Old people don’t use the internet?

yeah cos we are all so stooooopid!

That sounds like a bad excuse for not getting his marketing right.

For one thing, if he believes that to be true he should be finding other channels to reach the demographic (and unless the house is a bungalow in a street where a lot of other older people live, the chances are he has that wrong, too).

For another, it is patently ridiculous to think that older people are not internet-savvy. I was using it at home in 1993 (I remember when we got our first PC, as my son was 2 and we got him a CD ROM with nursery rhymes that played when you moved the mouse?), and used it at work well before that, so it's not as though it is a new invention that older people have yet to discover. Also, I think that the majority of iPads are owned by older people who don't need the storage facilities of laptops.

I think your client should ask him for the basis of his point of view, as well as how his sales strategies have been tweaked to deal with it. If he is just advertising online, why is he being paid?

oh PS I am 67 and retired now. for 13 years. long before I left work, i was chatting to out IT bod and it emerged that I had owned and used computers at home since before he was born!

I started using computers in 1964, so possibly before that estate agent was born.

I had a Dragon 32 in 1978 so a bit after you

I am 77, know I am not computer savvy but I do online banking and heaven knows what else on it. We are not all totally thick or uninterested.

Change the Estate Agent.

What a poor excuse, there aren’t many who aren’t on the Internet nowadays, especially as most TVs now use the Internet too.

Yes, definitely change him. He is making excuses for his inability to sell.

Just another lazy generalisation. Your post was spot on Doodledog

I would have challenged him and asked the basis of his statement, as I do with anyone who makes ridiculous sweeping statements.

Well, I certainly didn’t use the internet for buying things until the pandemic, albeit browsing it to decide what to go shopping to buy. What did irritate me recently was to find that a couple of catalogues that I buy things from had telephone numbers which were very expensive to use and it wasn’t apparent until you read the small print. Which must catch out people that use the phone line. Right move is rather addictive isn’t it . I spend ages looking for my dream cottage sometimes.

That is so ageist, I would have told him so to.

I think anyone with children born in the 70s will at least have a passing knowledge of computers. We bought our first so that the children weren't left behind their peers.

Could the agent have meant that your home may appeal to a certain demographic?

The irony is that this estate agent said this as part of his spiel to persuade my clients (I’m not an estate agent btw!) to sack their previous agent and move to him. They have moved to him but more through desperation than for any other reason!

I ve had a computer since 1990 and have bought sold and banked on it every since
My 86 year old friend is as savvy as me buy / sells emails photos etc ( she doesn’t bank) and my 96 year old cousin is on fb and does photo editing in a club and learning Spanish on line during the pandemic I should add just before lockdown at 94 she had her eyebrows tattooed on
We re far from dinosaurs nowadays
I d have ghad a go at that estate agent

I once did some proofreading for a student who had researched computer literacy - but in a small and restricted community - finding that older people did not use computers and the internet.

I had to point out that all the people aged 70+ (and some are 90+) in my community are competent with computers and use the internet. It's really a case of whether you have a need for it.

We, too, were using computers, probably before the estate agent was born, in the early 1980s, partly because we were teaching, so were familiar with the BBC B and bought a comaptible Acorn Electron for home.

I co-run a small club with a current membership of 150 people ranging in ages from 40s to 80s. We would love to be able to reduce our paper, printing and postage costs and run all our communications digitally but a good third of our membership do not use the internet and/or have mobile phones. It is changing as older members leave and young members join but it’s a slow process.

Of course, it was a sweeping statement for the estate agent to have made but they still need to market by a variety methods to get the widest coverage.

I'm 65 and for the last 20 years of working I worked exclusively on computers .spreadsheets PowerPoint all the other cr4p that was there to help me do my very stressful fulfilling job! I'm very tech savvy and only fall down on that hedgehog thingy and the one where you run people over before blowing their heads off....... I do like maleficent though! ? Joking apart I'm sick to death of the younger generations thinking that we all drop brain dead at 60! It's the new 40 or haven't they heard that one yet? At least we understand that getting vaccinated saves our lives!

Gabrielle56

I'm 65 and for the last 20 years of working I worked exclusively on computers .spreadsheets PowerPoint all the other cr4p that was there to help me do my very stressful fulfilling job! I'm very tech savvy and only fall down on that hedgehog thingy and the one where you run people over before blowing their heads off....... I do like maleficent though! ? Joking apart I'm sick to death of the younger generations thinking that we all drop brain dead at 60! It's the new 40 or haven't they heard that one yet? At least we understand that getting vaccinated saves our lives!

??? although I can’t do spreadsheets. I do word, family tree and embroidery patterns

Change your estate agent.

Some estate agents are unbelievable poor. Last time I purchased I really needed the room sizes and they hadn't even bothered to go and measure up and post the room plan! It was like trying to get blood out of a stone to get information from them.

I find this so funny! ‘Old people’ like me wrote the Internet, it’s a lot older than that whippersnapper of an estate agent thinks and the code didn’t write itself

I'd say its his marketing that's at fault.

I regularly look at rightmove, but won't delve further into ads with only one picture of the property, or shoddy looking photographs and no room sizes, floor plans help a lot too. These are the basics that people need to decide if they want to be bothered with a viewing.

I'd check what he's actually advertising and if its not up to scratch, change the agent, but tell him why he's just lost his commission.