Shoes, gifts, even your last pair of contacts—you’ve shopped for all of them online. Odds are you also shopped for your house online if you moved in the last 10 years.

According to Iowa Realty, 92 percent of home buyers will use online options for at least a portion of their shopping experience. And it’s changed the process for the better.

Sellers
If you’re selling a home, the new technology gives you a larger role.

“Sellers can really get involved in the process,” says Brennan Buckley, Marketing VP at Iowa Realty. “They help determine the photos to be posted. They have immediate access to review their listing. They even have a real-time gauge of their home’s activity because our system shows them the number of views their home gets each day.”

Buyers
Even the least technologically literate shopper benefits from the online resources available to home buyers today. Viewing interior photos, obtaining home details, and comparing sale prices and property taxes can all be done online before you attend an open house.

“The Multiple Listing Service (MLS) has been around for decades,” says Les Sulgrove, with RE/MAX Opportunities and the president of the Des Moines Area Association of REALTORS (DMAAR). “But with Internet and mobile capabilities, it’s become even more powerful. Any DMAAR member who chooses to participate can access the shared information the MLS provides.”

That means when you search for a home online, you’re not necessarily limited to the properties listed with one agency. An Iowa Realty search, for example, will bring up homes offered by other agencies that participate in the MLS data exchange.

Your search isn’t limited to your home computer.  Many smartphones have applications that allow you to view homes for sale. So if you happen past a great house on your lunch hour, you can look it up immediately on your phone and schedule an appointment before you get back to the office.

If your smartphone has GPS capability, you can simply drive until you find a neighborhood you like and let your smartphone search for home listings within a specified radius from your current location.

Both Sulgrove and Buckley agree that the rapid growth in mobile technology will continue to change and improve the shopping process for home buyers.

Realtors
Although most buyers enter the Realtor relationship more fully informed than in the past, Buckley says that hasn’t decreased the need for professionals. In fact, the need has increased.

“There’s no substitute for actually viewing a home that appeals to you from its online ad,” he says. “And because buyers are so much more knowledgeable, they realize how complicated the sales process is, and they rely on real estate professionals even more.”

That requires a Realtor who is adept at more and more complex approaches to selling and finding homes for clients. And it means real estate agencies are implementing a variety of tools to serve the market.

Iowa Realty continues to publish both newspaper ads and a quarterly magazine that’s available for free at nearly every grocery store in the state. In addition, the firm produces a broadcast program highlighting available homes and trends in the marketplace. And the firm’s website gets thousands of hits every week.

As Buckley explains, “At Iowa Realty, our goal is to have the information you need in as many forms as possible.”

When you put all those pieces together, selling or buying a home can actually get easier.