Not sure about the rest of the world, but in The Netherlands there's a big change happening in the way people sell their house. Estate agents (realtors in the US) are facing fierce competition from online estate agents. The difference? The person wanting to sell their house has to take the pictures, write the ad, and show potential buyers around. All things that the regular estate agents would normally take care off. The benefit? Waaaaaaaaaaaaaay cheaper as you're paying a lot less commission with this do-it-partly-yourself approach.
So what does this have to do with eLearning? Well obviously estate agents are going to have to look at doing things cheaper if they want to compete with the online services. One traditional way of cutting costs has been not to sent employees to classroom training. Said employees also will need access to accurate and recent information on-the-go. Enter eLearning... Information about houses, neighborhoods, estimates, crime rates etc. etc. can all be made available to the estate agent on their PDA or mobile phone. Ok, so that's passing information, how is this eLearning? Well, imagine training somebody in how to estimate the value of a house. Rather than spending a lot of time and money taking them to various houses, why not let them walk around in a virtual house, goggles and all? Allow them to 'touch' items in the house, play with lightfall, view etc. This would also allow the trainees to easily compare different houses at the switch of a button. They could have an online tutor there, giving them feedback on what they regard as good and not so good things about the houses they are 'viewing'.
Take it a step further and potential buyers could have access to this type of information/experience. Useful if you're looking at houses that are far away from where you now live!
And where did all this come from? Well, I'm in the process of selling my house and am kinda hoping to get a call from my estate agent tomorrow that an offer has been made. Fingers crossed!
1 comment:
You should check out Sketchup from Google. Its a FANTASTIC little 3D modeling pkg that is very easy to use. Many people are creating 3D models of real places and putting them inside of GoogleMaps. So, in the notso distant future GoogleMaps will be a usergenerated 3D environment...not just flat satalite imagery. I think estate agents could be very creative in using this. Of course, that industry came to the internet party late during web1.0, so in web2.0 it may be a while again.
Check it out. Sketchup is SO much fun.
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