The landscape of a real estate transactions has changed dramatically over the past 25 years. Listings, once inventoried in a physical book in a broker’s office, are now available to anyone, anytime on just about every broker’s website. The mortgage application, once done on a Smith Corona (Google that one, kids), can be accomplished using an app on your phone. Climb into the way-back machine and you’ll see that to evidence title, someone had to get into their Chevy Citation (likely without air conditioning, definitely without satellite radio) and drive to a courthouse to perform a title search using a pen and paper (gasp!). 

Today’s real estate industry headlines focus on all things tech and automation; Blockchain, eClosings, cyber fraud, lender portals, and outsourcing. You get the picture. The only thing we know for sure is it will take much less than 25 years to see the kind of technological advancement in our business that we saw in the last 25. The speed of innovation today is speedier. As Thomas Friedman posits in “Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations,” technological advances are outpacing our ability to process them. In short, our brains need to catch up with our own innovations.

This might send a shiver down the spine of those who fear that one day the real estate transaction might be executed using an app; that with a push of a button, brokerage, mortgage and title services will be ordered and performed by faceless AI bots without human interaction. 

Such a prognosis for our industry would be missing a key finding: while administrative tasks can and should be automated, real estate professionals are required to do the “deep work,” as Cal Newport calls it in his latest book by the same title. Sure, a seller can list their property on their own, but can they negotiate objectively without bias with a potential buyer? A buyer can quickly find a dozen houses online and spend an entire Sunday at open houses sans a real estate agent. But when they find the home they like, then what? Will they take on the largest financial transaction of their life without someone who knows the neighborhoods, the lifespan of a roof, and how to find a reputable inspector? The shiny new loan prequal app may tell you that you CAN get into that loan product, but will it tell you if you SHOULD? When title comes back with a non-fatal yet material flaw, who is going to use reason-based risk management and decades of experience to make a decision that benefits the buyer, seller and lender? Even the most primitive scheduling software can put a closing on a calendar, but who will shepherd a volatile settlement to a close when the buyers aren’t getting along with the sellers – who we learn ten minutes before closing are going through a contentious divorce?

Technology has absolutely improved real estate, and it will continue to at breakneck speed. Companies who embrace it and move with innovation (and not swim upstream against it) will reap the rewards. But what really separates the wheat from the chaff are the people. Relationships. Human connection. Professionals doing deep work. Companies who invest heavily in people, for things only people can do, will be the real estate service providers of choice now and in the future. It’s still, and always will be, about the people.

Derek Massey, Esq., is vice president, MA state agency manager at First American Title Insurance Company, Boston, Mass.