The process of buying a selling a house has transformed immeasurably over the last ten years. From browsing the ‘shop window’ of an estate agent on the high street, buyers now browse the window on their laptop or mobile phone. Gone are the days of leafing through endless sales brochures in an office or the pages of a newspaper; now potential buyers scroll through property profiles on their mobile devices whilst sitting on the train to work, or in a café on their lunch break.

It is now possible to purchase a house without ever needing to leave the comfort of your current home. The traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ industry has transformed to an almost entirely virtual space. The market leaders are the companies that have adopted this new route in order to market most effectively, and the new kids on the block who came fresh into the market with an entirely virtual approach.

In our tech-savvy society, people are accustomed to having all the information they require available to them at the touch of a button or the click of a mouse. The speed of delivery of this data, the quality of the content and the rate at which it is processed by the user, has all increased accordingly. For the buyer, an enormous number of extremely detailed and specific property profiles are immediately searchable online to a very high level of granularity. This enables browsers to very easily and quickly identify the properties that meet their criteria.

The estate agents who adapt to this new business model effectively will thrive, whilst those that remain rooted in tradition are already will begin to feel the strain.

Today’s home buyers are accustomed to technology and expect to be able to use intelligent deployments, optimized for the latest devices, to make one of the most important buying decisions in their lives. Companies that embrace this expectation and deliver an exceptional product to their customers will be the ones that succeed.