CRE Still Needs to Catch Mobile, Now More Than Ever

After a year of pandemic stay-at-home-please angst, vaccination rates are up, states are reopening, and millions are out and about again, mobile devices to the ready. Is the commercial real estate industry also ready/? Probably not and that will hamper them.

There are CRE companies that have moved ahead with technology like artificial intelligence and 3D virtual tools. Many haven’t.

“You would think that in today’s world where everybody’s doing everything from their phone that we’d have the capability to do everything from the phone,” J.C. de Ona, southeast Florida division president of Centennial Bank, tells GlobeSt.com.

“In my experience, most commercial real estate agencies are far behind the times when it comes to website technology, especially when compared to the residential market,” says Mike Willman, owner of digital consultancy Willman Web Services with experience creating sites for real estate purposes. “Many do not have a website that works on mobile at all, and those that do tend to use outdated technologies.”

Often Willman finds the sites are not what is called responsive, meaning they adapt to the different devices, operating systems, and screen sizes employed by users. Instead, companies might use dedicated mobile sites, which is confusing for people and considered inadequate from technical and design vantages.

“In addition, page speeds tend to be terrible,” Willman says, referring to how quickly a website loads onto a browser. “This decreases time on site and leads to a poor user experience.” It can also negatively affect search results, as Google considers download times when assigning rankings.

Part of the problem can be regulatory. “A residential mortgage loan in most states right now has to be closed in person,” says James Rogers, CEO of AI-augmented home-buying site Torii. “There just isn’t another option. And pretty much every real estate website has the same information because everyone pulls listings from the same place.” That means no competitive differentiation.

In areas like distressed real estate, mobile apps could become a cost-saving tool, putting information critical to investor decisions in a digital form so it is readily available on a phone or tablet.

The problems extend outward to property development. According to mobile infrastructure company MD7, before the pandemic, many jurisdictions required in-person submission of site applications and permits. That has changed, but it isn’t yet clear how improved the situation is.

One reason all sorts of companies in general fail in mobile marketing, according to Gartner, has been that even when companies build mobile capabilities, they don’t know the preferences of their users. 

They may even be slow to recognize what customers want in other areas, suggesting a systemic lack in marketing and strategy. A recent survey from essensys and compiled by Verdantix noted that only 13% of office space tenants think that commercial real estate owners are ready to meet new needs.

Without better understanding how investors, tenants, developers, and others want to work, any new app and web development can try hard in completely the wrong direction.