By now I imagine just about everyone has seen or heard about QR codes, right?  No? What does it mean? Why, QR stands for Quick Response!  Living in a brave new world of abbreviations, thanks mostly to texts and Twitter, it has become a challenge to decipher them sometimes.  LOL, TTYL, BTW — and so many, many more!

The Secret, Decoded!

QR codes are basically barcodes that are machine readable, designed to be read by smartphones.  The codes consist of black modules of data, arranged in a square pattern on a white background.  The information may be text, a URL or other data.  QRs were designed to allow its contents to be decoded at a high speed.

They originated in Japan in 1994, but are only now becoming common in the US.

QR in RE 

In real estate, they are often used on “for sale” yard signs to direct folks with smartphones (and the QR code reader app required to read the code) to a website.

I use them to invite prospects to a Virtual Tour of my listing, by placing the QR code on the yard sign, on flyers, on the “Just Listed” postcards I send out, and any advertising I do for the listing!  It’s a cool tool in a new world of real estate advertising, where door-knocking and sending mass flyers out to geographical “farms” is considered pretty much part of the Stone Age.

Decipher This!

Here are two samples of QR codes I am currently using.  If you have a smartphone (BlackBerry, iPhone, Droid, etc.) you can go to Google, for example, and download a QR Code Reader application suitable for your device.  Then you can scan the codes!

Feels a little like the old Captain America Decoder Ring — but I’m not old enough to know about those, LOL!!