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Alan Seiver remembers when fax came into common use in the 1980s, and he had to get permission to send one because it was so expensive. Today, the senior vice president at the Denver branch of national real estate brokerage firm Grubb & Ellis Co. thinks the Internet is making the fax obsolete.
In the early 1980s, Carl Luppens got his first taste of office technology when he bought a computer for work from Radio Shack. In 1990, he got his first cellular telephone as a broker incentive from a landlord. Now Luppens, who has long worked with technologically adept clients such as AT&T Corp. and is overseeing the development of Lucent Technologies Inc.'s new Highlands Ranch campus as a vice president at Townsend Capital LLC, estimates he has 12 phones and is on his second laptop.
"Technology is just a tool," Luppens said. "The surprise is how quickly it becomes essential and commonplace."
Indeed, technology is changing the face of commercial real estate irrevocably, moving it from a deal-oriented business to one focused more on sustained service. Service is where the money is now.
Real estate brokerage firms must also deal with new, high-tech competition, more technologically savvy customers and even advanced, "intelligent" buildings.
"You have to think technologically to get business these days," said Alec Wynne, a broker at the Denver office of the Staubach Co., a Dallas-based national tenant representation firm. "You have to know how fiber-optic rings work. You have to know about telephone requirements."
Easing communication
Technology hasn't made the industry any less reliant on human contact, any less relationship-oriented, than it has been historically, but it has made the business more efficient and flexible. Brokers and clients still, need to communicate; they're just meeting face to face less and "talking" electronically more.
This transition was prompted largely by machines - computers, telephones, fax equipment - that have made information more available as well as faster and easier to get. Big brokerage houses with in-house research departments no longer have a lock on property and market data with the advent of national independent information-gathering services such as CoStar and Property First and local RealComp - and their mighty databases. Indeed, third-party researchers have leveled the playing field for real...