Real Estate & Tomatoes on The Information Super Highway
Most people, regardless of what they do for a living, now have an email brimming with speed of light requests to get things done. Email and the internet have revolutionized the way the world does business and has become one of the biggest time savers in just about every profession. The real estate business has benefited from the changes especially with online home marketing, contract preparation and contract delivery.
Speaking for my own business, there are forests of trees spared because it’s so much easier to be nearly paperless due to email, fax to email and “cloud computing” when negotiating and preparing contracts for real estate purchases.
Little did anyone know that information would move at the speed of light and turn humans into petulant children like Charlotte from Willy Wonka. The phrase, “patience is a virtue” should officially be changed to; “patience was a virtue”.
Everyone wants “the goose that lays the golden egg, now”. In a world where most people can click “buy now” and have the UPS man ring their door bell with their widgets the next day, actually waiting for something, for anything, has become an exercise in lack of tolerance for a fair number of folks.
So there I was minding my own bees wax when I get an email saying I didn’t respond to a question fast enough. I actually saw the email which was a really a comment on a blog that was sent to moderation. Unfortunately, that day I was putting my beloved dog to sleep and my secret team of webmasters was attending other matters and had escaped the shackles to their desks. It was Sunday, you know, the day that Chick-fil-A is closed so the staff was probably driving around looking for something to eat.
Apparently, someone wanted to know about farmer’s markets, and fast. Bonita Springs, like most cities in southwest Florida, has a few of them sprinkled around town on various days of the week.
Apparently, farmer’s markets are a very big deal to some people. So big of a deal that they would like to know when and where to get a goose that lays a vine ripe tomato, right now, and follow it up with a handful of emails explaining how disappointed they are with not getting the answers immediately. Why they were so disappointed, in fact, that they won’t even be moving here because farmer’s markets were actually the prime determining factor. (I’m serious) Not the hospitals. Not the lifestyle. Not the school system.
For what it’s worth, that pressing tomato question was actually answered within one day but it still wasn’t fast enough for the farmer marketeer.
Now, while I find humor in the fact that someone is this hell bent on getting fresh produce information at the speed of light from a real estate agent it doesn’t really matter what the information was that they needed. They wouldn’t have had patience if it was a pressing tomato issue or a short sale negotiation.
These days there is always something needed yesterday … last week it just happened to be emergency farmer’s market information.
Maybe people need to watch an old episode of The Rockford Files and see Jim run from payphone to payphone with a pocket full of dimes to appreciate how much technology has substantially improved their lives.
The fact of the matter is that even with so much of the communication being done on the internet there are still people, the human variable, at the other end of every transaction. Humans have to put the data there and take it down, reassemble it, deliver it or tell it where the nearest farmer’s market is and sometimes it’s just not going to be immediate.
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Real Life in Bonita Springs is a project by Chris Griffith dedicated to writing useful blog posts for consumers about the Bonita Springs, Florida area. Find out what it is really like to live in Bonita Springs, Florida by reading about our fair city. You’ll get the latest in local real estate information, Bonita Springs real estate market reports and a little bit of humor. If you have topic ideas, feel free to request a story about the idea, after all, this site is just for you.
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