ASP Is Ideal For Real Estate

I think it would be safe to assume that a vast majority for professionals in the real estate world are confused if not overwhelmed by all the tech acronyms. We hear them all the time. Any company that provides services or products related to technology will list a whole host of ABC’s, IDUNO’s and HUH’s and we are all supposed to know what they stand for. Once we know what they stand for we find what they mean requires a tech geeks cipher just to decode the vagueness.

With that said, what in the world is ASP and what does it have to do with real estate. ASP stands for (With regard to this article) Application Service Provider. It is a company that provides computer based services over a network. Translation: Web Base Software; software you use on demand from any place you have (1) a web browser and (2) an internet connection.

Immediately the benefits of this kind of system or model should become obvious to you. You can be in London England sipping a hot cup of coffee at a posh little cafe with free WI-FI and a snazzy new Macbook Pro. [And] your office is in Napa California. The information available to you at the office is available to you in London. Not only is the information available, it’s real time, on demand and looks and functions exactly the same as if you were sitting at your desk.

Real Estate Professionals are on-the-go all the time. The nature of the business mandates mobility and ASP is the only software model that can fit the technology requirements of a high performance agent and real estate office.

My views on ASP’s is obviously biased towards Markler, but there are plenty of system out there that do many different things and fit different bills for different scenarios. Markler, for example, is a high performance real estate business management system with rich content control. This type of system may or may not be right for everyone in real estate (I personally happen to believe it does, but thats beside the point) but it does address many issues niche products don’t provide.

Yahoo Mail, and Gmail are good examples of niche products using an ASP model. It does one thing, manage email. The alternative would be using a mail client you install on your computer such as Outlook, Eudora, Thunderbird, etc. These both do the same thing, however the ASP (Yahoo Mail, Gmail) version is accessible from anywhere, with any computer that has an internet connection and web browser. While installed software will only work on your computer. There are email servers that enable better portability but for the sake of this conversation you will more than likely only be able to check your email from your computer where your mail client is installed.

In closing, I highly recommend anyone in the real estate industry take a serious look at using ASP type products. Buying installed software is old school. Don’t get me wrong there are many systems out there perfect for traditional software installation and there will always be a need for it. The real estate industry as a whole is ideal ASP type software.