More and more companies of all sorts are utilizing the low cost marketing system of the World Wide Web in order to compensate for the desire to spend large amounts of their hard earned dollars on conventional advertising. Now with this downward trend in the real estate, organizations in peripheral real estate markets have been seen making the move.
As we all know, the search engines have been utilized for the past few years when it comes to searching for a house or property, and of course we have all felt the mortgage broker's push towards internet dominance.
And now there are inclinations of the more back end real estate systems reaching towards the WWW in order to grasp an edge by offering their customers and clientele special extended services that they normally could not receive except through an appointment with a face to face agent.
Take for instance Chicago Title
Chicago Title is a neutral third-party in a real estate transaction that facilitates rules, regulations, and the handling of funds. As one of Fresno County's oldest Title and Escrow Companies, Chicago Title has records dating back to the 1800's. They handle a variety of transactions including; home purchases, residential refinances, commercial transactions, and new home communities.
But they do more than just mediate a real estate transaction. CTC has a marking staff that works with realtors and lenders to provide services that can help them become more efficient with their business, escrows, and clients.
With the rise in Internet accessibility, the competition for home or property sales, and every cat and dog reaching towards a mortgage or loan, companies have been looking to streamline their services in order to beat the competition and become the eminence front for the market.
Chicago Title is one such company that grew to the realm of Internet success and began offering a simplified method to many seemingly complicated structures of the loan and escrow system. CTC utilizes the Internet in order to extend their title and escrow services staff into the virtual realm with unique and cutting edge programs.
There are three proven services that CTC offers now online in order to help agents and lenders save time, money, productivity, and help them handle less paperwork. 1. Premier Services - An online service that allows agents to find out property information throughout the country, check sales comparables, find school reports, print out blank legal documents, and access Spanish or Vietnamese marketing material for their Bilingual clients, and much more. This service is available 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.
2. EStatus - www.chicagoestatus.com - Allows realtors and lenders to open and track escrows on-line. Once the transaction has been opened, it speeds up the process by automatically ordering all appropriate documents, and gives updates of the transactions from open to close. So realtors and lenders will always be up to date with what's going on. This enables them to inform there customer 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, even when the Title company is closed. This service also sends emails that will notify the agent when pivotal documents are available. You can also save transactions to a disk when it is closed.
3. CTIEC - www.ctiec.com - This web based service is also available 24/7 for lenders. Like Estatus, it gives real time updates on the refinance transaction. But more importantly it allows the lender to upload their loan application right to CTIEC, so that the lender will not have to re-type the information which saves them valuable time and the chance of a typing errors. This service also sends email to the lender when crucial documentation is available. Good bye fax machine. So as you can see, CTC has made the adjustments to the modern WWW era in order to become the cutting edge of the title and escrow community. And like so many other markets, you can look forward to this type of streamlined service becoming more and more readily available to brokers, agents and the general public down the road.
It is simple to understand the reasoning behind the move to such web based systems. The Internet offers a fast "information at your fingertips" type of services that cannot be produced in any other form. We are approaching the Big Brother view of communications, in a good way. And if you, as an organization, cannot adjust, you will be left behind. That is a fact.
So put on your seatbelt and enjoy the rollercoaster ride as the market shifts and turns and hopefully glides to your door. The market is not something to be afraid of, but rather embraced. And like Robert G. Allen discusses in his best selling real estate book Nothing Down, there is only one place to be in the real estate market and that is "in the market."
Be wise, invest in real estate, use the Internet and have a nice day.
