Real Estate News

Amazon kicked open the door this afternoon to bloggers of all stripes to get their work on the book seller’s breakout e-reader device; the Kindle.

Previously you could subscribe to a handful of pre-selected blogs on the Kindle, but Amazon now lets all publishers submit their feed for sale in the Kindle marketplace. Prices range from $0.99 – $1.99 a month for a subscription; and Amazon shares this revenue with you, the blog owner.

Creating an account and submitting your blog is pretty straight-forward. I had this blog up and running in a couple of minutes (though it takes Amazon 24-48 hours to review and accept your blog).

Right now there’s a mad land rush to corner the blossoming market for e-readers (witness the Kindle DX’s launch only 3 months after the Kindle 2). New devices from makers like Plastic Logic and a long-rumored Apple tablet stand only to accelerate the changes in the way we consume the written word in the coming months. 

This move has a fundamental impact on the way organizations, brands and professionals (Realtors indeed) communicate with customers. Delivered electronically to a Kindle, your local newspaper comes stripped of advertising, thus eliminating one traditional touch point for marketers.

But imagine instead a monthly real estate market report delivered wirelessly to a widely distributed network of opt-in (paying, even!) wired consumers via Whispernet. Much more valuable than any ad could ever be.

I truly believe these devices are game changing and will be speaking on the subject at this summer’s Real Estate Connect conference in a panel titled “How the Amazon Kindle Will Change Your Business” (natch). Make sure you register and snag a pass quickly!

In the meantime, if you have already Kindle, head out and subscribe and read FOREM on the go. Let me know what you think.

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See the rest here:
FOREM now on Kindle

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If imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, then the founder of the Clozing definitely has no qualms calling his new site the “Techmeme for Real Estate”.

Launched today by Sellsius blog head Joe Ferrara and his partner Anthony Barba, The Clozing is meant to be “your real estate water cooler”. It aggregates and displays real estate headlines from across the Net. Feeds from various sources are mixed together and displayed as stories break. The site hopes to make money through sponsored posts from advertisers that are highlighted on the right of the mix.

I love the idea personally. Techmeme remains one of the few sites I make a habit of monitoring throughout the day. Having a source of great real estate related links could be a really useful outpost to head to daily.

Nevertheless I have a few minor quibbles and suggestions for the Clozing on launch day.

The related stories algorithm seems to need some tweaking, as many of the headlines seemed to draw in random discussions. A story on IDX on Agentgenius.com was somehow linked to an announcement on Rismedia about a Green Resource website, for example.

For the Clozing to be truly useful, the relevance of the supporting discussions must remain high, at the risk of alienating the users. Given a generous allowance for launch day bugs, the Clozing ought to fix this quickly – else run the risk of going the way of RealEstateVoices.com – a much ballyhoo’d Digg clone that launched in 2006 and fizzled quickly.

Also – I wonder how truly safe it is to rely on a single source of authority (blog links) these days, given that much of the online discussion has moved quickly onto new platforms. News is increasingly shared and disseminated via social networks like Twitter so finding the fast moving conversations and links that are shared via those tools (like http://tweetmeme.com/) will be a must-have feature for the Clozing.

All in all though – it’s a great start and a nice addition to my daily bookmarks.

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More here:
The Clozing Seeks to Aggregate Real Estate News

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Over the last few years many of the major real estate search sites have moved over to Google Maps from Microsoft’s Virtual Earth as their mapping API of choice (Redfin being the most recent notable defector). HomeGain, Trulia, Homefinder, Estately and others all use Google Maps. But, interestingly, both the #1 and #2 sites; Realtor.com and Zillow, are still Microsoft clients.

Given that, they will likely be interested to hear that Microsoft has announced that they are now rolling in Photosynth technology into the Virtual Earth platform.

Photosynth is a platform that grew out of Microsoft Live Labs (see Next Generation Virtual Tours) and allows for amazing 3D environments (”Synths”) to be stitched together out of 2D photographs.

From the press release:

Photosynth software analyzes digital photographs and generates a 3-D model by “stitching” the photos together. These models, or “synths,” can now be viewed using Silverlight technology across multiple platforms. Virtual Earth brings together features, functionality and content that help consumers, businesses, citizens and governments bring location to life. It helps businesses and governments share location-based information, build better connections with consumers or citizens, and helps organizations make better operational decisions. With the integration of Photosynth into Virtual Earth customers will be able to create detailed 3-D views of anything from places to products and from hotels to homes.

Most recently, it was used to create an immersive view of President Obama’s inauguration on CNN.com called The Moment. (If you haven’t seen it, go check it out – it really is pretty amazing)

Rolling Photosynth in Virtual Earth has some pretty big implications for real estate as one could imagine a developer could take widely available assets (listing photos) and roll them into a pretty nifty 3D representation of a property that’s for sale.

You can see a sample “house Synth” on the Microsoft Virtual Earth site. (Click on the sales sheet for a really slick representation of what’s possible)

Cool factor aside. Whether or not this is a big enough feature to get some of these other sites to switch to VE, that’s another question all together.

Update: Here’s Microsoft’s video on the integration.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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View original here:
Photosynth Could Spark Virtual Earth Comeback

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Last week Zillow laid the smack down on the developer of the iZillow iphone-optimized webpage (see Zillow for iPhone), demanding that he pull down the site.

Sellsius blog has the low down.

A statement received by this blog this afternoon reads:

We reached an amicable agreement to purchase the URL. I don’t want to discuss the agreed price but it’s more than the $250 he 1st requested.

He can continue to run the site with different branding. Pity this got unnecessarily heated; other than this, Auston seems like a good guy.

Kudos to both parties for being able to come to a friendly agreement.

Now back to zestimating your neighbor’s house.

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Here is the original:
Zillow Spikes #Zillowfail, Settles with iZillow Developer

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Congrats to Trulia for winning the 2009 Webby award in the real estate category. This is nice recognition for the Bay-Area company, but they still have a ways to go to catch up its nearest competitors.

Traffic to all the major portals seems to be ticking up after a pretty miserable 4th Quarter all around. Trulia sits third, while Zillow looks to taking a remarkable run at knocking Realtor.com off the top spot.

Congrats also to the folks at Hotpads who won the <a href=”http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/current.php?season=13#webby_entry_real_estate
“>People’s Choice Webby this year.

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Trulia wins Webby Award

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Click here to view the embedded video.

Ever since Zillow evolved into.. well, whatever it is now (some sort of real estate search, AVM, mortgage rate and discussion forum Frankenstein, as far as I can tell), the controversy over Zestimates seems to have quieted down.

Maybe it’s that the novelty of seeing what your home is worth has worn off as housing prices crash.

Perhaps it’s that the PR pros at Zillow have done a phenomenal job positioning the company in the media as a legitimate data source so the Zestimate has become an accepted statistic.

Or more likely, maybe it’s that the industry has been successfully wooed with the promises of easy, cheap marketing online tools (which are especially seductive in a down market) and any remaining resistance has slipped by the wayside.

In either case, Zestimates just don’t seem to be the point of contention they once were.

But today Zillow launched an iPhone app. One that promises to bring the debate over Zestimates (and their accuracy) back to the forefront.

Upfront – it’s a very slick app. The app’s location awareness (as demonstrated on the video embedded above) is

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Click here to view the embedded video.

Mobile real estate poised to take off? Palm seems to think so.

On a side note, I’m kind of digging the Pre… but doubt I’m ready to give up the iPhone. Yet.

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Century 21 has really been pushing to move beyond the Gold Jacket lately. First, they announced they were dropping all of their television advertising in favor of an all-Internet play (see Century 21 Ditches TV for Online)

Now they have announced that they’ve launched “C21 Communities” – a social media platform.

Century 21 Real Estate LLC, the franchisor of the world’s largest residential real estate sales organization, today announced the launch of C21 Communities, its new social media platform. C21 Communities is available directly from the company’s Web site, www.century21.com, and this new platform bundles a dynamic set of social media tools designed to enable online conversations between its agents and consumers, including:

* Talks, an online interactive advice forum,
* C21 Talk Radio, an online radio channel for consumers interested in real estate, and
* CENTURY 21® social networking sites on Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube.

While I’m not a huge fan of the site design (the tag cloud seems to dominate the page – and is not a navigation element I’ve ever found particularly useful), I love that the brand is seeking to redefine itself with all of these social elements in place.

The interactive forum, specifically, has a lot of interesting possibilities. Especially if C21 were to leverage the interests and passions of their community to highlight and promote “super-users” as authorities on particular subjects.

Much like Apple does within it’s own support forums or like Verizon did to leverage the experience of its customers and let them take the lead on its customer service.

Promoting knowledgable users (read ‘agents’) through a national portal like Century21.com might very well be one more value-add that a large broker brand like C21 could offer to its franchise network.

It also begins to claw back some of the conversation that is currently being siphoned off by third party sites like Trulia and Zillow.

Owning the conversation is something that every broker brand, big or small, should be thinking about doing.

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Go here to see the original:
Century 21 Gets Social

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Crazy busy week for me this week. So not much time for blogging.

I will however take some time out tomorrow and try and drop in at REbarcamp Portland.

The event will be taking place at CubeSpace. Registration opens at 8:30AM on Thursday and the festivities kick off at 9AM.

REBarcamp Portland was organized by these guys – my hat’s off to them.

• Bryan Husen
• Dale Chumbley
• Garron Selliken
• Jeff Bernheisel
• Nick Bostic
• Ron Ares

If you’re not in the Northwest, REBarcamp Phoenix if happening tomorrow as well. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out of both great cities.

You can find a list of all the local events at REBarcamp.com.

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Source:
Rebarcamp Portland tomorrow

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Two well known real estate bloggers have launched a new training program for real estate professionals.

Jeff Turner and Bill Lublin have announced the creation of the new Social Media Marketing Institute (SMMI) and now offer a new designation to Realtors; Certified Social Media Marketer (CSM). The course is designed “to educate business professionals in the effective and responsible use of Social Media to generate business through permission-based marketing.”

Both instructors certainly have the chops to pull this off; Jeff is better known as the founder and president of the virtual tour company Real Estate Shows. He is a deep thinker and true pioneer in the social media space – you can follow him on Twitter (@respres) and on his blog Turner’s Perspective.

Bill is the CEO of a Century 21 affiliate in Phildelphia; you can read him on MOVEPHILLY blog, on Twitter (@billlublin) and is an active contributor to AgentGenius.

For more on the SMMI, read today’s Inman News article.

Other social media/online marketing resources:

• 1000Watt Consulting
• 4Realz
• New Media Labs
• Domus Consulting

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The rest is here:
Social Media Marketing Institute launches today

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Congrats to those nominated for the real estate category:

• Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate
• HotPads.com
• NYTimes.com/RealEstate
• Riverfront Park
• Trulia

The winners will be announced as part of the Webby Award week, June 8-10 in New York.

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Read more here:
Webby Awards Nominees Announced

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Google recently flipped the switch on a new service called Latitude; which takes Twitter-like status updates and mashes it up realtime location data. The premise is Latitude will let you share your location and see where your “friends” are anywhere on a map.

It’s pretty easy too. Using your mobile browser (Android, Blackberry, Symbian S60, and Windows Mobile handsets are currently supported – iPhone coming soon) visit google.com/latitude and ping the service with your location. You’ve then just broadcast that location to all of your contacts (those you’ve opted-in, of course).

Google Talk is integrated with Latitude, so you and your friends can update your status messages and profile photos on the go and see what everyone is up to. You can also call, SMS, IM, or email each other within the app.

There are a number of other location-based social network platforms out there (Loopt springs to mind) but Latitude is the first that I am aware of that also brings a desktop component to it. Adding the Latitude gadget to your iGoogle page lets you see at a glance, from your desk, exactly where everyone is.

This is where the potential for real estate search gets really interesting. Imagine the ability to get real time updates from your clients as they are conducting a home search. Alternatively, as a home buyer, you could location-tag properties with “search update” and view them all collectively once you return to your computer. 

Location awareness is a growing trend that we’ve seen in closed ecosystems like the iPhone so far, but that we’re starting to see go cross platform. I suspect we’ll be seeing much more in this arena soon.

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Latitude Takes Location Awareness Cross Platform

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In what should surely spur another burst of creativity from the real estate developer set, the New York Times announced this week a brand new Real Estate API.

The Times API contains real estate data from the NYC Department of Finance dating back to 2003 and all the classifieds data from the Grey Lady dating back to 2007.

What exactly does it offer?

The API offers aggregate data divided into two sets: listings and actual sale prices. You can get the number (”counts”) of listings and sales per ZIP code, neighborhood and borough, for various building types and date ranges. You can also get percentile prices for listings and sales per ZIP code, neighborhood and borough, again for various building types and time periods.

You could mash that up with a simple Google Map to get an elegant heat map of how prices in Manhattan have changed over time or go a step further and layer in the data from the Trulia API or the Zillow API too.

This may even be a cool project to tackle at Connect Create this summer in San Francisco. What is Connect Create?

From the Inman News web site:

72 hours. A room of developers. One killer app. Watch innovation come to life during Connect as technologists compete to create something amazing for you to take home.

Winner gets to strut their stuff on stage the final day of the conference. Pretty cool opportunity!

Any other APIs out there folks can talk advantage of? Leave ‘em in the comments and I’ll update this post.

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Dabbling in Real Estate APIs

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There was, for a while, a sense of stalemate that had hit real estate search on the web. Frankly these days, you could be forgiven for not finding much difference between the map based searches on most of the major property portals.

It seems like a map-based view of search results and the much older list-view of homes returned seemed to be all we could expect out of search. But let’s be honest. It’s not the most exciting way to view properties on line; staring from space or reading down a list of houses.

That’s why I was genuinely excited when I first saw the Hawaii Property Galleries on Hawaiilife.com. It’s a particularly innovative and one might say, obvious way of displaying properties online. But I’m surprised I haven’t seen more do it.

It’s simple really. It’s all about the photos.

The properties are all organized into generic photo buckets; ocean views, condos, acreage etc. and once you click through to view, you can slide through each of the properties — up to 18 properties a page — indivdually. So if you want to compare all the photos of the master bedroom in each property you can, likewise if you want to compare all the kitchens. You get the picture. It’s fantastic.

I love the concept – but would love to see a little more finite control handed to the user. Right now the properties that are highlighted are chosen by Hawaii Life so it would be great to be able to tap the entire MLS and apply any sort of filter and create your own galleries. That would make for an incredibly powerful research and comparison tool.

Nevertheless, it’s a fun way to look for homes and more importantly, really makes me want to go to Hawaii!

Interestingly enough – Hawaiilife is an example of a former web-only play that has parlayed its skill at building search experiences on the Net to real world success (Blueroof is another that comes to mind).

When it first hit my radar Hawaiilife was a straight referral based play (see 10 Kick Ass Real Estate Search Sites). It’s since opened its first brick and mortar brokerages in Kauai and the Big Island. And, according to a company spokesperson, in just under 8 months they’ve secured close to $100 million in listings and brought on more than 20 agents. They plan on opening two more offices on Oahu (Honolulu) and Maui later this year.

So it begs the question, shall we see this sort of search experience on the Continent someday or, more pressingly, will will see Hawaiilife’s mainland counterparts borrow its business model too?

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Continued here:
Hawaii Life Makes Me See Paradise

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It’s no secret newspapers are dying. Most are struggling to transition to a new digital environment. And let’s face it. Most newspaper web sites are pretty awful. Many are stuck in legacy platforms, saddled with expenses and without the resources necessary to bring their sites up to 2.0 snuff. (Sound familiar brokers?)

And since craigslist has already gutted their real estate advertising revenue, it seems many papers seem to be abandoning the space altogether. Leaving it as someone else’s problem.

Zillow.com announced today its plans to launch co-branded real estate Web sites with 180 newspapers across the US.

The Tampa Tribune and 100 other newspapers published by Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc. are amongst the first to take up the Zillow brand. For example, Homeseeker on TBO.com now just redirects all property searches to a cobranded Zillow page.

This is great news for Zillow who get all the SEO benefit of those inbound links, fantastic name brand awareness in each of these communities they go live in and tons more traffic to prop up their advertising CPMs.

And presumably, the newspapers get a cut on any ads sold in their Zillow space.

Of course, all of this isn’t particularly revolutionary, it builds on Trulia’s existing Publisher Platform and the granddaddy in the space, Classified Ventures’ Homefinder.

But it’s interesting to see the degree to which the newspapers don’t seem to care about monetizing real estate traffic on the ‘net. I’m not sure if its just not profitable (no advertisers) or they don’t have the capacity (or capability) to monetize it successfully and so are just willing to hand it off whole to a third party.

In any case, it seems a little short sighted.

A couple years ago I spoke to a group of newspaper advertising executives about what to do to save their real estate sections. I suggested that they look beyond banners and classifieds and build out a whole platform to support real estate agents and brokers taking their marketing messages to the web; a listing syndication engine, a blogging solution, an advertising platform, a video hosting tool.

The vision? Rather than simply preying on advertising dollars from the industry – build out the tools that the industry so desperately needs. Become a trusted service provider and build a bridge between the professionals and the community the paper serves. One that ultimately in fact could be leveraged by all verticals.

In today’s climate, that may be too ambitious, and too late. And it all hinges on whether the local newspaper brands are still even relevant in a few years. I’m not even sure about that anymore.

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Zillow goes to the Presses

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