Savvy home buyers driving today’s real estate market

While mortgage rates may play a part in the real estate market, the Internet has made consumers the real drivers of the market and today's home buyer is perhaps the most powerful customer in the marketplace, according to the white paper titled, "Real Estate Confronts Customer Acquisition," from RealSure.com, a real estate consulting firm for agents and brokers.

The white paper provides insight for real estate industry professionals who want to develop strategies for coping with today's more buyer-centric market.

"Today's customers have more information at their fingertips than ever before. More information has led to more sophisticated buyers, buyers that in turn have become more knowledgeable. More knowledge allows a person to become more demanding, which in turn leads to increased choice. And choice creates power," according to the white paper authored by Stefan Swanepoel, a real estate industry trend analyst and Janet Branton, vice president of the National Association of REALTORS'® (NAR) Business Specialties Area, and executive director of the Real Estate Buyer's Agent Council (REBAC).

According to Swanepoel and Branton, real estate professionals will need to stay just as informed of market trends and opportunities as their potential customers to get – and retain – their business. "Professionals in the real estate industry will have to develop a more empathetic attitude towards customer care, redefine customer maintenance and create a better 'customer keeping' strategy. They will have to become 'married' to their customers," the paper says.

That means changing the focus from the seller mdash; acquiring listings, marketing and selling the home -to the buyer.

"Customer acquisition in the real estate industry has for a long time been associated with the acquisition of inventory; the listing, the home and the seller. The logic has always been, list the property and the customer comes with it. Everyone knows that he who controls the listings controls the market. Until the early 1990s that might have been true, but during the last decade, a whole new way of looking at customers has developed," the report says.