Social media in real estate

Social Networks have long begun to heavily impact personal interaction and the private life of a significant portion of the population in general. They are now more and more gaining influence on business processes, especially on the consumer-oriented processes of businesses. This paper investigates the current state and assesses the future potential of the use of social networks and applications based on these technologies in the field of residential real estate from both a user and a business perspective. In a first section, currently available social media services are described with respect to potential applications in the real estate world. Secondly the paper describes the results of an empirical study in which participants of the residential real estate market in the Rhine-Main region, Germany were interviewed about their current and intended future use of social media applications. This paper concludes that social media applications are currently not consequently used by most market participants. While, a growing importance can be expected for the future, the key to success for the business side will be the ability to use social media in a sensible way to enhance a solid non-digital business proposition.