We may be relying too much on technology...

It occurred to me yesterday that in Tooele UT we may be relying on too much technology.

As is so often the case with me, it can take a whole series of seemingly non-related events to get one blog post to formulate in my mind. This morning was one of those times.

In this case, a combination of a weekend manning the phones while Berna deals with a sinus infection and one of the first decent snowstorms of the year combined in the weird abyss that is my mind. As an aside, there's probably a reason why Berna doesn't let me near the phones very often. Or Real Estate clients either, for that matter.

It started with several calls I received from Real Estate agents over the weekend regarding our house listings.

We live in a semi-rural area 30 miles away from the Wasatch Front, or as those from outside the area might know it, Salt Lake City. With nearly 7000 agents in the Salt Lake Board, nearly half of our transaction sides involve what I would call an 'out of area' agent. It's not that they aren't capable. It's simply that they don't know our market or our geography, which is significantly different from theirs.

So, what does this have to do with technology? Very simple. One call was from an agent that was simply lost. For those of you from outside Utah, we are set up with a fairly simple (I think!) grid system of streets in most of our cities. You pick a central spot in town, often the intersection of a 'Main' type and 'Center' type street, and the grid goes in the four directions, North, south, east and west. Our MLS has a spot to fill in those 'coordinates' in the event a street has a name. As a Realtor, we have to get used to knowing how this works. Or, we did, before GPS systems. This street type of street numbering system is in plat in Tooele.

So, even though the address was something simple like '100 East, 400 North' (not the real address), this agent was lost, although she actually told me that 'the house is in the wrong place'. I laughingly asked her how that could be, and she replied that her GPS said so. Well, how can I argue with that? In actuality, she had transposed the direction coordinates, and she was right, the home for sale was NOT where her GPS said it should be! However, it was where the address said it should be.

The second call was regarding feedback I had left with an agent regarding a home Berna and I had showed to a client the previous day in Grantsville. I told her it was a beautiful home that showed very well, but likely wouldn't work for our client. She was somewhat offended when I suggested that it was priced significantly higher than I felt was realistic. She told me that she had priced it accurately because she'd used the CMA program in our MLS.

In reality, this is a very cool system, and we use it ourselves. However, like many 'systems' it can only account for things like neighborhoods, high traffic streets, etc. only if we manually add them, because the machine doesn't know any better. Is it a beautiful home that's overbuilt for the area? Is the house bordered on two sides by mobile home parks? Bus stop in front of it? High truck traffic? The list could go on and on, and if you don't know the property, and the area it sits in, then you can't blame the machine!

What actually got me putting this all together in my mind was the trip I took this morning to meet with some of Berna's clients at a design center for a builder, that although builds new homes in Tooele has a showroom in Sandy, a city some 50 miles from where we live. Around 6am, we started getting some serious snow to go with the serious wind we've had in Tooele the last day or two, so I left some 30 minutes earlier than I usually would. As I passed Stansbury Park, the roads became snow covered and visibility went down to virtually nothing. After I saw the third or fourth slide-off, I started paying attention to what kind of vehicles were having the most trouble with the conditions.

Out of the eight vehicles that I saw from that point in the ditch, six of them were sport utility vehicles or trucks that could be reasonably expected to have 4-wheel drive. The other two were very new vehicles that I would expect to have some sort of traction control and ABS brakes. As I passed them in my 25 year old Porsche, equipped with neither high tech system, only a set of very good snow tires, it occurred to me that those drivers, in addition to not using the sense God gave a goose, were obviously relying much too heavily on the technology that the car companies have given us, ostensibly to make us safer.Their 'skills' (if they'd ever had them!) had eroded from non-use.

So, what's the lesson here? Like in any other endeavor, our success can't be achieved solely with gadgets and technology. They are excellent tools, but they are only that. Without knowledge and good sense applied as well, they may just be expensive paperweights. I hope that we will all use a combination of 'old school' skills and tech wizardry, or we may all be in the ditch, literally and figuratively!

That's when I realized, In Tooele UT, we may be relying too much on technology