5 Ways The Real Estate Market Won't Be The Same In The Future

by Daniel J. Business Tips

Real estate isn't a technology per se but is definitely not immune from the digital shift and like with everything else, you either got to get with the times or get ready to be beat

Let's go over 5 ways the real estate market will be shifting in the coming years and decades and what you can do to capitalize on it.

1. The Way We Buy and Sell Real Estate is Changing

Before the internet and social media, if you wanted to sell your home you had to find a real estate agent to market and list your property for sale because real estate agents had access to a secret database of real estate listing called the MLS (multiple listing systems or multiple listings service)

If you were interested in selling your home you would have to pay this real estate agent or broker 6% of the sales price of your home, meaning if you sold your home for $100,000, you would have to pay the broker $6,000 in commission.

Entrepreneurs saw this as an opportunity so website like Zillow came around and they took the secret database of real estate listing and they made it public, this way anybody can see what's available for sale or list their property for sale, so now you can find a home to buy anywhere in the country or list your home for sale without ever speaking to a broker

In late 2017 facebook rolled out a feature on facebook marketplace where people can list their home for sale and in its initial testing, people have been loving it. While this might be good news for a consumer looking to buy and sell their homes, this is not good news for the million real estate agent in America today

Now, this doesn't mean that real estate agents will be completely extinct, this means that the agents that want to stick around will have to find a way to provide a service that the internet cannot.

2. Shopping Will Never Be The Same

Store, even big stores like Macy's and JC Penney are shutting down hundreds of stores all across the country.

Let's be for real, people and especially young people love shopping online, it's super convenient, you can do it right off your phone and you don't have to wait in any lines. Stores cannot compete against that convenience

If a brick-and-mortar store wants you to come and shop, they're going to give you a special reason to get up and leave your house and put down your phone and turn off social media just so you can go shopping

It means that stores are going to have to add some sort of wow factor to make you want to come and hang out in the store instead of just shopping there

What does this mean exactly, well, developers are trying a bunch of things to turn malls into something like community centers where you can come and try new technology.

Companies like low rider have become very popular recently because they specialize in turning large empty anchor stores into small water parts inside malls

This way malls could give people a reason to come to the malls

3. The Shift In Where We Live

Baby boomers have led to this huge boom in suburban cities where the idea is, you would buy a home and then you would a car and then you would drive 30 minutes to an hour to work every morning. Millennials don't really like that idea

It's a waste of time who want to sit in their car for two hours every single day, I mean social media companies are fighting to hold somebody's attention just for a few seconds, and that's why younger people like renting in urban cities because now they could walk or bike to work and if they need to get to the other side of the town they can just call an uber

The funny thing is we're actually seeing a similar shift with older people who've lived in suburbs their whole life because they don't want to have to drive places all the time anymore and so now you're seeing these people move into urban cities as well which is why you're seeing so many urban senior centers popping up

This huge influx of demand into urban cities present an opportunity for real estate investors and developers because young people are renting in these urban cities and investors want to invest where people and jobs are moving.

4. The Way We Office

The need for additional streams of income have pushed a lot of people into entrepreneurship in one way or another, office space is not cheap which is why some creative developers have started making shared or co-working office spaces, shared office are becoming extremely popular for entrepreneurs, it's exactly what the name says it is

It's a shared workplace for growing entrepreneurs, typically you get your private room and then there's a common area that's shared with a bunch of different startups, this way you can meet different entrepreneurs and save a bunch of money on rent

This is good news for entrepreneurs because now you don't have to lease out an entire building or an entire office and it's also good news for the investors and developer because you get to charge more money per square foot because you're going to have multiple tenants in one office space.

5. Real Estate Maintenance Is Changing

Starting with the basics, you hopefully won't need a checkbook to pay rent to your landlord every month, it'll all be automated then your leases will all be digitized if it's not already and now artificial intelligence or AI will be coming to a property manager near you

Real estate management companies are the ones that manage investment properties and they usually aren't the most streamlined businesses, but new technology is trying to make this process simpler and cheaper this way it's easier to take care of your tenants and your property

This new technology will sync with your investment property and they'll tell you things like, hey your water heater might be leaking in the next six month, so here's what you can do before it evens happens.

As these changes are happing you have three options, you could sit there and watch it happen, you can complain about it, you can capitalize on it by doing something about it.