Real Estate Blog

In its September 2008 issue, alongside its reviews of tub cleaners and organic produce, Consumer Reports turns its critical eye on the real estate industry.

The publication polled a sample of 3753 readers who sold or tried to sell a home, 4029 readers who bought a home and 7368 readers who did both. The results are illuminating to anyone in the industry; especially some of its findings which will surely be controversial.

Let’s look a bit deeper at the numbers.

First, the good news. Only 1% of sellers tried to use an online web site (craigslist, forsalebyowner.com etc.) to sell their home. 80% chose to go with an agent. It suggests that any fears that online players may someday distermediate the Realtors seem overblown. Sellers want to work with a real estate professional

The bad news is that CR concludes is that overall “higher commission didn’t always translate into more service or better results.”

Moreover, respondants who “paid commissions of 3 percent or less were just as happy with their brokers performance as those who paid 6 percent or more.” In fact, those who paid more were “more likely to say they had regrets about the selling process”.

More troubling, is that CR recommends that consumers continue to aggressive negotiate the 6%
commission downwards.

Seems to me that the real challenge here is that, moving forward, the industry needs do a better job of communicating its value (beyond puff advertising pieces) and, more importantly, delivering that value to consumers.

There are many ways to turn this tide, but I believe one way to slow the downwards trend on commissions is if brokers and agents can demonstrate to consumers they have an aggressive multi-modal marketing package in place for each and every listing.

Unfortunately, despite overwhelming evidence that consumers are looking for homes on the Internet (about 80%), it seems some Realtors are still choosing to ignore the medium.

According to CR, 85% of Keller Williams agents advertised homes on the Web - compared to only 76% of RE/MAX agents and 75% of Century 21 agents. The numbers, while high, are still unacceptable.

Agents should be syndicating their listings across the Net, taking dozens of high quality photos of the home, creating single property sites, doing video tours, blogging about their listings’ key selling features. Any or all of these approaches can add value (either real or perceived) to the bottom line of the transaction.

Brokers aren’t off the hook either. They need to be educating their agents on what the 21st Century internet-savvy buyer is looking for and then provide those platforms that can deliver those services to their agents.

The Internet is not the be all and end all to getting a home sold. But far from being a threat to commissions, it may just end up being their salvation.

Continued here:
Can the Web Save the 6% Commission?

One of the things that always struck me at the last couple of Connect conferences was the number of folks in the audience that came from outside the US.

Last month in San Francisco was no different. I met people from Canada, Mexico, Germany, Australia, Spain, France and many others, all walking the floors of the Palace Hotel.

Every day, I look at the Inman News Facebook and LinkedIn groups and there are requests from entrepreneurs and real estate professionals from every corner of the globe who want to participate in the conversation.

So this got all of us at Inman thinking, why not give them that forum?

Let’s get the folks from Booli.se, Zoomf, Immobilien Scout24, Igglo, Properazzi or Immobiliare.it and connect them with the people at Zillow, Trulia, Redfin and others and share the insights.

Let’s examine REALTOR.ca, a truly national real estate search site, MLS driven and controled by Realtors. Sound familiar?

Let’s look at markets in North America, Asia, Europe, South America and understand how the greater global economy can impact even the smallest local markets.

Let’s learn how brokers and agents around the world are retooling, relaunching and reacting to ever-changing global real estate markets.

Let’s understand how new technologies like smartphones, video and social media are knocking down traditional barriers and borders around the globe.

Global Connect will be all of that and more… Mark your calendars, we’re bringing the world to New York City, January 7-9, 2009. You can learn more on the Real Estate Connect NYC 2009 web site. With much more to come.

I’m also looking for speakers, topics and anything else FOREM readers can contribute. I’m honored that this blog reaches the far corners of the globe, and over the years I’ve had many conversations on line and off with readers from around the world.

So whether you’re in Rotterdam or Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town or Chennai, Tokyo or Toronto; if you’re working on a cool technology, doing something innovative with your business, writing a blog or just have a interesting new idea - let me know. I want to hear about all of it. I want to bring you to New York.

Please contact me at joel [at] inman.com or phone me at +1 (971) 228-5704.

This should be a lot of fun. Hope to see you there.

See the original post:
Inman News Kicks off Global Connect in NY

Google Insights for Search is a fantastic new tool that allows you to dig into Google’s search volume patterns to find trends.

While I think there are a lot of ways you can use this tool (see agentgenius.com), I think that for most marketers the geographic breakdowns will be one of the most interesting - mainly because it can help identify brand awareness in any particular location.

Let’s look at the national brand awareness of the big search portals:

Strong Nationwide (Near universal brand awareness)

Realtor.com

Yahoo! Real Estate

Regionally Strong (Strong in specific regions; east, west, south, north)

Zillow.com

Trulia.com

Confined Awareness (Searches confined to single States)

Cyberhomes

Frontdoor.com

Poor roost.com did not have enough search volume to show any results.

(h/t Sellsius blog)

View post:
Digging in to the National Real Estate Search Scene

Wish I could be in New York for this. Looks like a fabulous get together.

Surely someone is going to shoot it on video and share with the rest of us right?

Future of Local Video Gathering in NY

iPhone 2.0 turned the iPhone from smartphone to full-fledged pocket computer. Applications continue to pour into the iTunes store and I’ve been experimenting with a lot of them. Here are a few of my favorites, practical applications:

Evernote - Need to keep track of all the contacts and colleagues you meet on the road? Scan their business cards with the iPhone’s camera and Evernote will scan in the information so it’s waiting for you in text form back on your desktop.

Pulawai - The power of location-based, mobile real estate search can be seen in this app. Bare bones for now, and the search results are pretty sketchy - but familiarize yourself with this experience… the future is here.

Yelp - Keep track of your online reputation in Yelp’s reviews with this handy app. Better still… find a good place for lunch when you’re out on the road.

Nearby - On a neighborhood tour with out of town clients? Top up the databanks with useful local landmarks pulled from Platial’s geobits. Better still create your own neighborhood tours on Platial and pull them up on your iPhone.

Sketches - Take a photo of a property you want to email to a client? Use Sketches to mark it up, add arrows and notes right on the photograph.

Any others to add to the list?

Read more here:
5 Apps Every Real Estate Agent Should Have on Their iPhone

Housevalues lost $1.3 million in the 2nd quarter of 2008, the company reported in a press release last week. John Cook also reported that they lost over 400 customers in the same period.

But don’t shed a tear for HV - they’re still sitting on $62.7 million in cash. And that’s a bucket of cash that they’ve been willing to swing around a bit recently.

The press release highlighted RealtyGenerator, a company HouseValues acquired in November of last year. RealtyGenerator is a pretty slick product that functions as a lead generation and CRM tool for brokers and agents.

Personally, I was more curious in seeing what HouseValues had to say about its other investment - the $2.75 million they plunked down in January into ActiveRain.

Took a while for me to find any mention, but I did manage to dig this out of their Letter to Shareholders from the 2007 Annual Report (PDF link).

While the acquisition of Realty Generator will go a long way toward enhancing our products, we believe our investment in ActiveRain will help us broaden our sales reach. ActiveRain is a leading community and social networking platform for real estate professionals. The company has attained a high level of user engagement and has rapidly grown to more than 80,000 members. While ActiveRain will continue to operate as a completely independent business, our strategic relationship creates the potential for a new and rapidly growing channel.

Clearly Housevalues is excited about their new properties. I’m not sure investors were similarly moved however, as the stock price (SOLD) has remained relatively static.

Here is the original:
New Sales Channels for HouseValues

Roost.com, recent Inman Innovator Award recipient, has redesigned its real estate search results pages.

The biggest change is the search criteria, which were previously available on the left and right sides of the listing results and are now all above the fold. They are now, according to company PR, “completely hide-able” too.

Once expanded, the criteria panels slide from left to right. It reminds me somewhat of the Xbox 360’s dashboard tabbed interface which features 5 “blades” that also slide in and out.

The goal, I’m guessing, is to get people right to the meat of the search, the results, quickly and not clutter it up with too much extraneous information. Also notable is the map results now take advantage of Google’s new terrain image data and the map pins dynamically update as you view the listings.

Overall, it’s a pleasant experience. But it strikes me that it may still be a bit much for the average real estate consumer. The bigger issue here is that as more and more filters get added to Real Estate 2.0 search tools; neighborhood boundaries, school districts, keyword searches, I’m finding myself a little overwhelmed with options.

Ultimately the challenge for any of these sites, lies in creating a user experience that is both rich with data and pleasant, intuitive and easy to use.

Companies like Redfin, Estately, Trulia and Roost are all creating innovative new ways to present the massive amounts of data that is available to online searchers. But, in many cases, the rush to add even more features (fsbos, foreclosures, mls/broker listings, local context) to search results isjust adding more noise.

I applaud Roost’s attempt to ‘hide’ some of this features but personally I’m still waiting for someone to bring Google-like (or even Cuil-like) simplicity to real estate search results.

—
Related Articles at Future of Real Estate Marketing:

• Roost.com Kicks over the RE Search Cart
• Millions of Listings Oh My
• Roost Reveals the Brokers in its Nest
• Google Base Redesigns
• Terabitz Creates MLS iPhone Site

The rest is here:
Roost Redesigns Search Results

And a fair number of those were bought by real estate professionals I suspect…

Last week at Real Estate Connect, the Flip came up in conversation numerous times and I can’t count how many of them I saw being wielded by content-hungry conference-goers over the three days in San Francisco.

That’s why today I wasn’t surprised Pure Digital, the company behind the popular Flip video cameras, announced that it has sold its one-millionth unit in the US. They also reported that, according to research conducted by the NPD Group, the Flip Ultra is the #1 selling camcorder in the US based on sales through June 2008. A quick search on Amazon.com confirms their popularity.

I spoke with Pure Digital CEO Scott Kabat this morning and asked him more specifically about the Flip’s impact in the real estate industry. Interestingly, he told me his mother was a real estate agent and while the Flip was not designed specifically for this industry, he was definitely conscious of agents needs. Pure Digital’s goal is to make video production simple, portable and affordable - qualities that most definitely line up with the real estate industry’s requirements.

He also shared with me that the company has overcome one the long standing complaints about the Flip - its incompatibilty with the Mac. Pure Digital has been working with Apple and recent updates to Quicktime and iMovie now mean that the video files shot by the Flip can now be imported directly into Apple’s video applications. This is a huge win for us OS X users.

Finally, Kabat intimated that they are aggressively developing the Flip software to allow for seamless uploading to online video-sharing sites; which includes YouTube and now AOL and Myspace. Future versions of the software may also include the ability to upload to real estate-specific video hosts and web sites as well.

Personally, I’m a big fan of the Flip (minor quibbles aside). The hardware is stunningly simple to use for the non-technical crowd and the software is quickly becoming more and more useful too. The marriage between the two (hardware and software) is what will drive greater and greater adoption of video. And for the real estate industry that can’t come soon enough.

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Related Articles at Future of Real Estate Marketing:

• Taking Video to the Mat: WellcomeMat Body Slams a New Release
• Century 21 Puts Open Houses in Youtube
• Agents Seeing Success with Online Video
• Marketing Tips for Realtors in 2008
• Sitcom Used to Sell Condos

Credit:
Flip Sells a Million Video Cameras

Right now my life feels a little like this motorcycle ride I took a few week’s back…

It’s all a bit of a blur.

Real Estate Connect SF 2008 kicks off in little less than 24 hours and I think it’s shaping up to be one of the best events we’ve put together. But, needless to say, it’ll be slow posting here on FOREM this week.

However, if you want to keep up with everything that’s going on from afar, make sure you:

Follow me on Twitter.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Friend me on Facebook.
Watch my Flickr Photostream.
Find me onTechnorati.
Converse with me on Disqus.

More importantly - if you’re coming to Connect.. make sure you say hi in person or give me a call at 971.228.5704.

Hope to see you there.

—
Related Articles at Future of Real Estate Marketing:

• Video Highlights from Connect SF 2007
• New York Connect Kick Off
• Inman News Real Estate Connect Warmup
• Connect SF this Summer is Going to Rock
• Help Plan My Trip to Inman Connect NYC

Go here to read the rest:
Connect with me at Connect

Frontdoor.com, the upstart real estate search portal from media giant Scripps Network Interactive, continues to move forward. From their most recent press release:

Just six months after opening, FrontDoor.com, the real estate Web site powered by HGTV, continues to unlock home ownership information for users – now offering more than 3 million listings of homes for sale across the country.

So is 3 million the magic number?

Zillow’s Real Estate Search Results claim to have close to that (2,626,271 to be exact). REALTOR.com says you can “search over 3 million new, existing and rental properties”.

Young buck Roost.com has about half that… but then they’re only live in a handful of markets.

Roost.com now provides consumers access to homes for sale in 26 major markets, over 12,000 cities and nearly 1.5 million listings in total.

Nothing from Trulia on how many listings they have but I’m going to take a wild guess here and say that they have… oh I don’t know… approximately 3 million listings?

—
Related Articles at Future of Real Estate Marketing:

• Estately Schools the Competition
• Oodle Launches Real Estate Pricing Guide
• My Reply to Reply.com? Waste of Money.
• Lots and Lots of Real Estate Lists
• Searching Real Estate Listings By Brand

Go here to read the rest:
Millions of Listings Oh My

Open registration for .Me domains starts to today. The domains, which were previously reserved for entities based in the country of Montenegro, are now available for anyone to purchase.

(Amusingly, .Me was assigned to Montenegro after is declared independence from the former Serbia and Montenegro which used the TLD .Yu… so .Me split from .Yu)

Uses for a .Me domain?

Realtors using their own names as their main branding element would be wise to snag that URL. Using joerealtor.me might be a unique marketing angle (…for a short while anyway) but in any case, it would be good to stake your claim on it, even if you don’t end up using it.

Also, if you’re planning on using Apple’s MobileMe push contact and calendaring service with your hot new 3G iphone - you can assign your .Me URL to your MobileMe account (by adding it as your personal domain under the account settings).

Anyway, I snagged burslem.me - if you want to as well, go get ‘em.

—
Related Articles at Future of Real Estate Marketing:

• Searching Real Estate PPC Advertising
• ActiveRain Launches Outside Blogs
• How To Research Your Competitors’ PPC Advertising Campaigns
• How to Keep Tabs on your Search Ranking
• Realogy Makes A Big Ad Buy

Here is the original:
Get Your .Me Domain Today

The guys at 1000Watt have redrawn the Real Estate Web 2.0 mindmap. Make sure you go and check it out.

What’s impressive is that despite the gruesome economic news and horrific market conditions many in the industry are facing there is still so much innovation happening on the technology side.

I think this is going to be the big story of the latter half of 2008. It’s make it or break it time for many of the players on the list and those who haven’t raised a few rounds for a decent war chest to wait it out (see Trulia Gets Beaucoup Bucks) are going to struggle and probably fail.

—
Related Articles at Future of Real Estate Marketing:

• VentureBeat Reveals Trulia Redesigns
• Zillow and Brokers Kiss and Make Up?
• Trulia Helps Agents Put their Stamp on their Listings
• Zillow Is Creating It’s Own Reality
• Zillow expands its reach

See the rest here:
Real Estate 2.0 Expands

Yahoo! Inc., just released the results of a study they did on how the Internet influences home buyers and sellers and specifically how it influences consumers when it comes to selecting a real estate agent.

No great surprises in the results (which were tabulated from a survey of 500 participants)… Yahoo’s found that… Yes… the Internet plays a “pivotal role in the selection process and was central in helping consumers identify agents”.

The numbers are good brain fodder though.. here’s what Yahoo! found:

• Home buyers and sellers consider approximately two agents on average before making a final decision.
• The Internet impacts consumer trust. Forty percent of respondents credited a site in increasing their trust in the agent.
• 74 percent of people who accessed an agent Web site got there with the help of a search engine. [emphasis mine]
• The online research process is quick and intense: consumers spent an average of 12 hours online researching agents and 75 percent selected an agent within one week of starting their search.
• 45 percent of respondents used the Internet to learn about agents they didn’t know existed.
• 41 percent discovered special deals and promotions offered from an agent through the Internet.

Struck me that maintaining a blog might still be the best way for Realtors to deal with the discovery and introduction process.

But the biggest find reinforces what many of the online search sites are banking on (see Trulia Gets Beaucoup Bucks) - there is still a massive disconnect between Realtor’s advertising budgets and where consumers are looking for information. According to Yahoo! (bias noted) 77 percent of respondents searched the Internet for information during their research process compared to 34 percent for print.

And guess where Realtors are still spending the most of their money? A Borrell Associates report quoted by Yahoo says that newspapers continue to get biggest share of Realtor advertising dollars at 40 percent (though online is catching up - and now stands at 32 percent).

—
Related Articles at Future of Real Estate Marketing:

• Stroking Your RSS Ego
• MyNewPlace promises to help you find an apartment
• Turnhere Takes a CAR Ride
• Jump into 3D with Agent Earth
• Internet Marketing for Real Estate Developers

Source:
More Proof You Need to be Marketing Online

Simmering resentment over Trulia’s SEO practices (see Trulia Caught Cloaking Red Handed) hasn’t stopped the search site from landing another $15 million in funding.

Deep Fork Capital LLC led the financing to top up Trulia’s reserves; Trulia’s other investors Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners and Fayez Sarofim & Co. also participated.

In the statement, Trulia co-founder and CEO Pete Flint said… well, he didn’t say all that much really…

““This additional capital will help us take advantage of this opportunity and continue our accelerated growth. This market is also a unique time to help real estate brokers and agents transition their marketing efforts and services online. In the coming year, we plan to roll out world-class products that will continue to transform the online real estate experience.”

Also found in the release - Trulia claimed it has:

• Approximately 5 million unique users
• 100,000 real estate professionals as registered users
• More than 3 million real estate listings nationwide
• Over 70 million property records providing constantly-updated comparable sales

Trulia has now raised $33 million since it launched. That’s big money - so somebody definitely thinks there’s a payoff somewhere to be had. The only question is from where?

—
Related Articles at Future of Real Estate Marketing:

• Trulia’s Web Site Down?
• Too Busy To Blog? Pay Someone To Do It For You
• Trulia Now Live in the Pacific Northwest
• Welcome Trulia!
• Quick Hit: Trulia profile

Go here to see the original:
Trulia Gets Beaucoup Bucks

Moo is one of my very favorite online printing companies. In fact, the first time I went to Inman’s Real Estate Connect (see Help Plan My Trip to Inman Connect NYC) I carried with me in my pocket a handful of Moo’s MiniCards with me that had my blog URL and contact information on it.

For those of you who have moo’vd your marketing yet, Moo (which is based in London) creates brilliant printed products that can pipe in photo feeds from your Flickr or Facebook account so every single card can have a unique image on it.

For this reason, it makes Moo uniquely useful to the real estate agent. And they’ve just released a new product that their aiming directly at agents too - full-size business cards.

Using Moo’s “PrintFinity” technology, you could be printing business cards for a new listing that has a different picture on every card with the property information on the back. Imagine blowing your seller’s mind when you show up with a box of these for them to pass out.

Alternatively, you could create a series of business cards that have all the listings you’ve ever sold on the backs of the cards, along with your contact info.

The other nice thing is that Moo lets you do very small print runs (of only 50 cards) - which makes sense for a single listing - as you end up having a lot less waste and a run can be updated if there’s a price change. 50 cards costs only $21.99 and you can choose to get the cards in 100% ‘Green’ card stock (recyleable and biodegradeable) too.

—
Related Articles at Future of Real Estate Marketing:

• Friday Fun: Business Cards to Remember
• In the Daily Grind with Real Estate Agents
• Agent 2.0: not-so-clever play on ‘Web 2.0’ or the future of real estate marketing?
• BuyerHunt is Real Estate in Reverse
• An Embarassment of Riches

Read the rest here:
Moo Launches Business Cards for Agents