WALKING around a room in a different suburb without leaving your chair and scanning a book with a phone so the person on the cover jumps out and speaks to you – no it’s not the plot of a science fiction movie, but the future of how we will buy real estate.

Virtual reality, augmented reality, Google stalking, are all phrases anyone buying or selling property was about to become very familiar with, according to leading real estate industry coach Tom Panos.

Mr Panos said new technology and social media were the medium the current generation of buyers and sellers operated in and so the industry needed to embrace it and lead the way.

According to REA Group chief information officer Nigel Dalton the tools were already being used by some parts of the industry to market property and as the technology improved, it would become much more commonplace.

The benefit would not only be to help those who were time poor cut down their shortlist and save themselves from hours of driving around, but with information now so accessible, it would help make the industry more accountable and trustworthy than ever before, according to Mr Panos.

He said prospective sellers already used social media to learn everything they could about a property or an agent before they even met and while that might be a scary prospect for some, overall it was a great thing for the industry.

This “Google stalking’’ wasn’t just used in the real estate industry, he said, people used it before making all sorts of decisions such as what restaurant to go to and where to book a holiday.

“In the past when someone had a bad experience with someone they could really only tell their friends and family, but in 2016 they tell the world. You can’t hide and the reason why is every consumer now has a loud voice.

“It actually means that the consumers are going to win out,’’ he said.

“You are actually talking to a consumer who has more information than ever at their fingertips and what we have seen is that it is not that one media has now taken over another media, it is media are working in combination not in isolation.’’

Mr Panos has dipped his toe further into new technology for the launch of a new mini book – There Are No Blind Dates in Real Estate, which he will launch at the Australasian Real Estate Conference on the Gold Coast on May 22.

After the launch the book will be available to a wider audience and will be available as an ebook from June.

Realestate.com.au have used the book to showcase new technology and how print and on line can work together.

If you hold a mobile phone over the cover, an image of Mr Panos will leap out of the cover and speak to readers.

Mr Dalton said the aim was to show people how technology would be used to market property in the future.

“Everyone now carries a phone, that phone has got a great camera and a good processor and a great screen,’’ he said.

“Australia is now pretty well covered by 3G and 4G and that has enabled us to get those extra layers, those digital layers that are the augmented realities, able to be seen through a phone and that has not been doable until now.

“You have got to look at science fiction to see where this goes in the future.’’

Mr Dalton said there would be a couple more years of people having to use their phone to access augmented reality and then more advanced headsets or glasses sets were going to be ready.

“We are working on a Microsoft technology called Hololens, so that is the first stand-alone pair of holographic glasses and you can still see where you are, you can still see the people around you and the room around you, but what it does is it drops into that world a hologram of things you can look at.

“What we aiming to do with all of these technologies is manufacturer that one commodity that families and real estate agents are in short supply of and that is – time.’’