I saw recently that the National Association of Realtors published their annual Smartphone Survey Report. A great deal of this report is already well-known (and boring) but a couple of the results caught my eye. Keep in mind this survey is targeting real estate agents, not the public at large.
When I became a Realtor in Louisville, I had a standard cell phone but I knew I needed a more powerful communication tool. So I performed some research and eventually purchased a BlackBerry.
This new device was certainly better than my Samsung but it wasn’t incredible. Email was much better, texting was good, but surfing the Web was horrible. It would also crash unpredictably to which tech support gave me the “reboot the phone and try again” routine. Personally, I wondered what all the hype was about. Looking at this survey, it seems a lot of real estate agents have followed this path.
I’m curious to see next year’s survey and how much Android increases. I predict it takes major market share away from BlackBerry with the iPhone inching up as well.
The Smartphone brand holds closely to the OS as you would expect. The phone I own now is a MyTouch from T-Mobile. This phone is so much better than my BlackBerry that it’s hardly worth discussing. From texting, Web surfing, contact management, calendar integration with Google, and the ability to add new, useful applications, I find it hard to understand why anyone would continue with a BlackBerry. I’m really impressed with my HTC product.
Here are some of the other items of note from the survey.
Email remains the top reason for a real estate agent to acquire a smartphone. In fact, email (88.4%) is only slightly behind making a phone call (91.2%) in the most used feature. The most used downloadable applications are for social media, with Twitter being the most likely winner in that war.
83.5% of all respondents are either Satisfied or Extremely Satisfied with their smartphone with iPhone owners leading the way in this category.
For the record, the saddest result in the survey is that 17.5% have no interest in getting a smartphone despite the high level of satisfaction among smartphone owners. Just goes to show that sometimes, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
