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Business & Tech

Technophobe

Some people still prefer their real estate the old-fashioned way.

, we discussed the extra mile traveled by tech-savvy Burlingame realtor Raziel Ungar. With “Burlingame Buzz,” his series of documentary home town videos, Ungar has woven himself into the fabric of Burlingame in ways a gallery of house listings on Trulia could never do. In response to the story, a question was raised: do real estate agents, circa 2011, ever deal with the computer illiterate?

Phyllis McArthur of Girouard Properties has been in the business since 2001-- not long enough to recall the days when realtors raced around town for face-to-face document signings. In fact, she said, no one she knows was active during those pre-fax days.

This year, McArthur has gotten a crash course in pre-technology real estate, thanks to a handful of clients.They are out there, these tech-less individuals. The rest of us have forgotten how to make a deal without computers.

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Case in point: instead of waiting by the home fax machine, McArthur’s recent clients rented a limousine and were driven from their home outside Reno, Nev., to Foster City for a document signing. The clients, two sisters “in their 80s or early 90s” didn’t trust their local bank to send and receive their faxes.

“They didn’t want to fly,” said McArthur. “And they wanted control over what they were doing.” The limo took them to Foster City, where they signed papers completing the sale of their house, then it took them up to San Francisco for a meeting with their lawyer and back to Reno.

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There is no mention of whether bottles of Cristal were consumed during the drive, or if anyone hung out of the sunroof and said, “Woo-hoo.”

Real estate transactions require huge amounts of paperwork. Some people simply feel more comfortable looking at a person across the table instead of a fax machine – whatever the cost.

“I have a client from Europe who’s selling her mom’s house in Daly City,”  McArthur said. “As soon as we get an offer, she’s going to fly back (to the U.S.) and do the paperwork. She has no internet.”

Meetings are held in person at McArthur’s San Mateo office. “It’s actually kind of fun,” she said. “It’s different.”

Most of these clients, McArthur said, are elderly. All of them are sellers. “(Buying) is a different ballgame,” she said. In a decade of business, not once has McArthur had a buyer who didn’t use the internet to scout out homes.

Buyers are getting more and more legwork on their own. McArthur cited recent clients who essentially asked her to stay out of their way until they had decided to write an offer.  Another couple asked that they travel in separate cares when looking at property. “They wanted to discuss what they’d just seen without having me there,” she said.

This same couple, upon meeting McArthur at a listing, told her, among other things, that they’d learned there had been in a death in the house they were about to see. They’d called the listing agent and asked.

“Buyers are going onto sites like Trulia and Active Rain and learned what realtors say to each other,” McArthur said. “They end up with so much information.”

Meanwhile, she has another non-tech client lined up, a Peninsula couple “in their 90s.” Each step of that transaction, she said, will take place in their home, on the market for the first time in four decades.

Soon, the last generation of computer-challenged men and women will be gone. Instances of agents meeting clients in conference rooms will slow to a trickle. Eventually, McArthur predicted, the conference rooms themselves will disappear.

“I have more technology at home (than in the office) and I do my best work at home,” she explained. "Technology is going – in my opinion – to make brick-and-mortar offices obsolete. What’s the point of them?”

Will they take the realtors with them? McArthur said no. “A professional can negotiate a price and make sure (sellers) accept our offer,” she said.

Professionalism – and the fading presence of clients who prefer the human touch – may continue to rule the day.

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