SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS: In hot housing markets, realtors are using FaceTime as an effective tool to show homes.
SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS: In hot housing markets, realtors are using FaceTime as an effective tool to show homes.
Time is of the essence in the Bay Area real estate game, and technology is playing an ever more integral role. It’s no big deal for agents to hammer out deals with absent sellers who sign off electronically from cruise ships or with Mainland Chinese buyers who surf the Web for investments. It’s the new normal, where “seeing” a property means taking an online video tour via an agency’s 3-D walk-through program — or via FaceTime. And, in case you were wondering: [Real estate agent Julie] Ray’s clients — Kristin and Eric Olson, who moved for two years to Basel, Switzerland, where Eric had a job in biotech — bought the house in Redwood City’s Mount Carmel neighborhood for nearly $2.1 million. That was close to $400,000 above the listing price.
“It’s obviously a lot of money to plop down for a place you’ve never set foot in,” said Eric Olson. “But we had a lot of confidence in Julie. We knew the neighborhood” — he and Kristin had lived there with their two daughters before moving overseas — “and the FaceTime images assured us that we were going to get comparative value for what we were paying.”
