In the last 10 years, the real estate industry has been profoundly changed by new technologies, more specifically by the Internet. The Internet has changed the way people now look for and compare homes, choose their agents, or apply for a mortgage. Although most real estate agents now have their own Web sites, many of them have a hard time deciding what kind of information and services they should provide on their sites. Agents must find out what online services their future clients expect, and must then decide what new technologies they should adopt to stay in tune with their target market.

With regards to adopting new technologies, the U.S. population is not uniform: some people are fond of innovative devices, whereas others only adopt them when they absolutely have to. Marketers thus divide the population in five adopter groups: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. What matters to agents is to find out where their target market belongs. Although each group