Real Estate News

In the last few weeks or so, I have noticed an incredible amount of GOOD content coming down the pipeline. Like you, I subscribe to blogs, RSS feeds, Twitter lists, etc. But what has grabbed my attention lately has been my Facebook feed. Anyone who know me, knows that I am a huge fan of having a Facebook Fan Page. I think it is still one of the best ways that a brand, company, or individual can ’speak’ to it’s audience.

So today, I wanted to share with FOREM fans, a ’snippit’ of my Facebook feed and the articles that jumped out to me. You’ll notice that these articles are all across the board – not just real estate. 

When talking to FOREM founder Joel Burslem awhile back – he reminded me of something so powerful and gave me some great advice:  “Read blogs and news sources from outside your industry – we can learn so much by seeing what other successful companies and brands are doing – that aren’t necessarily in real estate.”

Here are the 10 stories I enjoyed from my Facebook feed today – in no particular order:

Starbucks Gets Its Business Brewing Again With Social Media

How the Resort Industry is Using Social Media

VIDEO: Posted by Fans of CALIFORNIA ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS

VIDEO: Facebook is the ‘Ultimate” Viral Video Tool, Ethan Beard

Realtor Mag Marketing Makeover Challenge

RPR revamps MLS licensing agreement

Want More Twitter Followers? Tweetmeme Has A Button For That.

10 Must Have Facebook Plugins For Wordpress

To Tweet or Not to Tweet: Expert Tips about Using Social Media

How to Make Money on Foursquare

Shameless plug: If you’re not following the Inman Fan Page, I encourage you to check it out! Get all the top news headlines delivered right to your Facebook news feed. Plus, be the 1st to know about contest, promos, and more.

So what are your favorite posts from your Facebook feed today? Have a great tip? Leave me a comment here!

Written by: Katie Lance, Marketing Manager, Inman News

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On the iPhone at least. Android and other smartphone platforms have had livestreaming video apps for a while now. But the tide has finally turned in the favor of iPhone users too – as Ustream has finally had its app approved for distribution in iTunes (app store link).

For me, this release culminates three of the biggest technological trends of 2009; Lifestreaming, Location, and Video.

First up – Lifestreaming. Twitter. Facebook. You’ve probably heard of these sites. It’s now easier than ever to instantly share events to a large distributed audience online – what you’re doing. By sharing information via these networks you are building connections and, by extension, reach.

Location. GPS is nearly omniprescent in most modern smartphones. Your devices now know in an instant where you are in the world. Apps like Google Latitude, Foursquare and my new fav – Gowalla, all exist because they know where you are. So too do augmented reality apps like Layar (see Layar Technology Now Available for iPhone). Location awareness is a true technological paradigm shift.

And finally video. I’ve been on this soapbox long enough. But the web is rapidly becoming about video and video content — witness Comcast’s bid to acquire NBC/Universal; a traditional “pipe” getting into the video content game. Or U2’s massive live concert on Youtube that generated over 10 million streams across 7 continents.

So what does all this mean? The Ustream app has magnificent repercussions for citizen journalism, family ties and yes, even real estate (think of working with a relo client remotely to show them properties, for example). The power to broadcast live, each of us from the palms of our hands, will certainly change the way some of us communicate.

Time to go fire up my phone.

You’ll be able to find me here. Live.

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Coldwell Banker introduced a fresh take on real estate search today with the launch of its new web site at beta.coldwellbanker.com. Besides a tarted-up user interface, the new site offers a couple of intriguing new ideas that I think push the innovation needle in the right direction.

The first of which is the new site now knows where you live. It uses your IP address to figure out where you are searching from and automatically offers up properties from that area. IP address detection itself isn’t particularly new, but I like that the team behind the site are thinking of ways that it can be used to help streamline the real estate search process for consumers. What I’d really love to see however, is for this idea to be taken even one step further by integrating the location awareness built in to the new Firefox browser (see New Firefox Brings Location to the Browser).

Most notable however is CB’s new Bluescape search. Here’s their description from the press release

…allows consumers to give a ‘thumbs up’ or a ‘thumbs down’ to various images that are displayed – similar to how popular music sites learn users’ preferences based on how they rate different songs. After rating various photos, consumers can then submit a query and the BlueScape technology will identify homes that might be a fit. Developed to help consumers actively looking to purchase a home as well as those still in the “dreaming phase,” this visually driven approach to search is new to the real estate category.

The tool works exactly as described. You’re presented a series of seemingly random “lifestyle” and real estate related photos; photos of mountains, pools, different styles of homes etc. You give each photo a thumbs up or thumbs down rating and after a period of time you can ask Bluescape to return your results.

The process is actually kind of fun (although the music got a little annoying after a while). Presumably, the more photos you rate the more accurate your results are. But it would be nice if the site gave you some indication of how many images a user needs to rate before good results are returned. Personally I just kept clicking until I couldn’t take the music anymore.

The results Bluescape returned were definitely intriguing – and at a national level the results were fairly close to the images I’d flagged. When I filtered the results to my local area however, things got a little rougher. For some reason, Bluescape recommended I live in a strip mall. Hardly what I’d call my “dream” home.

I’m not sure this is a problem with the algorithm behind the suggestion engine or if it was just my taste in photos. Very well could be the latter.

In any case, despite a few little glitches like this (and the fact the site doesn’t play nice with Safari web browser), it’s great to see a brand like Coldwell Banker thinking creatively and outside the box when it comes to real estate search.

The goal for any real estate brokerage in the coming months is going to be how to differentiate your real estate search site from the sea of Google Maps and pushpin clones that exist out there. Finding your own unique take, or angle, on search while staying true to your brand will be the most challenging, and rewarding task ahead.

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New York-based broker Corcoran Group has launched a new iPhone application to help real estate consumers connect with properties.

The app is very well executed and joins StreetEasy and Redfin as among my favorite real estate apps.

Click here to view the embedded video.

To promote the new app, they commissioned Swedish artist Kari Modin to illustrate the key features of app. The ads will run in media outlets, online and on phone kiosks throughout the city.

The images are striking and I think it’s an important takeaway here; while real estate search apps are a hot ticket item right now — and I would suggest that any decent sized brokerage should be seriously evaluating their mobile strategy for 2010 — simply building and releasing an app isn’t enough.

It needs to be fully baked into to your overall marketing plan and supported through a well-imagined and targeted advertising campaign, which Corcoran has done.

There’s a land rush going on right now for screen space on smart phones and the window of opportunity for any broker to stake a claim will likely be short-lived. A few years from now and there will be likely dozens of “me-too” apps in any given market. Now’s the time to strike.

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Great news. The deadline for early bird registration for next year’s Real Estate Connect conference in New York has been extended for another week.

Plus if you register use the coupon code FOREM and you’ll save an extra $100.

Connect is by far the leading technology conference in Real Estate. There’s always a fantastic line-up of speakers… and next year is no different. Just take a look at the list of some of the folks who will be speaking there.

Dennis Crowley
Co-Founder, Foursquare

Jason Fried
President, 37 Signals

Saul Hansell
Tech Reporter, The New York Times

Max Ventilla
Zoo Director, Aardvark

Chris Pearson
Founder, Personified & DIYThemes

Vanessa Fox
Entrepreneur, Ignition Partners

If you’re serious about real estate technology and you’ve never been to a Connect conference – you don’t know what you’ve been missing. I’ve had the honor of being involved in many of these conferences and I’m hoping I can make it out to New York in January.

Full deets - Inman News Real Estate Connect runs January 13 – 15, 2010 at the Marriott Marquis Times Square in New York. You can check out the entire program here.

Full Disclosure: Real Estate Connect is produced by Inman News, which owns the Future of Real Estate Marketing blog.

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$100 off Registration for Real Estate Connect

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I was getting on a plane this morning so I was only able to tweet this news.

Brian Boero at 1000Watt Consulting sums it up best.

Now, today, search engine land reports that Google has taken this one step further to include a unique page for every listing that includes photos, a map (including Street View) property details, directions, transit information and more. It’s a listing detail page, basically.

I wrote back in July that “the game’s about to get interesting” (see Google Gets Serious about Real Estate Search). Today, with the launch of Place Pages for real estate, it just did.

It’s live right now in Australia. So we’ll wait and see when and if it gets announced State-side. But if I were Move or Trulia or any of the other property search portals worldwide, I’d be nervously crossing my fingers this stays in the southern hemisphere.

Read more about it at search engine land.

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Google Muscles into Real Estate Listings

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Altos Research has released four new WordPress Plugins that make it dead simple to go deep in to the numbers and create data rich local market blogs.

Altos is among many real estate data providers out there, but is unique in that many of its core products cater to individual Realtors rather than large institutional or corporate clients.

These new plugins allow subscribers to easily embed Altos charts on new posts or pages on their blogs through a very easy interface. The upshot to all this?

It makes it dead simple to create new web properties dedicated to answering real estate consumers’ biggest question right now… “How’s the Market?” – Market blogs are on the rise.

LoCo Market Stats is an Altos-powered blog that is doing just that. Realtor Heather Elias is using the charts to illustrate a week-by-week snapshot on the Loudoun County Virginia real estate market.

Realtor Eric Stegemann at stlhomedata.com is taking a slightly different tack – and using one of the plugin’s most powerful features; which is the ability to create static pages per city or zip-code and then have the data flow in to each page dynamically – like this one he created for Valley Park, Missouri. This means that, unlike the static charts, each time the page is reloaded, the data is refreshed.

Call it the fire-and-forget method to building out market blog.

Real Estate 2.0 is probably best characterized by the explosive growth of social media that allowed Realtors to begin to publish real estate related content to web. I believe the next phase in this phenomenon will be tools that allow individual brokers and agents to begin to expose, publish and interpret the data that drive local markets. This is the premise underlying ventures like the RPR (see NAR Leaps into the Fray — In a Big Way) and what every MLS executive in the country should be thinking about right now.

The winners in this game will be the ones that blow open the doors to the deepest, richest data but, more importantly, make the it easiest, cheapest and most intuitive for the masses to share.

With this release, Altos stands at the head of the pack. At least for now.

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Data Sharing and The Rise of the Market Blog

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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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NeighborCity is an real estate search site that operates in 20 markets across the country. Like Estately and a handful of others, NeighborCity is also a brokerage and as a result, gets access to the MLS and is able to display all the active listings in those markets.

But NeighborCity is taking it one step further. It’s also displaying all the active agents in those markets and suggesting them alongside any searches done on the site. Right now it has profiles built for over 45,000 agents.

The premise is pretty simple, really; say I’m searching for a $400K single family home in the 97219 ZIP of Portland, Oregon – in addition to all the property listings that meet my criteria, NeighborCity is also going to suggest the best agent for my business. In this example, it says it is Dave Hrabal of Windermere.

They’re calling the service AgentMatch and it uses a proprietary algorithm to rank agents based on their relevance to the user’s search criteria – based on variables like price range, property type, neighborhood and the agents’ past performance.

If they’re interested in seeing the home, the buyer can choose to contact any of the suggested agents and the agent can respond to the inquiry with additional details on their commission structure and/or their individual specialties. Consumers get to stay anonymous until they’ve chosen an agent to work with.

Agents can also claim their profiles to provide more information to prospective clients. Presumably, there is some sort of referral fee paid out for any clients that come through the site.

We’ve seen agent matching sites before (Incredible Agents and Homethinking spring to mind) but this is the first site that I’ve seen that marries agent discovery so close to the property search touchpoint. It’s rather like the recommended items on Amazon.com – and I kind of liked the experience.

While it’s bound to be controversial (as any kind of computer generated valuation generally is) – what I liked about AgentMatch was at least the promise of editorial neutrality. Unlike Trulia or Zillow’s pay-to-play advertising model, which as a consumer I’d typically disregard. In theory, the algorithm should surface the best agent for my needs.

What I would like to see however, is greater detail and transparency on how the AgentMatch suggestion is generated. Currently – there’s really no explanation provided as to why the agents that are presented are suggested. And that’s the biggest shame really.

No sense telling me the who without telling me the why.

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NeighborCity Serves Up Recommended Agents

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Online real estate video host Wellcomehost released its first annual report on the use of video in real estate marketing.

Significantly, the company found that the use of video is up 95% in the first half of 2009 versus the first half of 2008.

Breakouts like Realtor Ian Watt (see Video Isn’t Just About Your Listings) set the bar for the creative use of video and also seemed to have kick-started a whole generation of car-mounted video blog posts.

But it’s not only the little guys getting in on the fun; big brands like Corcoran Group are embracing video too.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What I found particularly interesting in the report however, was the breakdown of the how real estate professionals are using video. Marketing listings comes in at the top of the list 30 per cent; showcasing local areas and professional introductions round out the top three but oddly, demonstrating market knowledge comes in dead last.

Seems to me, if done properly, market intelligence is the biggest opportunity to push video in a new interesting direction. Imagine an animated Common Craft style monthly video market report, for example…

Here’s a few more slides from the full report.

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Real Estate Video Use Rises in 2009

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The Realtors Property Resouce (RPR) is likely the most important technology story of the last few years. And it will probably be the most closely watched story for the next couple of years too.

What is the the RPR? Brian Boero from 1000Watt Blog sums it up nicely.

The NAR has taken over certain technology assets of Cyberhomes from LPS (formerly known as FNRES) in order to bring its RPR (Realtors Property Resource) project, as well as its consumer-facing play, HouseLogic, to market. To do this, they have created Realtors Property Resource, LLC – a wholly owned subsidiary of the NAR.

This is huge. A national database of over 140 million property records – eventually enhanced by property status (on or off market) data from MLSes around the country. A suite of tools built to allow Realtors to access and share this data with their clients. Even a stab at knocking off those pesky computer-generated Zestimates with a new RVM or “Realtor Valuation Model”.

This is huge. Rob Hahn,  calls it a “Coming Civil War” and a shot across the bow at the local MLSes — and it’s certainly is a bold move.

But ultimately RPR is an attempt (last-ditch?) for NAR to stay relevant to its membership – since the savviest of them have long been questioning the need for a national association.

Consumers can find reams of property data on any number of real estate search sites these days. Brokers and agents have a number of low-cost tools at their disposal to build a rich and compelling online experience. And most importantly these two groups can now connect in much more meaningful ways through social media.

As Jim Duncan, writing on Agent Genius, succinctly put it; “NAR recognized the need to be competitive“.

But frankly, I will be happily surprised, if the NAR/RPR can out innovate the innovators. While they have assembled quite a team behind the project, I worry that a monolithic enterprise like this will ultimately be doomed by legislative paralysis.

For NAR/RPR to truly take a run displacing the current status quo – they need to adopt the mindset of their free-market competitors. Do something really disruptive. Here’s a few ideas:

1. “Powered by NAR” – Build an API that will let engineers across the country to piggyback off of this data mine and build a thousand variations of the HouseLogic interface. Ask only for reciprocal link and acknowledgment of the source.
2. Offer a challenge like the Netflix Prize – A $1 million prize for the team that can take the base RVM algorithm and improve it.
3. Go open source – take a subset of the Cyberhomes code and release it to the world under a GNU General Public License – let the developers go wild and help improve the experience for all.

RPR is an important first step for NAR to take – but I’d like to see them go even further.

It’s time for a really big leap to restore the faith.

Update: You can now watch the introductory webinar in its entirety.

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Terabitz has been very quiet lately.

A refresher for those of you might not have heard of the company – they launched in 2007 to much fanfare (see Terabitz Gives You Loads of Data) — as a sort of “Netvibes for real estate” — but the company made hard tack to starboard in the years since and have reinvented themselves as a platform for real estate brokerages.

It’s a crowded marketplace in that space, but certainly one that is always ripe for innovation. This week they’ve pulled the up the curtain on what they’ve been up too, with a new release of their platform.

It includes a number of back-end features that build off their data aggregation chops to allow brokers to create content rich web sites. From their press release:

Neighborhood and Community pages featuring business reviews, photos and school reports (via implementation of the Yelp, Flickr, and Education.com APIs) as well as hyperlocal news content (via implementation of Yahoo Pipes).

Real estate market reports featuring data and trends derived from live MLS (Multiple Listing Service) data and displayed in a way the average user can understand at a glance. Market reports are provided at the neighborhood and community level, which makes them far more useful than typical city or county-level views.

Property search that better merchandizes listings through a “gallery” view that enables the user to view large photos in the search results display.

Explore the Neighborhood™, a map-based tool that enables users to view amenities in the area of their home search – businesses, places of worship, recreational facilities and more – in order to better understand what it is like to live in a place.

Terabitz One-to-One™, a prospecting tool that enables agents to create dedicated, automatically updating Websites for homeowners that display recent sales, new listings and a dynamic home value estimate.

The Terabitz platform is modeled on the relaunch of Chicago brokerage @properties‘ web site. @properties is a company that’s proved its willing to invest in potentially game-changing ideas (see Real Estate Search Stores – Coming Soon?) so it seems like a natural fit.

The redesign is clean, simple and well executed. But I’m not a fan of having to register in order to search for a home — so I didn’t get a chance to test out the search tool. And it was doubly annoying that every listing I clicked on I had to create an account… how about a couple freebies guys?

Nevertheless, I did like Terabitz platform’s neighborhood and community pages (like this one for Lincoln Park, for example) which were a nice collection of a series of different data sources. My only suggestion would be to add more media; more photos (the Flickr stream pulls in some pretty random stuff) – professionally produced neighborhood videos would be a fantastic addition to those pages too.

In any case, it seems this release is why we hadn’t heard much from Terabitz recently. It turns out they’ve had their heads down coding.

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Terabitz Launches New Web Platform for Brokers

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Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee) really needs no introduction. Web 2.0 guru, brilliant marketer and unabashed self-promoting social media superstar, he is on a mission to help you take advantage of the all the latest web technology to further your goals and monetize your passions.

I first met Gary at his keynote at Real Estate Connect in New York where I had the opportunity to corner him for an video interview (see Leverage the power of social media).

Gary’s book Crush It has been tearing up the best-seller lists and I’m stoked to announce that as of today, Crush it is available as a vook.

I could write a lengthy blog post about the app – but Gary sums it best…

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Crush It vook app contains 18 never-before-seen videos and the full content of the book. It is available for immediate purchase on iTunes (App store download) and on the Web.

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Crush It the Vook Now Available

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AgentPress is a brand new Wordpress theme released today, designed specifically for use by the real estate industry. The theme is a collaboration between Wordpress designers StudioPress and the real estate blog MyTechOpinion.com.

You can see a live demo here.

It’s a sharp looking design that really pushes Wordpress beyond its blogging basics. For just shy of a hundred bones (a pretty small investment really) you get a great looking web site with a lot of baked in functionality.

But more than just a good looking site — with a choice of four color schemes — you get the benefit of Wordpress’ fantastic SEO optimization, an integrated blog and all the great plugins and hacks available to Wordpress site owners.

I particularly liked the way Agentpress gives you customizable listing templates for individual properties which incorporate some nice design elements like the Lightbox-esque popups and embedded Google Maps. Plus, because each listing is stored as a separate post in the Wordpress database, Agentpress gives you a modest property search tool right off the home page to index your individual listings/posts.

Marry these property pages with a vanity URL and you’ve got yourself a pretty snazzy single-property website.

After a bit of a lull, there’s been a slew of real estate-related activity on Wordpress recently, starting with the Local Market Explorer plugin released by Zillow (see New Local Market Explorer plugin for Wordpress).

Now, with premium theme options like Agentpress (the iReal Estate Theme is another premium theme available for purchase) and an embeddable IDX solutions like that from Diverse Solutions, you’ve got the makings of pretty kick-ass website – right off the shelf.

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Agentpress Launches Wordpress Themes for Real Estate

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It’s pretty epic.

Seriously. I love the honesty. The attitude. And the tongue in cheek humor puts it over the top.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Besides, any guy who can take a crescent wrench to the face 5 times will win my business ever time.

Looking for a mobile home? Check out Cullman Liquidation.

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Best. Real Estate. Ad. Ever

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Best. Real Estate. Ad. Ever

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