By Lyn Cox, RE/MAX Australia Public Relations
This week, realestate.com.au invited RE/MAX Australia and RE/MAX New Zealand corporate teams to attend a special event, via Skype or in person, at the Coronation Hotel, Milton: The Age of Disruption with Nigel Dalton.
Chief Information Officer with the REA Group, or ‘Chief Inventor’ as he is more widely known, Mr Dalton is responsible for the development and operation of the REA Group’s market-leading mobile and web property sites. He has more than 14 years of experience applying systems-thinking principles beyond IT and product development in the USA, Australia and New Zealand.
He leads a team of experts focused on the future of technology at REALABS, a purpose-built invention space in the heart of Australia’s tech hub, Richmond in Melbourne.
REALABS is designed to create, trial and bring to life the newest technologies for people to experience property, including virtual reality, augmented reality, drones and robotics.
REA’s invitation promised a thought-provoking and engaging journey about the impact of technology now and for the future; and Mr Dalton more than delivered.
There was 100 per cent audience engagement. From the first slide to the last word, our minds were in overdrive!
Is he correct, will someone in the audience, in their lifetime, know someone who visits Mars, or go to Mars themselves? Will RE/MAX have a presence on Mars, when the less-polluted real estate there is more attractive than some places on Earth?
Yesterday’s black and white television is today’s virtual reality.
Is the future already here, just unevenly distributed? Those driverless cars do exist, you realise! Only today I read that 500 ‘intelligent’ cars will soon be cruising around on Ipswich roads in a Mains Road Department trial, cars that can anticipate other drivers’ behaviour, react to potential danger, ‘talk’ with traffic lights and communicate all this to their driver. And the first Australian driver-less car was on hand to launch the trial. This was in Ipswich, where I grew up, where I went to school… where I rode my horse over the town bridge!
When Charles Darwin pondered the survival of the fittest, it was not the biggest, the fastest, the strongest but those best at adapting to change.
How long will it be before the real estate industry follows Uber and starts rating customers… like an extension of ‘Rate my agent’?
Robots assist nurses and talk with the elderly, and could easily do the same with agents and buyers.
How about looking at a signboard and being transported in a living room… It’s already possible!
The ideas, the challenges to current norms and status quo, and possibilities we’d not even explored kept on coming.
The currency of the real estate industry’s future is trust, customer service and neighbourhood.
There is no ‘disruption’. ‘Disruption’ creates fear. In real estate, there is no ‘disruption’ only competition.
So much to take in, too much to explore. We want to hear more. We need to hear more!
Media contact:
Lyn Cox,
RE/MAX Australia Public Relations
M. 0418 793 096;
E. lcox@remax.com.au