Real Estate News

Problem: When someone in the real estate industry goes job-hunting, it can be difficult to navigate through all the listings posted on Monster, Career Builder or some of the other online job boards posting up.

In addition, when an employer or real estate brokerage is looking for someone with specific real estate experience, it can sometimes feel like a ‘needle in a haystack.’

Solution: Vendor Alley has a BRAND NEW job board up just for real estate job postings. I think This is a great idea. It takes a a common problem  (unemployment in the RE industry) and makes a super-easy solution.

As of right now, there are 4 categories:

1. Sales
2. Tech
3. MLS/Association staff
4. MLS/Association CEO

This is a version 1 release. Vendor Alley plans on adding additional features, ‘bells and whistles, and possibly additional categories down the line.

Greg Robertson, Co-Founder, W&R Studios says, “I get a lot of requests for job postings on Vendor Alley or people wanting recommendations.  I also saw that there was no single place for people to look for jobs in the real estate industry.  Since Vendor Alley gets such diverse readership (vendors, MLS professionals, sales, tech, portal, brokers, agents, franchisees, etc.) I thought it would be a good place to start a job board.”

Posting a job is really simple – employers form to fill out that includes a place for a job descriptions and contact information. It is only $29.95 to post a job for 30 days via PayPal.  They are also thinking about the idea of charging an additional amount to also do a post about it on Vendor Alley.

Greg has requested feedback, so please check it out and feel free to leave a comment below.

Written by Katie Lance, Marketing Manager, Inman News

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It seems like whenever Apple announces the latest and greatest product -  there are always  other companies who see if they can do better. The last couple weeks, there has been a ton of industry buzz about the iPad – what it is and what it isn’t – and specifically, how it could impact Realtors. One of the biggest buzz items has been the lack of flash on the 1st generation iPad.

Just announced yesterday, the JooJoo tablet computer will begin shipping to pre-orders later this month. With all the hype behind the Apple iPad tablet, the timing could be perfect for Fusion Garage to launch the JooJoo as Apple has done the hard part of creating a huge viral buzz for ‘the next great thing.’  The JooJoo is listed for sale at $499 and will include Flash.

Fusion Garage CEO said, “It has a much larger screen, 12.1 inches instead of 9.7 inches. The resolution is 1368 by 768 pixels instead of 1024 by 768. There are an extra 300 pixels of length, so it’s 16:9 widescreen resolution instead of 4:3. And the Web browsing experience is even better than the iPad, because of the size of the screen.”

One thing to note – the JooJoo won’t have an app store.

Is Steve Jobs worried? Probably not

What do you think? Leave your comments here!

Written by: Katie Lance, Marketing Manager, Inman News

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The rest is here:
Competition for iPad? Meet JooJoo: the iPad alternative with Flash

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This was my first time being “behind the scenes” with Inman News at Real Estate Connect NYC.  Having worked directly with agents and brokers prior to coming to Inman, this time at Connect I listened with a new set of eyes.

I kept thinking, “If I was a Realtor, what would be my big take-away from Connect?”

At opening session, Brad Inman talked about 2 things that caught my attention:
1.    The world is changing – real time search, location, news, comments, reviews, auctions and collaboration, and of course real estate.
2.    In this age of “digital addiction” take time to “look up” and connect with people face to face.

So taking those two things into consideration, if I was a Realtor – here would be the 2 big things I would implement ASAP into my business:

1.    Mobile technology. If I was a Realtor I would make sure that I had a mobile strategy in place. In his opening message, Brad Inman, Publisher, Inman News said, “One of the biggest shifts we are seeing is the increase in real time data.” Tools like mobile applications, Twitter and Facebook, are impacting how quickly information is distributed. Inman predicts that one of the big trends in 2010 will be mobile apps that are able to filter and organize this data. Real time search, real time location, real time agent feedback, and real time real estate listing information will be major trends we will see in 2010. “Those agents that adopt technology will close more transactions because they will be more efficient,” say Inman.

If I were a Realtor I would make sure I looked at things like:

• Does my brokerage have a mobile app? What about my MLS?
• Is it worth me investing in my own mobile app?  iSites, a new service launching today, allows you to take your website’s RSS feed and data and quickly transform it into a full-fledged iPhone app. It was created by Genwi, a service that combines aspects of RSS reader, social network and news filter. For just $25, iSites will create a customized iPhone and Android app for you.
• What type of local data can I have right at my fingertips on my mobile phone? Yelp is a great place to start. Foursquare is another great local app that is getting a ton of attention, especially after Dennis Crowley spoke at Connect – and we all had an “a-ha” moment!

Mike Mangino, Owner & President, Elevated Rails talked about some of the key apps to have on your mobile phone to help you do your business better:

• Navigation tool
• Access to your CRM tool
• A simple mortgage calculator app you can use with clients
• Social Media apps: TweetDeck, Tweetie 2 or Hootsuite, Facebook and Linked-In apps
• I’m adding to this list – Wordpress app – a must if your blog is hosted on WP.

2.    Connect with people face to face. One of the biggest challenges Realtors face is meeting new potential clients face-to-face. Now is the time to ‘look up!’

Scott Heiferman, co-founder and CEO of meetup.com was one of the final keynote speakers at Connect and talked about the power of connecting with people live and face to face. People are creating their own self organized groups.

There are 5.7 million Meetup.com members in nearly 59,000 local groups in more than 11,000 cities, according to the company’s site.

Agents can not only join a meetup for local real estate professionals, but they can connect with local real estate buyers groups and sponsor non-real-estate-related groups.

I love this concept – especially for an agent trying to break into a new market niche or community, or just for an agent trying to expand their sphere of influence, this is the perfect opportunity for them.

The message is: be the catalyst for community in your business – online and offline in 2010.

Stay tuned for more about Connect. Inman News will be publishing a comprehensive report next week. Also check out inman.com this week – videos are available for Inman Premium Members. Not a member? Sign up by this Friday, January 22nd and get a special rate of only $99 (reg. price $149)

Written by: Katie Lance, Marketing Manager, Inman News

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Greetings FOREM readers!

I am really excited to be a featured writer on FOREM’s blog. I have been a reader and admirer of this blog for some time and am thrilled with the opportunity to contribute!  It is an honor to write along side Joel Burslem. I am equally as excited about my new position as marketing manager with Inman News. I look forward to bringing a fresh and new perspective to our readers and fans!

To read more about me click here!

So for my 1st blog post, I am going to talk about one of my favorite subjects – Google.

Let’s face it, we are living in a Google world. But, as you all know Google has become so much more than just a search engine.

There are tons of experiments going on with Google – but I thought I’d take this opportunity to give you the 3 latest (and in my opinion most exciting) things happening with Google that will impact you and your business.

1. Google Living Stories – This looks like it could be the next “big thing” for Google and potentially down the line for real estate. Google Living Stories takes newspaper reading to the next level.

Newspapers?  Yes. Stick with me here. This is where it gets good.

It’s not surprising to anyone that the newspaper industry is dying but breaking news and the hunger for news continues to grow at an exponential rate.

Google Living Stories is in beta form right now, and is very “Wikipedia” looking.  So far, Google Living Stories has partnered with The New York Times and The Washington Post. When you go to Google Living Stories and click on a story, you are brought to a page with 1-2 paragraphs of text, photos, graphs, timelines, related links, and related stories.

I love this.

If Living Stories takes off this could be HUGE for the real estate world. Imagine a client searching for “New York Real Estate” – when they click ‘search’ they then may come to a page with listings, photos, neighborhood info, school info, timelines, video, and so much more.

Living Stories still has a ways to come but it has a lot of potential!

News organizations produce a wealth of information that we all value; access to this information should be as great as the online medium allows.

2. Google Chrome – This free web browser is literally taking the web world by storm. Just 2 days ago, at the Googelplex in Mountain View, over 500 new Google Chrome Extensions were unveiled.

Why Chrome? Speed, simplicity and style – but the best part is the speed. It is lightening fast! Already  have Chrome? Check out these experiments from Google to play around with! Also announced today on Google’s blog is the launch of Mac and Linux extensions for Chrome.

3 . Google Goggles – Take a picture of a book, a store, a landmark and that picture translates into a search for that object. It is still in its infancy and only available on the Android (but the rumor is that it will available soon on Google Chrome) but think about the possibilities for real estate search. What if this worked with homes on the market? You could snap a photo and instantly see how long it had been on the market, details about the home, listing agent, virtual tours, and more.  I think there are lots of possibilities for this – plus I love the “cool” factor.

What’s next for Google? Stay tuned – the possibilities are wide open!

Posted by Katie Lance, Marketing Manager, Inman News

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Top 3 Latest & Greatest Products from Google

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From the Redfin Corporate Blog:

Big news! Redfin just announced a $10-million round of financing led by Greylock Partners’ James Slavet and his colleague David Thacker. Redfin’s group of existing investors — Madrona Venture Group, Vulcan Capital, DFJ, The Hillman Company — also pitched in on the round.

This new round of financing brings the total investment in the Seattle-based brokerage to just north of $30 Million. Greylock joins Madrona Venture Group, Draper Fisher Jurvertson, Vulcan Capital and the Hillman Company as investors in the firm.

Some key metrics released by Redfin in their blog post:

# Revenue exceeded a $20 million yearly run-rate and Redfin generated its first profits
# Redfin shipped the highest-rated iPhone application for real estate
# Site visits increased more than 200%
# Total dollar-value of Redfin transactions since inception exceeded $2 billion
# Redfin customer satisfaction remained at 97%

This news, coupled with the announcement that Realogy is in the black for Q3 surely means that things are starting to look up in the real estate space.

Congrats to all the Redfin crew.

More at Techcrunch.

Photo by aresauburn™

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Dothomes.com is for sale.

Google PR 4. Yours for the right price.

Dothomes was one of a number of overseas property portal sites that tried in the last few years to make their way on to US shores. Turns out playing in the US market is much more complicated than they thought.

Much ballyhooed at the time (see DotHomes is in the Running), Dothomes was a product of BytePlay Ltd, which also had a presence in the UK and South Africa – no word if those sister sites will stay active though.

The reason for the sale? From the founder directly, “real estate was never our cup of tea…”

So the company is changing their strategy to provide “enterprise data acquisition solutions in UK.” The sale of Dothomes will be conducted by private auction and will conclude October 1st. I’ve asked for a link to the auction site, and will post here as soon as I can.

Globrix, the News Corp backed site, is the only overseas portal that I’ve heard is still pondering a US based entry. News of Dothomes’ retreat may make them a little more wary however.

Photo courtesy of wizardofthefiretopmountain

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Wanna buy a web site?

Wanna buy a web site?

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The eyes of the real estate industry will be on California again as Inman News’ annual Real Estate Connect conference kicks off this week in San Francisco.

Having been involved planning Connect conferences for the last couple of years, I can honestly say the Inman News team has really pulled off an amazing schedule of events this time around. There’s a ton of great speakers and sessions this time around that will really make a trip to San Francisco worthwhile.

Here’s a few highlights:

Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman and Zappos COO Alfred Lin are going to keynote at Connect!

Also who could forget ReBarCamp – at Trulia’s HQ tomorrow!

Parties! Vendor Alley has all the deets.

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend this summer’s Connect – but I will definitely be following the goings-on online. Should be a great conference and there’s still time to register.

And hey, if you’re attending Connect – let me know how it’s going in the comments below!

Full disclosure: The Future of Real Estate Marketing is part of Inman News. Inman News also organizes the Real Estate Connect conference.

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Real Estate Connect Kicks Off this Week!

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Well, at least in the eyes of these WSJ film producers it is, who are releasing a new web video series about the tumultuous period at the end of 2008.

Most of the info in the video probably won’t be news to many of this blog’s readers, but they did a nice job summing up all the events that led to the crash last year. (Also make sure you check out Michael Lewis’ fantastic piece in Portfolio that covered much of the same ground.)

I know this blog usually focuses on the important stuff – like Twitter – but I thought it was a great video and thought I’d share. Now back to our regular programming.

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Originally posted here:
Wall St. Bust Now History

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In my post New Firefox Brings Location to the Browser, I asked the following question around the new browser’s location awareness capability.

So the race is on – which will be the first site to implement this feature? Any bets?

Well today, we have a winner. That was fast.

The blue circle has come to your desktop with Google Maps. If you’ve use the Maps app on your iPhone you’ll know what I’m talking about.

When you visit Google Maps with a supported web browser, you’ll see a new My Location button in the top left corner of the map. Simply click the button to center the map to your approximate location. If your location can be determined accurately enough, it’s shown with a blue circle, just like on Google Maps for Mobile. Click the button again to remove the blue circle, or to re-center the map after you’ve moved it away.

Combine this feature with the new embedded real estate searches in Maps (see Google Gets Serious about Real Estate Search) and you’re starting to see the foundation of a really slick application.

Something that might live in the new Google Chrome OS perhaps?

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Continued here:
Google Maps Wins!

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Realogy brand Better Homes and Gardens launched its revamped web site. Lots of new content, including a revamped video section and brand new video platform (provided by Brightcove). All very cool and it looks great.

So while visiting the new site it also gave me a chance to have another look at BHG’s search tool, which I hadn’t played with for a while.

I can definitely say that it has one of the nicest user interfaces of any major real estate brand web site and rivals (even exceeds) many of the third party search sites. I have to agree with Greg at Vendor Alley who writes “[it is] simply gorgeous, and very intuitive.”

It has some really nice subtle touches – like filtering by the age of the home. And I loved how the search results are grouped in to price brackets. Also geeks like me are going to love you can subscribe to an RSS feed of your search results.

It all shows me that they really spent some time thinking through how a real estate consumer will perform a search and how they want to get the data returned.

Problem is, as gorgeous as the site is… it doesn’t seem to work.

Just like Greg – I was surprised how few listings it returned in my neighborhood (zip code 97219). Only 29 listings on BHG versus 460 on Realtor.com and 466 on a local broker’s website.

Weird.

Another beef is that it seems totally borked in Safari 4.0.

I could not get the site to do any kind of search on my Mac. Clicking around on the buttons or drop-downs did absolutely nothing. This forced me to fire up my backup browser Firefox, which also gave me some weird display errors in FF 3.5.

Granted these are both very new versions of each browser, so it’s not surprising to find these kind of hiccups.

I hope these two errors are simply launch day bumps. I know how hard it is to come out of the gates with something that works with every machine, in every instance – it can be a truly Herculean task.

But I hope these kinks get ironed out quickly. It’d be a shame to spoil such a great experience with small little bugs like these.

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BHG Gives Great Search but Broken Results?

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It’s been a while since we’ve heard anything coming out of the Googleplex around its moves in the real estate space.

And now, we wait no longer. On the Google LatLong blog today, Google has announced that they have rolled out vast improvements in the way that they handled real estate searches in their index.

They have also rolled out brand new real estate specific landing page at maps.google.com/realestate.

We want to keep making it easier for people find the real estate information they’re looking for and have it returned to them in a useful way. So, from today, if you enter a query like san francisco real estate on Google Maps, you’ll see that we make it easy for you to see all your results on a map with a one-box that will take you to real estate listings. Previously, you had to specify “real estate” from the search options menu, but now we’re making it easier to find available listings.

This move should come as no surprise to anyone following this space. Real estate search tools like Zillow and Trulia are seeing significant traffic growth and Google will only stay on the sidelines so long once they see someone else starting to monetize search results.

They also seem to have borrowed some of the features that made some of their competitors like Estately, so compelling.

You’ll notice that we’ve made some other enhancements that will improve your real estate searching experience. We’ve added lots of markers that will show not only the ten most relevant listings with pins on the map, but also show a small circle on every other listing in that area using the search results layer, so you can get a really good idea of the distribution of properties for sale. You can click on each marker and each small circle to get more detailed information about the property.

This feature means you can now conduct a real estate search around a specific neighborhood, or see at a glance all the properties close to a BART stop. You can also pan the map to another area entirely to see listings there if you decide that another part of town is more your speed.

Google has silently been collecting broker feeds for the last couple of years (pulling them in to their Google Base database). And so like many of its counterparts it has a reasonably deep market coverage, but it does depend on what part of the country you’re searching.

Right now Google is only deploying these searches into its Maps results, so they are relatively confined. But I wonder how long before they display them in their Web results too (much like they do with their Local Business results – at the top of the organic results). If that’s the case, here’s where we may see the Mountain View giant start to siphon off traffic.

Time will tell, but the game’s about to get interesting.

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Google Gets Serious About Real Estate Search

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Location awareness is one of the killer features in the new iPhone. Especially in real estate apps, like Zillow’s app, which recently broke ½ million downloads.

We all know the old axiom with property, right? Location, location, location.

Now that can be translated to your desktop, in addition to your phone. The new version of Firefox (3.5) has added location awareness as one of the new features in this release. From their website:

Now Firefox can tell websites where you’re located so you can find info that’s more relevant and more useful (for example, getting directions or finding restaurants near you). It’s all optional – Firefox doesn’t share your location without your permission – and is done with the utmost respect for your privacy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The is potentially huge for online real estate sites, which in the near future could query their visitors, ask for their location and return the most relevant results quickly and seamlessly to their desktop.

Granted if you are searching from home, you (hopefully) already know where you are. But if you were house hunting in a city in an unfamiliar State or pulling out a 3G-enabled netbook in a coffee shop on a Sunday morning open house tour, this could be a killer feature.

So the race is on – which will be the first site to implement this feature? Any bets?

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New Firefox Brings Location to the Browser

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Have you got your ticket for Real Estate Connect San Francisco 2009 yet? Only one more day till the price goes up!

This will be the fifth Connect conference that I’ve been been part of and I’m proud of having been able to contribute to the program over the years.

But more importantly, Connect is something that I personally look forward to attending every summer. It’s a great place to meet up with all my friends in the industry and catch up; but I also get a ton out the conversations that spin out of the conference.

Here are 3 things that I’m personally really stoked about seeing this summer’s Connect:

• The Keynote address by Zappos’ COO Alfred Lin;
• The revival of the ConnectTech Workshop;
• Connect Create – The first-ever online real estate developers challenge. 72 hours to build a killer real estate app.

I’m also speaking this year again on a panel called How the Amazon Kindle Will Change Your Business
on Thursday, August 6 at 2:00 pm. So I hope to see you there!

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Real Estate Connect registration deadline tomorrow

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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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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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