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Abstract
Recently, digital technology has made its way into the property market, but the applications of new interactive technologies such as Virtual and augmented realities are yet to be explored in real estate sector. The literature in this area is scarce and thus provides an impetus for thorough exploration. This paper systematically reviews the state of the art technologies in the real estate websites of the US and Australia. It presents a SWOT score matrix including the advantages and functionalities of the Real Estate Technology (RET) such as Virtual and Augmented reality, 3D laser scanners, 360 cameras and walk-throughs along with technology adoption capacity of the websites. Based on the scored matrix, the paper discusses future trend in real estate industry taking user’s perspectives into account and highlights the need of Technology Adoption Model (TAM) for real estate property management. A total of 10 websites: Top 5 visited websites each from Australia and the US were selected for a systematic analysis based on the SWOT based Rubric of focused disruptive RET use, neighbourhood insights, nearby facilities, virtual tours, total results and minimum price. These assessments are made by comparing search results of Mascot Sydney and Laurel Maryland. The results, based on comparative analyses and novel SWOT scores matrix, are expected to pave the way for developing TAMs in real estate management that so far, is non-existent considering available literature. In future, the matrix can be expanded to include customers and websites from both developed and developing countries and a holistic TAM can be proposed to add both theoretical and practical value to real estate body of knowledge
