Elizabeth Castelda, a Greensboro real estate agent with Coldwell Banker Triad Realtors, gets a phone call instantly notifying her of a client who has shown interest in one of her listings online. And the phone call isn't the customer; it's a computer.

LeadRouter, a proprietary software used by Coldwell Banker Triad Realtors to make sure its clients get contacted within about two hours, takes an e-mail from an interested customer containing contact information and translates it to a voice that automatically calls the agent. "This is LeadRouter, you have a contact ..." the voice tells Castelda. The software will automatically forward the call if that agent doesn't acknowledge that he or she has made contact with the client within two hours.

Today, the real estate industry is changing to meet the expectations of consumers who are more Internet-savvy than ever, says Tim Kent, Executive Vice President of the Greensboro-based N.C. Association of REALTORS. "When prospective buyers or sellers show interest, they expect to hear back in minutes," Kent says. These clients, often in their 20s and 30s, have higher expectations, he says. Research shows that about 80 percent of real estate customers spend time online before contacting a Realtor, he says.

With clients surfing the Web for listings and doing much of the research themselves, real estate brokers are doing all they can to embrace technology and use it to their advantage. It's the use of enhanced Web listings complete with photos, laptop presentations, and using e-mail for faster turnaround time that give agents like Castelda an advantage.

"Technology has really changed our business big time," says Michelle Amador, the Greensboro Office Manager at Coldwell Banker Triad Realtors. This technology has drawn younger agents to the real estate business. Castelda has been in the business for a year and a half and is one of Amador's younger agents

In fact, the N.C. Association of REALTORS has seen an increase in its members due, in part, to increasing technology in the field, Kent says. In 2000, the association had 22,000 members. Today, it has more than 37,000 member Realtors.

"Not only are younger members more sophisticated, but probably our urban members are more sophisticated," Kent says. A quarter of the association's members now carry handheld wireless devices like Trios or BlackBerrys, and 91 percent of its members use e-mail daily to keep in touch with clients as compared with 80 percent two years ago. Castelda sends out an e-mail newsletter every month and, like many other Realtors, is developing her own website. In fact, real estate brokers are increasingly feeling the push to develop websites that serve their Internet-savvy customers.

In 2005, 51 percent of the members of the state's association had their own business website, which could be their own domain or could be a link off of the company's Web site. Builders are also developing bigger and better websites with enhanced database-searching features. The Greater Greensboro Builders Association recently unveiled a new site created by Atlantic Webworks in May. Functionality was the key to this website, says Adrienne Cregar Jandler, President of Atlantic Webworks. "Because the consumer expects the most current information," Jandler says, "now builders are saying they need a website." This is a dramatically different trend than in the past three to five years, she says. "Home buyers are getting more savvy and more busy. They want to be able to sit at home at 10 o'clock at night and view houses."

Increasingly, websites feature virtual tours where prospective customers can view a model home. Hoyle Koontz, the owner of Technipix, a virtual tour photography company, takes a series of photos and merges them into a 360-degree virtual photograph of whatever location his clients need.

In the case of Concept Builders out of Burlington, these virtual 360-degree images offer their customers a virtual tour of the model homes directly from its website. "It puts someone right in a home or a model," says Koontz, who has done virtual tour photography for Piedmont Leaf Lofts in Winston-Salem. He says his customers understand the value of images with regards to selling homes.

Brent Bruner, Owner of Re/Max in Winston-Salem, has been in the real estate business for more than 28 years and has seen the technology change. "Technology has revolutionized everything," he says. Now, Bruner has agents with laptops, and all agents have access to all listings electronically. "Real Estate used to be a vanity business, all about a person's name, but now Realtors young and old are able to ramp up quickly," Amador says. "This is a 24/7 industry," Kent says. "If you don't respond quickly; you snooze, you lose."