Leading edge of real estate tech: Booth & Lee – Ray White Ballarat on three decades of rapid technological change

THE last 30 years have seen enormous technological change and Ray White Ballarat, once known as Booth and Lee, have been on the leading edge of adaption and change in the real estate sector.

When Trevor Booth and Phillip Lee struck out on their own telecommunications were limited to landline phones, faxes and early mobiles.

The internet as we’ve come to know it was still a few years off, email was a thing for researchers and academics and proto-social media consisted of bulletin boards and Usenet groups.

“We were always, and particularly Phillip, interested in technology,” Mr Booth said. “If there was new technology out there, whether it was computers or whatever, Phillip had a strong interest in that area. With our business we actually were probably the first real estate office to set up purely computerised. So when we started we didn’t have any manual systems.”

Computers need programs and Booth & Lee were early adopters of digital industry tools.

“We’ve been leaders in real estate software,” Me Lee said. “We were the first to use the Sales Manager software, in fact we were a pilot site, one of the first four in Australia.”

30 years ago artists were still employed to do renderings of properties for sale or lease and when Booth & Lee opened their doors on Saturday, 1 April 1989 they had just one phone line that got jammed up pretty quickly.

“People were ringing Telecom saying they couldn’t get through,” Mr Lee said.

“We’ve gone from faxes to the internet and emails, from black and white photos in the paper to colour photography, from using cameras and getting the images printed to using digital cameras.”

In November 1995 Booth & Lee became the first real estate agency in Ballarat to list a property on the internet.

Of course, the process was nothing like it is today, with the ability to upload content from a smart phone, let alone a computer.

“It was a website called review.com.au and back in those days you didn’t have back end access to the website, so we had to post a photograph along with the typed-up text down to Melbourne and two or three days later the property got on the internet,” Mr Lee said.

“The internet felt like the way to go, we didn’t know it was going to be what it is today when we made that decision.”

Email is an integral part of pretty much every business now, but back in the day Booth & Lee jumped on the chance to adopt new communication technology.

Unlike today, email was not always on and required dialling into the service three times a day and downloading new messages. The speed of change in mobile telephony has been particularly rapid.

“We’ve gone from having no mobile phones, to phones fixed in the car, to Motorola flip-phones – with the little aerial on them that cost us $3750 each, to smart phones,” Mr Lee said.

That dedication to always trying new things in the technology space continues today. The team at Ray White Ballarat are avid users of social media and focus on finding new ways to make the platforms work for them.

“We’re the first agents in Ballarat to livestream auctions on the gavl platform and Facebook,” Mr Lee said.