Steve Rubel put this trend in context succinctly yesterday morning:

All of us – whether you’re a stay at home mom or an executive – are going to have to cope with the firehose. There’s more information coming at us than we can handle. Information will scale. Human attention is finite. This presents a major challenges to those of us who are in the attention business. It’s like 25 lanes of traffic trying to squeeze into the Lincoln Tunnel all it once.

Transcription:

Hey, Jim Duncan with RealCentralVA and Nest Realty here in Charlottesville, Virginia thinking about a common theme that I’ve heard from my new prospective clients recently and it’s a feeling of overwhelmed. A lot of people are overwhelmed with the amount of information that’s out there about the real estate process whether it’s buying a home, selling a home, looking for a home, just getting started.

There is such an extraordinary amount of information on the Internet that filtering through it and finding the accurate, the good, the relevant information can be an extraordinary challenge. God knows I would be if I didn’t have a process in place to delve into the information on a daily basis.

Personally I read or skim 200 some local Charlottesville blogs and 150 real estate blogs and between ten and 20 economics blogs on a daily or every other day basis so I have become accustomed to processing this type of information in a rapid and hopefully effective way. So I see part of my job as representing my clients, marketing homes, showing homes, etc., but a lot of it is also answering questions about the process. How do I buy a home? What questions should I have? What questions do I not know that I should be asking, etc. etc.

Today’s realtor is as much a client representative as somebody who deciphers and puts information about the home buying process, about the local politics, about the land use policies and growth policies into context that matters. Every year as I look at more information and process more information, I think that’s really the key; putting information into the context that matters for clients.

It’s something I think I’m pretty good at, I enjoy, and I’m really passionate about educating people, but I always like the opportunity to learn from my buyer clients what they’re reading and what question they have because there’s new information every day and I’m always looking to learn.

If you have any questions, please give me a call. Jim Duncan, (434) 242-7140 or online anywhere, RealCentralVA Have a good day.