Home Tweet Home
You may not be Twittering yet, but your broker is.
Heads up, Seattle: Real estate agents in Emerald City are sifting through your thoughts—no matter how boring or banal—and they’re learning a lot more about your home-buying tendencies than you might think. Before you freak out and start wearing a foil hat, it’s not nearly as Big Brother as it sounds: Like geeks to a new Apple device, tech-savvy property pushers have been swarming Twitter, the microblogging service that lets users shoot personal updates to friends and subscribers in 140-character bursts, and they’ve been mining it for market research.
“Tweeting” about how easy it is to hear your new baby cry through the paper-thin walls in your two-bedroom bungalow may seem innocuous to you, but to people like Ardell DellaLoggia, it’s the predictor of a real estate upgrade to come. “I’m trying to learn what people want,” says the Coldwell Banker Bain associate broker, who joined Twitter last summer to follow Seattle users’ stream-of-consciousness postings. “Are they mentioning real estate?”
And with real estate discussions today focusing more on the tanking market than on bullish buyer sentiment, the real estate Twitterati are tweeting, too—not to hawk houses, but to build virtual relationships. Stacey Lange, a Windermere agent, hasn’t sealed any deals by posting quippy comments online, but she did get a referral—via someone who’d been following her Twitter feed from Dallas—so she’s sold on the service. “People who use [Twitter] and see that you sell houses or that interest rates are low, they’re the ones who are going to come back to you [when they’re ready to buy],” she says.
The upshot for home buyers? The anonymous online brain-picking that the real estate agents have been doing can work both ways. “There are people who read me and hate me,” DellaLoggia says, with a laugh. “That’s good. They learned something: They learned not to call me.”
Published: March 2009
