Image courtesy of Inman Connect Now


Brad Inman: Pandemic Ignites "Digital Spring" for Technology Transformation


Hi All,

The pandemic has ignited a "Digital Spring" for technology transformation - "probably more in two months than two years - said Inman Founder Brad Inman at Inman Connect Now online conference today. (Tuesday, 2 June 2020)

While optimistic about virtual tours, Inman says "we need to improve the technology."

According to Inman: "The virtual tours are a little clunky, like seeing that 360-degree thing, that was like you just got a Zoom pop up on your screen. How do we fix all that? I have trouble getting from the kitchen to the living room in a virtual tour. Maybe it's me. But the innovators, the technologists here, they got to go to work. We got to make these better, smoother, easier. It's like walking backward with a blindfold to get from the kitchen to the living room. What are you all working on to make that experience better?"

"... Rich media and 3D shopping and virtual touring, all that stuff was a pretty heavy lift for us through this thing [COVID-19], and now we're seeing really, really rapid adoption of that, so that's fantastic," said Zillow CEO Rich Barton at Inman Connect Now today.

Below is an except of an exchange with Brad Inman and Zillow CEO Rich Barton.

Here is a related Inman article:

✓ Inman (2 June 2020) Brad Inman: 'This is our digital spring'

What are your thoughts?

Dan

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Transcript | Brad Inman, Founder, Inman | Rich Barton, CEO Zillow

Brad Inman, Founder, Inman
I call this the digital spring that came upon us kind of unexpectedly. And this technology transformation, it took a pandemic putting the industry on its heels, but to do transactions, suddenly all of this stuff had to be adopted. But I'm also kind of a critic. There's the industry adopting it, which is really essential, and I think that's gone crazy, probably more in two months than two years. But also we need to improve the technology.

Brad:
The virtual tours are a little clunky, like seeing that 360-degree thing, that was like you just got a Zoom pop up on your screen. How do we fix all that? I have trouble getting from the kitchen to the living room in a virtual tour. Maybe it's me. But the innovators, the technologists here, they got to go to work. We got to make these better, smoother, easier. It's like walking backward with a blindfold to get from the kitchen to the living room. What are you all working on to make that experience better?

Rich Barton, CEO Zillow
Everything. Everything. We've been investing for years in a rich media experience team with incredibly bright engineering and machine learning folks to be able to do things like take a regular iPhone or a regular smartphone and take a series of pictures and videos in a house and then derive a floor plan from them, and on the fly, create a virtual tour, a 3D tour that shoppers want, take by their app or on the web. We've been working on that. ...

Rich:
Brad, imagine how much R&D resource right now is going into a better video conferencing system now, a better work from home. Zoom has zoomed way ahead, but imagine the resource that's going on at Microsoft and Facebook and Google right now and startups coming at doing what we're doing now radically better. We know it can be done a lot better. We're experiencing these frustrations really for the first time because it wasn't that important, not for us. I know you guys have been work from home for a while. But for most of the working world, this is a new experience, and so this is the same for the real estate industry. All these things are new experiences and we are now zooming ahead as a whole industry. Everybody's focused on this and I'm very optimistic that we're going to get a digital spring. I don't know if it's going to all happen by spring, but I get what you're saying. I like the concept.