Real Estate Blog

Century 21 released the results of a recent market research study today (see Inman News) that shows that they are “the best-known name in the business”.

Full results below:

“Please tell me which real estate agencies you have ever seen or heard of?”

1. CENTURY 21: 97%
2. RE/MAX: 93%
3. Coldwell Banker: 89%
4. Prudential: 75%
5. ERA: 51%
6. GMAC: 38%
7. Keller Williams: 33%
8. Weichert : 18%
9. Realty Executives: 14%

The results came from the 2008 Ad Tracking Study, conducted between March and August, 2008 by Millward Brown, a market research organization. The survey was based on 875 online interviews.

Certainly, C21 has been one of the more aggressive marketers despite a down market. Their ‘Path Home’ ad has been all over the airwaves this year, so it’s not surprising to see them at the top of this list.

Click here to view the embedded video.

century 21, real estate marketing

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Century 21 Most Recognized Real Estate Brand

My employer Inman News has embarked on a major editorial project over the next few months focusing on the future of the real estate industry.

I’d love to hear from FOREM readers what they think that might look like. You’ll score a pass to the upcoming Real Estate Connect conference in New York for your efforts.

We are also calling for essays that focus the future of real estate. Write no more than 400 words on how to reinvent the real estate industry and revive the housing market. Pick a category — brokers, agents, technology, title or lending — or discuss the entire industry. Our editorial team will review the essays, publish many of them, and hand out a $500 check to the author of the best essay. Also, the authors of all essays published in full will get a free pass (valid for new registrations only) to the upcoming Real Estate Connect conference. Send your essays to future@inman.com by Dec. 31, 2008.

Read more on reinventing the real estate industry.

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The Future of Real Estate

A big thanks to Real Pro Systems for supporting FOREM this month.

Real Pro specializes in web sites and marketing solutions for the real estate industry and have a pretty comprehensive internet marketing solution for Realtors. Their Gold3 package includes a web site, blog and all kinds of integrated lead cultivation and drip marketing tools designed by agents for agents.

And the best thing is they have graciously set up an exclusive offer for FOREM readers this month…

If your looking to retire your old website, you can trade it in today and get up to a $400 credit towards a new set up from Real Pro Systems. Add any of the add-ons and you’ll get an additional $100 off. Not a bad deal.

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Sponsor Shout Out: Real Pro Systems

One of my favorite online real estate search tools, Estately expanded in to two new markets today; Greater Chicago and Long Island, New York. This marks the first markets outside of the West Coast for the Seattle based search site — Estately previously only served Washington, Oregon and California.

This means Estately, which pulls all of its listings from its relationships with the local MLSes, now has over 330,000 homes for sale on its site.

Another welcome feature in this latest release is the addition of past home sales information to every listing. You’ll now be able to see the entire sales history on any listed home to see if has recently changed hands and if so, for how much. This new feature is powered through a relationship with Cyberhomes.

With these two new markets, Estately is taking big strides to move beyond being simply a regional player. Even if it still has a long way to go to rival the reach of the big national sites, there’s no question the underdog is starting to lose its puppy teeth.

estately, real estate search, real estate 2.0

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Estately Expands Eastwards

Neighborhood boundaries are a fluid thing. My definition what encompasses my neighborhood (Multnomah Village in Portland) may vary greatly from the person across street.

It’s also one of the Holy Grails to online search. The ability to confine a search to a particular neighborhood. Roost does this particularly well, as does Estately and to a lesser degree Zillow.

Zillow also took the step of creating a set of neighborhood boundaries (over 7000 of them) that they released earlier this year in Shapefile format.

Another effort is slowly taking shape (literally) however. The popular photo-sharing site Flickr is also releasing Shapefiles of neighborhoods, using the data it collects from the geotagged photos in its database to accumulate a collective definition of what makes a neighborhood.

The project, which is in early Alpha, can best be viewed on the mashup site Neighborhood Boundaries. Simply punch in your neighborhood name (or city name) and see how the boundaries are being defined in your neck of the woods.

Again, this is early Alpha, so many markets won’t have much coverage. But the possibility of user-defined neighborhood boundaries is intriguing to say the least.

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These Are The Photos in Your Neighborhood

Taking a page from the its search portal cousins and perhaps even its cross-town competitor Redfin, the new Windermere web site launched today, with a simple search box up front and center. Simple, slick and straight to the point.

Broker web pages are often cluttered with all kinds of extraneous information; programs on this and that. Windermere cuts right to the chase and puts the power of its IDX driven search tool up front and center. Just what I’m looking for.

Better still, the search experience gets even better once you dive in. Results return speedily are mapped quickly onto a Microsoft Virtual Earth map. Clicking on a individual listing and you get a nice big picture as well as the ability to read the entire property details, view all existing photos and print out a ready-to-roam flyer.

I suspect this is the model for the brokerage web site moving forward. A simple, interactive online destination that supplies the consumer with the complete search experience. If Windermere takes this to the next level and white-labeled this tool for its agents, they’d be on to a winning combination.

Windermere serves the Western US, in Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington state and Wyoming.

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New Face for Windermere

For real estate buyers right now it’s a crazy time. The fear of making the wrong decision can be paralyzing at times, so having access to information is critical.

I thought I’d share some of the tools I’ve been using in my own search.

What’s Happening on the Ground?

Trulia.com

Trulia generates its reports from its internal database of property listings (most of which are pulled from its relationships with real estate brokers). Inventory is admittedly incomplete, but it’ll give you a good sense of the trajectories of the local markets.

Cyberhomes.com

Cyberhomes, on the other hand, gets its data from its records on over
100 million US properties. Their neighborhood overviews are a little slow to load but can give you a overview of what a zip code is doing and see the overall direction of the market.

Get the Big Picture?

Altos Research

Altos reports are real time market intelligence that deep dive in to what’s really going on in your market, right now. As a buyer, you can also get a snapshot of the trends in any given market. Altos founder Mike Simonsen claims their reports lead the Case/Shiller Index by three months.

Foreclosures

Understanding the volume of foreclosures, bank owned properties and auctions that are hitting your is key to gauging where prices might be headed in your local market.

RealtyTrac

The 800lb gorilla in the foreclosure space. RealtyTrac has a fantastic amount of information despite a clunky web site. There is a monthly charge to have access to this data - but it’s well worth it, especially if you’re looking at these opportunities seriously.

ForeclosureRadar.com

California buyers may want to look at ForeclosureRadar, a “professional grade” search tool that tracks all foreclosure activity in the state. Designed mostly for Realtors and investors, it’s a fantastic tool that gives you unparalleled data and analysis. Too bad it’s not available outside of the Golden State, yet.

Bonus - Find Homes on Auction

Also, if you’re interested in getting homes at auction, check out Zetabid.com. Right now they are running auctions in California, Florida and Illinois.

Trulia, Cyberhomes, Altos, RealtyTrac, ForeclosureRadar

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5 Great Sites to Help You Better Understand This Crazy Market

Got a map based real estate site? Vancouver-based lat49 lets you monetize that asset with its geo-targeted advertising network.

It’s pretty simple really, as a publisher you simply sign up to join their network, incorporate their API and then begin earning ad revenue passively. Think of it like Google Adsense for maps.

It raises the possibility for brokerages (many of whom have invested heavily in map-based real estate search tools) to develop an alternative source of revenue and offset some of those costs, by being able to bring advertising directly to their maps.

What would make this offering a real winner, would be the option to offer premium map-based ad space to ancillary service providers, vendors and even local merchants. The key aspect would be to be able to control who and what advertisements would appear on your site.

In addition, Lat49 also give real estate companies (even individual brokers or agents) a unique opportunity to create regionally-based branding campaigns across multiple web properties by embedding ads at a local or even hyperlocal level.

Lat49 gives advertiser several IAB approved sizes including a 728×90 Leaderboard, a 300×250 Medium Rectangle, and a 468×60 Full Banner ad.

Sites currently using this technology include Hotpads in the US and HomeZilla (see Neighborhood Search Comes Back) in Canada.

lat49, real estate marketing, online advertising

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Lat49 Lets You Monetize Your Maps

HouseValues (SOLD), the 10 year-old lead generation company, shed it’s skin this morning and repositioned itself as a marketing and technology solutions company.

The new company is going to be called Market Leader and brings together a number of HouseValues’ recent acquisitions, including RealtyGenerator web site and CRM tool, under a new roof. They also have a minority stake in ActiveRain (see ActiveRain secures $2.75 million from HouseValues).

Along with the rebranding, they also launched two new products; Growth Leader, aimed at helping real estate agents manage their online advertising spending and Team Leader, which will help agents manage their teams.

Market Leader will trade on the NASDAQ until the symbol LEDR and will be featured in the closing-bell ceremony on November 24.

More coverage:

• HouseValues rebrands as Market Leader

market leader, housevalues, real estate marketing

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HouseValues Retools as Market Leader

• Go Big or Go Home
  (tags: enormo properazzi real estate search global web 2.0)

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links for 2008-10-29

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Google just announced you can now use Google Earth on your iPhone. This is huge.

With just a swipe of your finger you can fly from Peoria to Paris to Papua New Guinea, or anywhere in between. It may be small, but it brings all the power of Google Earth to the palm of your hand, including all of the same global imagery and 3D terrain. You can even browse any of our 8 million Panoramio photos or read Wikipedia articles.

With Google Earth for iPhone, you can:
• Tilt your iPhone to adjust your view to see mountainous terrain
• View the Panoramio layer and browse the millions of geo-located photos from around the world
• View geo-located Wikipedia articles
• Use the ‘Location’ feature to fly to your current location
• Search for cities, places and business around the globe with Google Local Search

It’s available today in 18 languages and 22 countries in the iTunes App Store.

This is a radical new way to interact with a virtual world and it blew me away when I loaded it on my iPhone.

Google Earth has always been a fantastic environment, perfect for real estate search (see Navigating a Virtual World). But it was always hampered by the mouse and click mechanics necessary with the desktop version. Pairing it with the iPhone’s amazing touchscreen and gesture recognition capabilities makes perfect sense.

While this initial release only permits certain data sources — Wikipedia and Panaramio, to name a few — imagine being able to import a property search via a KML file or better yet, layer in live neighborhood information, real estate market data or listings from Google Base.

Do that and it’s not too far of a leap to think that the iPhone or iPod touch, combined with the 3D environment presented in Google Earth, could very well become the mobile real estate search mechanism of choice.

You can download Google Earth for your iPhone or iPod touch through the iTunes App Store.

Update: A couple of tips I figured out: Use a two-finger drag up and down to tilt view vertically. Two finger twist rotates the viewing angle.

iphone, google earth, real estate search

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Mobile Real Estate Search Paradigm Just Shifted

From the guys at 1000Watt Consulting.

real estate brokerage, real estate websites, real estate 2.0, real estate

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Top 10 Real Estate Brokerage Web Sites

Globrix, the UK based, News International backed real estate search site announced this week it will be making the move in to the United States in early 2009.

They are following the footsteps of early leader Dothomes, which announced its US expansion in April of this year (see DotHomes is in the Running).

According to the article on GlobalEdge, Globrix expects to bring its free-to-list business model to US Realtors looking to feature properties to overseas buyers and already has (unnamed) US partners in place. The Globrix Blog confirms these plans.

Globrix is currently one of my favorite international property search portals (see Globrix Takes Aim at UK Property Listings), mainly due to its clean interface and super speedy search results. I’m looking forward to seeing whether this move will shake up the relatively static nature of the US search scene.

It also remains to be seen whether US brokers and agents will embrace yet another destination to syndicate their listings to - but the international angle that Globrix brings might very well be enough to push them over the edge.

More coverage:

• Renthusiast: Look out America, here comes Globrix!

Technorati Tags: globrix, real estate search, real estate 2.0, web 2.0

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The British Are Coming (Again)

The real estate application category on the iPhone seems to be filling out. When the upgraded version of the launched in July, Pulawai was the only real estate specific search tool (see 5 Apps Every Real Estate Agent Should Have on Their iPhone).

But that’s now changing and it looks like there is an epic battle brewing for screen space on my phone.

Trulia iPhone application

Trulia’s app is notable because of the prominence they give to open houses on the home screen. I think this is a wise choice, since people will likely be using this app as they are out and about and will want to find out what’s open near them to go have a look.

The search experience was very easy on Trulia’s app - simply pushing the ‘All homes for sale’ button takes you to a list of all the properties near you. (Your definition of “All Homes” may vary).

Searching all homes, it was a bit frustrating because wasn’t immediately obvious how the results we returned - it didn’t seem to be sorted by price or even distance away. Using the Custom Search option does let you get a little more specific on how those results are returned however.

Personally, I would have loved to be able to refine the search from the All Homes results page to weed out the listings that didn’t fit what I was looking for. Unfortunately instead, Trulia makes you go back to the beginning and start over again.

The biggest disappointment with Trulia’s app however are the listing pages themselves. Next to Utopria’s offerings they pale in comparison (see
Utopria Brings Property Listings to iPhone) Only one photo? Also, it’s great that you can show me where the property is on a map, but what does staring at a pin from space really tell me? I want a little more.

StreetEasy Real Estate

StreetEasy doesn’t waste any time. The New York based real estate site just takes you right into the search results as soon as you fire it up. I actually kind of enjoyed this - the less decisions I have to make up front the better. Let me get right to the meat and then let me start carving away.

(Though I have to say, the fact that the top listing it returned on its default search was an $80 million, 4 bedroom Central Park apartment made me feel more than a little bit inadequate.)

Clicking on the Edit Search button lets you refine the results and StreetEasy makes good use of the iPhone UI elements to make the refinement easy and enjoyable - lots of tumblers to spin up and down. Making search fun is one of the things the iPhone can be great at.

On the whole, StreetEasy succeeds where Trulia fails - showing you all the photos associated with a particular listing. Clicking on the thumbnail floats all the images upwards to a gallery like environment you can thumb through. I also loved the fact that the app lets you pull up the details on the building that a particular apartment is in.

Further, StreetEasy makes it really easy to tab between the listing description, the map and the agent’s contact information. Trulia struggles to accomplish this with a slightly clumsy popup menu.

HomeFinder

HomeFinder was created by developer Brandon Alexander (Alexander Mobile) and claims to bring over 4 million listings to the iPhone. Listings are drawn from Google Base, FSBO websites and feeds from several large MLSes and brokerages (not identified).

Compared to the two previous offerings, it’s pretty bare-bones, yet functional. HomeFinder gives you loads of options to filter a search - but it also kept crashing whenever it returned the results. So I’m going to have to withhold judgement on this app until we see a new revision.

So what’s the verdict?

StreetEasy’s iPhone app blows the competition out of the water in terms of ease-of-use, functionality and sheer slickness. Unfortunately it’s only available in New York City.

Trulia’s app looks great, gets off to a good start and then falls flat on its face. Frankly disappointing and hopefully future versions will add some of the missing features.

The others (Puluwai and HomeFinder) well, compared to their commercial competitors, feel unpolished and struggle due to poor data sources.

So for now, there’s no clear winner. Unless you live in New York.

Source:
iPhone Real Estate App Showdown

Simon Baker, former CEO of Australian REA Group, has launched a new web site he’s calling Property Portal Watch. From his blog:

Property Portal Watch will be the one stop shop for all information on property portals around the word. It is designed to provide news, views, rumours, overviews and general information on property portal sites throughout the world. In addition it will provide tips and techniques for those wanting to advertise online. Its first incarnation is as a blog (while i get the proper site built).

Simon helped build REA Group into a truly global real estate search powerhouse that now has operations in 10 countries. It owns 22 websites, eight print publications and its web sites have over 8 million unique visitors each month.

Given that background, I’m sure there will be some great info coming out of there. For anyone who’s interested in watching the Real Estate 2.0 space - make sure you give it a visit and subscribe.

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New International Property Portal Site Launched