASS we developed an APP many months ago in house that has turned the industry upside down. It demonstrates to the world how simple and easy it can be to search for everything real estate in the palm of your hand. Now with the introduction of larger screen PDA’s this technology tool has become seriously important and is impacting all industries……real-estate-land has always been a bit slow on the uptake, but that is changing too.
I remember about 15 years ago when Barbara Corcoran put together a rather cheesy, yet highly effective, television commercial showing the world how simple and easy and effective it was to search for real estate on a desktop or laptop computer using the web instead of searching via the archaic column ads. posted weekly in The New York Times real estate section. There was Barbara sitting at her desk with her broad unmistakeable grin clicking away to the listings displayed on the company website with Rosemary Clooney singing ‘Come on A-my house’ in the background. We knew then that Barbara had true STAR QUALITY and boy have we been proven right with her hit show THE SHARK TANK, an ABC-TV ratings hit! Those tiny New York Times column ads, with their painfully vague abbreviations barely described a fraction of the properties they were trying to sell. I recall attending classes on how to write these ads, cramming as much information into 2 to 5 miniature lines. It was a joke. The world had changed and Barbara wisely recognized how impactful viewing property on a larger screen with beautiful photographs and floorplans and all the information clearly depicted would impact the way people searched for a home.
The next revolution took place many months ago when URBAN COMPASS and its team of brilliant engineers and scientists built one of the most exciting, insightful and seamless real estate APPS for the real estate world….in house, not out-sourced and then clumsily integrated to other systems. Search had transitioned from the desktop or laptop into the palm of the consumers hand, viewable from a ski-slope in Aspen, a sidewalk cafe in Williamsburg, a terrace overlooking the Mediterranean, or in the deserts of Africa. This was indeed a revolution and over the past months this APP has become better and better with more features to make the life of the consumer and their brokers easier and better. We have witnessed a major evolutionary step. And it showcases technology at its best: when it truly caters to the needs of the consumer and performs in an intuitive, easy fashion. Many are now beginning to copy this APP, just the way others copied Barbara’s bold move to the web many years ago. There is something great about being first……and as a tech innovator URBAN COMPASS will continue to lead the path forward.
These are exciting times indeed. And we all owe some gratitude to Barbara for leading the way on being innovative and looking towards the future and changing with the changing times: I feel I learned so much from her and I am forever grateful.