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LAS VEGAS � Google executive Justin McCarthy smiled, looked out upon a vast room packed with Realtors and noted how times had changed.

Just four years earlier, he said, he had spoken to a real estate industry conference on technology trends and had gotten the message that Google was viewed with suspicion.

�There was this notion of a lion coming over the hill,� he said, evoking a phrase widely heard in the industry at the time. It was shorthand for any number of developments � particularly the emergence of technology � that were rumored to be positioning themselves to take real estate agents� livelihoods away.

�Anything that looked and smelled new was immediately the lion,� McCarthy said.

But you would never sense that at the recent convention of the National Association of Realtors in Las Vegas. Not only did McCarthy and Zillow.com founder Richard Barton fill the room with hundreds of attendees, but those who couldn�t get in formed a line that snaked down a hallway, waiting for someone to leave so they could enter. It was an unfamiliar sight at such industry confabs.

�Maybe a year ago, I felt this change (in the industry�s attitude). Maybe it�s the economy,� McCarthy said.

Whatever the reason, there certainly does seem to be � at long last � an understanding that technology can be a real estate agent�s friend.

As McCarthy and Barton spoke, I watched the sea of agents around me nod vigorously and take notes, many of them muttering in agreement with just about everything the duo said.

Barton, in particular, seemed to evoke a reaction from the crowd. The Zillow chief executive said his company�s huge home-valuation Web site, which took off almost instantly after its debut less than two years ago, now has about 4 million visitors a month. In apparent understatement, he says things �happened a lot faster than we expected.�

That day, Zillow had launched its free listings-feed program, in which a dozen major brokerages and listings-services were pouring for-sale data into the site. �Free� is a word that speaks volumes in the real estate business, and Barton said that on its first day, the site had 500,000 listings.

Zillow also plans next year to launch its Virtual Sold Sign program, in which agents can go into the site�s database (which the company says contains every residence in the country) and mark the homes they have sold.

Source: thestate.com