I wish I could just let people post articles without getting my knickers in a knot. I often read poorly written articles from Realtors, gurus and such. The topics vary, but quite often they write about what is currently getting a lot of buzz in the industry. They normally promote it and talk about it at a very high level in order to experience what I call the “Guru Effect” in Real Estate.

The “Guru Effect” is something very interesting in human nature. The way it works is quite simple. If people believe they can improve their standing in the eyes of their audience, they will make every effort to do so with outlandish statements.

Realtors are famous for demonstrating the Guru Effect. I often ask Realtors about technology. Things like, “Do you use Twitter or Facebook?”, “Do you blog?”. Many times I hear them say, “Yes absolutely, it’s been my number one money maker” or “It has connected me to buyers and sellers all over the globe”.

I’ll ask another group about bus benches or fridge magnets and surprisingly I’ll get similiar answers. Nobody wants to say, “I’ve blogged for 3 years and haven’t made a dime” or “I send 20 tweets a day and nobody ever asks me about my new listings.”

The point here is to do more than listen to someone’s answer, ask for qualitative proof and think about a motive for their answer. If they can’t qualify their success, then likely you are seeing the “Guru Effect”.

I’ve been in the technology world for 15 years. I’ve worked with some of the largest telecommunication companies in the world. Utopria has created interactive media-based portal for Realtors across North America. I’ve personally seen some great ideas and I’ve seen my fair share of failures. I can usually spot the time/effort wasters.

So let me share something with you…Twitter is NOT the next big thing in Real Estate.

I find it quite comical when the experts talk about how wonderful Twitter is, they often quote about how useful it is in delivering breaking news. Do you know why this is? Because it is useful in delivering breaking news. Sadly Real Estate is not breaking news. Your new listing does not carry quite the same impact as an earthquake in Japan. Your news about doing a listing presentation at 3pm today is spam. This hurts I know, try not to take it personally, but it’s true.

You can’t say, “Well just don’t post spam to twitter, engage in dialogue”. It’s Twitter, 140 characters remember? Most of it is spam and most of it goes unread.

We’ve had almost all of our subscribers at Utopria get onboard with Twitter. We’ve even integrated Twitter with their listings. After 4 months, none of the original group is using twitter actively. There are better ways to keep people connected to information that they find value in. One of these is with RSS.

[In fact I would be willing to bet that the next big thing in Real Estate is RSS, but we'll save that for a future article.]

The other comment we hear from the gurus is that you, “have to stick with it”, “it takes some time to understand Twitter”. Au contraire, our Realtors had it figured out within two days, there is just not much substance to it in the Real Estate world.

Why are we so down on Twitter? We’re not. We think everyone should try it. For all you know, we could be showing you our own “Guru Effect” here. So please do question our motives. In the meantime, don’t waste much time with Twitter technology as a sales tool in Real Estate