Replaced

Nicole sat across the dinner table from us Friday night. She was not her usual positive self. Something happened. I decided to pry.

Replaced

A former actress, Nicole followed her true calling behind the camera. She did film. Music videos. And stills. The latter is, IMO, her best work of all.

Her son came twelve years ago. A daughter, sever years later. So she ditched LA and set up a photographer's studio here on the Central Coast.

Many of her stills adorn the walls of my home. Family portraits. My kids. Wife. Dogs. Taken at different times over the last ten years.

Nicole closed her studio on Friday. 

I assumed the economy took its toll. Nicole believes it goes deeper than that. "Everyone is a photographer today," she said. "They own digital cameras, enhance them with Photoshop (or picnik) and post them on Flickr. The value of a professional is no longer recognized I suppose."

That hit home. Big time. Especially as it relates to real estate.

Maestro

In 2004, I presented twenty-five very far-out predictions in a speech given for a large Realtor association. Slide nine read as follows: In the future you will no longer "own" any listings. A nice 3-D rendering of a product box was placed below the title. Across the top of the box the word "Maestro" was printed in bold. Underneath, it read: Orchestrate the entire process of selling your home - yourself.

Maestro included: 

• A turnkey blog site that featured your home
• A unique URL based on your home's address
• Map mashups with local data 
• A huge photo library and video player
• Direct syndication to every listings site on the planet

Maestro was real estate marketing in a metaphorical box. It provided the homeowner tools to recreate everything an agent does -- the many photos they should be taking, the compelling copy they should be writing and the web distribution they should be executing. 

The premise behind Maestro fed into the notion that in the future, by virtue of handling all of their own marketing, homeowners would retain ownership of their listing and simply hire agents to coordinate the sale -- i.e. show property, hash out paperwork, etc.

The audience booed. "There's more to selling a home than that," they barked. I knew that. Just like there's more to capturing a moment than saying cheese and properly framing your SureShot. The problem was, four years ago, when homes were selling like hotcakes, I wasn't sure the real estate consumer knew that.

And I'm not so sure that the consumer knows any better today.

Nostradavison

Several predictions from my presentation have now come to pass in real estate. And honestly, most of what I predicted seemed inevitable anyway.

A few, however, veered towards absurd.

Consider:

"Holographic Search" that allowed consumers to walk through a listing projected from a computer while sitting in their own kitchen.

"Caravan" was a device agents provided to their buyers. Think listing alerts meets GPS (I got this idea one evening waiting at a busy restaurant that handed out devices to patrons that lit up when your table was ready).

And of course Maestro.

I know they are borderline silly. They were offered to stimulate conversation. 

But then today my inbox received a press release sent from the U.K. announcing the launch of EstateCreate, a self-publishing website built to help consumers list their home and market it everywhere.

Holy shit.

Blinders

You'll think the product is simple. Regard it as a basic template website. With few bells and whistles. Much like most agent and broker websites are now. You may also shuck this as silly, much like some of my predictions, pay it no mind and think to yourself, well... even if a seller uses this, they'll still need to sign their listing over to an agent for full commission.

Blinders. 

Products like EstateCreate are trying to tap into the gaping holes left in the consumer mindset all the dog branding, bad websites, lack of transparency, poor search experiences, misguided marketing and lack of professionalism created and continues to create.

These are the gaping holes that today's real estate brands continue to avoid filling with better information. Higher standards. These are also the voids that real estate innovators are trying fill with solutions offered to real estate folks who continue to shun the idea of spending a few dollars a month for new technology.

If vendors can't sell their innovations to real estate professionals to help the consumer, my guess is they are going to start targeting the consumers themselves in greater numbers, tapping into their motivations to market, buy and sell their homes.  

Think TurboTax.

I hurt for Nicole. Being taken out by the economy is one thing. But being replaced because the marketplace misunderstands your value proposition is something entirely different. I'm showing Nicole how to change that and save her business. 

- Davison
Twitter: 1000wattmarc

Thinking horizontal in our vertical

John Battelle posted this gem the other day. It captures so neatly the challenges and opportunities facing many in online and "traditional" real estate these days.

Consider this point:

"Every customer interaction is marketing. Every partnership is marketing. Every employee is a marketer.

And all your data, well, that's marketing too."

And, further:

"Joining the conversation economy ... means taking your core assets - the data that drives value and knowledge inside your enterprise - and offering it as fuel for the collective intelligence of all your partners - your channel, your vendors, and, ultimately, your customers."

His thinking here is placed in the context of a discussion with Oren Michaels, CEO of Mashery. Mashery provides a managed solution for companies that want to create APIs. APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) allow publishers (e.g. Trulia) to share their data with others.

Lie down

We've been telling broker clients for some time that their conception of marketing must be obliterated if they intend to survive. That means empowering everyone -- including the executive team -- to become part of the "marketing department." The person formerly known as the marketing director needs to become the managing editor -- and work with IT, sales (i.e. agents), and management to coordinate the extraction and broadcasting of data and knowledge into the marketplace.

For MLSs ... well, we've beaten this dead horse to a pulp, but I'll take one more swing: Stop protecting and start broadcasting. With great care of course. And with the goal of putting information to work for broker and agent subscribers. But, man, unlock the value!

Break glass in case of emergency

There's so much inside most real estate organizations: Data, personality, knowledge. But it sits behind glass, that smudgy barrier of plastic marketing - and, frankly, bullshit - that has stood between real estate and its customer for too long.

It's time to break the glass and create a glorious mess.

Get horizontal as Battelle says. Reach outward. Forget about an API is that makes no sense for you. There are a hundred ways to take the larger point and run with it.

-- Brian Boero

Flikr, Skittles, Oodle and other cool developments

Photo sharing site Flikr now allows free users to upload video. As I noted in my "Seeing online real estate" post a couple weeks ago, Flikr is one of many services that will drive a much more visual online real estate experience in the near future. Brokers and online real estate sites of all kinds can easily display location-related images and video via the Flikr API.

Skittles - those chewy little candies - are now being marketed online in manner that is ultra-aggressive in its approach to social media. In fact the boundary between the brand and the "conversation" has been obliterated. Take a look and think about how this sort of thing might be applied to real estate marketing. Risky but not without rewards if executed properly, in my opinion. [via searchblog].

Walkscore, the site that measures the "walkability" of places, including homes, has cut two significant deals in the past couple weeks. Both Zillow and Estately have integrated the Walkscore API. Users on these sites can now view the proximity of listings to various amenities. Walkscore is a non-profit and there's a strong normative dimension to the service (We should use cars less) but it's a compelling (and free) addition to most real estate sites. 

Oodle, the classifieds site, is quietly kicking ass (Yes, I think you can kick ass quietly). They went live today as the classifieds engine on facebook. This follows upon a deal announced last week with AOL and a partnership with Wal-Mart.com inked last year. Their traffic is skyrocketing. And they have a strong real estate category. As the real estate listings aggregators approach parity in terms of volume, I wonder if they will find themselves challenged by a player like Oodle, which can develop content and traffic mass of an entirely different order.

Brokers: Jump on the neighborhood conversation now or surrender it to a media company. That's the message to be taken from the New York Times' announcement that it is entering into the neighborhood blog arena.

-- Brian Boero

Barber poles and real estate

What comes to mind when you see a barber pole?

An old geezer running a blade across a leather strap.
A hot towel, thick foam and a close shave.
Clubman.
Checkerboard floors.
A great place to whack a Mafia Don.

The local barbershop was Americana, right up there with the greasy spoon coffee shop and the Rexall drug store -- endeared by all who frequented them.

But over the decades, the love waned. As new competitors grew into the marketplace, these establishments remained still in their own murky waters of services, anchored to old ways and failing to navigate their brands to the new currents of change.

Over time, despite the full array of services they offered, they drifted from the fabric of our culture, replaced by TRESemme, Paul Mitchell, Fantastic Sams, CVS and Starbucks -- "interlopers."

The older institutions suffered at the hands of their own neglect, compounded by their inability to convey the value they offered, the full services they provided and the personal attention they gave. They believed that being moored to an historic tradition is good enough to insure their place in the future. Or perhaps they believed in nothing and let fear of some unknown guide their complacency.

Barber Poles in Real Estate

There's tons of them spinning around Main Street. Red and blue ribbons of full-service, high-end value, and personal attention all buried under the sands of gloriously ineffective marketing.

Today's broker -- you might be a barbershop. You cut hair better than anyone. You service the customer better than anyone. And what you deliver is uncommon. But you've created ambiguity around yourselves, the skills you posses and the benefits derived from them. And that continues to ring the warning signal. Look how easy it was for Zillow to make the marketplace believe its home-value estimates were more accurate than yours. They marketed your intelligence right under the rug.  

A real estate TRESemme is coming

Believe it. And react as if they have already leased a storefront in your town. In some cases, this is already happening.

Believe that as things get tougher, as money gets tighter, people need what you have but will never find it if you and your agents are sharpening your scissors behind closed doors.

Believe that so much has changed in real estate and in the way consumers interact with it that your message, your brand, your entire marketing campaign is likely dangerously antique.

Believe that starting to change those things today is the only way you'll survive over the course of time.

What Davison Realty Group would do

I'd craft a new credo today. Davison Realty: "Preserving and improving the process of residential real estate."

I would then measure every single thing my firm does, every action my agents take, every bit of copy I write, every piece of technology I own and measure it against the yardstick of that statement, make sure it rings true and build brand value around it by market it with precision and skill as if my life depended on it. 

I'd begin with my Web site. If it does not make finding homes or finding the right agent really easy, I would administer changes immediately and not wait another day. Otherwise, my credo is rendered false and my brand has no meaning.

I would take a hard look at my backend system. Does it have lead management? Does it have lead routing? Does it offer my agents the ability to run comparative market analyses on the fly? Does it allow me to distribute incoming inquiries to my agents via text messages and supply them with the tools to respond immediately and properly rather than with canned nonsense?

I'd take a hard look at my physical space. I would evaluate whether my lease, my expense, my machines, and my cubicles inhibit my ability to fulfill my credo or serve my agents who have no particular credo at all. And if not, I would administer changes immediately. Otherwise, my credo is rendered false and my brand will continue to have no meaning.

I'd take a hard look at my agents. I'd find the ones with no credo or the ones who have a credo yet apply no effort to support it -- like the agent who "goes the extra mile" yet hardly lifts a finger to learn about new technology. I would do whatever is in my power to retrain them. Expose them to agents who are thriving because they live, breath and die by their credo, which just so happens to be aligned with mine. If that fails, they need to be let go. Otherwise, my credo is meaningless and my brand will continue to have no meaning.

I'd take a hard look at my marketing department and the copy they have been pumping out. Have their words conveyed my intentions? Have they oversold them or have they failed to touch upon them? Are they written in language that resonates with my market or has it spoken at them? If the copy has failed, I must administer change immediately and align every word with my intention and distribute those words out to new places -- in new ways -- and do everything to render my credo as truthful. And convey meaning.

Lastly, I will perform a complete investigation of my services. If I have to, I will hire a firm to conduct a study. And perform surveys. And determine if what we offer is understood and experienced by those who have used us in the past or those who may require services in the future. I would do everything I can to discover what people want today from a real estate brokerage. Do they still need the hot lather and shave or do they view that as old fashioned and unimportant? I would consider that info to be my holy brand grail and serve as the basic building blocks of what will become tomorrow and secure my position.

This is what I do right now. Today. Otherwise, all that I am would be defined by a credo that would read: Davison Realty, we are the roulette wheel of services and skills. Come, bring your money. Good Luck!

And while that may be acceptable to many barber pole brands that surround me, it's just not good enough for me going forward.

-Davison

Twitter: 1000wattmarc

Let's call it Zulia

Brian wrote this toward the very end of December 2007. I remember both of us flying down to Los Angeles (each from different destinations), meeting at the airport and grabbing a cab to meet with a client. We were throwing ideas around and before long we realized the cabbie was completely lost. In the few minutes I spent trying to get the cabbie back on track with the directions we had, Brian hatched this idea and presented it to me. It was one of those moments when I wished we still had our tech company so we could build an app that enabled our customers to do this. I loved this idea then, and I still love it today. ...Marc

On Friday, Davison and I gave a presentation to a group of top producers at a large real estate company here in the Bay Area. At these things, I usually play Ed McMahon to Marc's Johnny (minus the pre-show hi-balls). I keep things moving and laugh at all the jokes.

But this time I wanted to take a few minutes to share an idea I had with the crowd. I offer it for your evaluation below.

I've been thinking that if I were to sell real estate in my neighborhood, one of the things I would do would be to create a comprehensive database of images, sales histories and notes on every single home in the neighborhood (in my case, about 1,200 homes).

In other words, I'd create my own private Zillow or Trulia -- or, really, something even more valuable to my clients and prospects. Maybe I'd call it Zulia.

The data would be impeccably accurate, the images would be clear street level views, and it would be frequently and meaningfully updated. Each home would have its own page. Heck, I could even run this on Wordpress. Every home would be a post.

But -- and the real value would lie herein -- all of the data, all of the images, would be complemented by my own assessment of the home. This might include observations taken on a broker tour at some point in the past ("next door neighbor raises German Shepards"; "living room gets very little light in winter"), or notes on sales prices that would make such data much more meaningful than a list of out-of-context comps. I might, for example, note that an unusually low sales price could be attributed an out of area listing agent, not a marker of a market shift.

This database could be used in a couple different ways. I could either use it as a tool for myself and my clients and keep it password protected. It would be helpful in discovering buyer preferences or helping shape sellers' perception of their home's value. Or I could leave it wide open.

Either way, I'd be using the Web to leverage my valuable experience and knowledge in a new way that would help clients and differentiate me from every other agent in my neighborhood with a stack full of comps from the MLS.

The agents in attendance liked the idea. But in reality, most were selling super high-end homes and don't get their fingernails dirty in the nitty gritty of technology. With a more time and effort, this could even be done at a brokerage level.

Your thoughts?

-- Brian Boero

Online real estate marketing made simple

Brian first published this blog on October 1, 2007. Every word of it rings true today some 14 months later. 

A while back I gave a speech at a real estate franchise convention on the topic of online marketing. 200 weary brokers filled the room. They expected to hear about new technologies and cutting edge tactics.

I let them down. I decided, instead, to tell them this:

The first thing to do when thinking about online marketing is to forget about technology completely. A carnival of blinking tools and barking vendors has clouded your thinking. I want you to go back 15 years to a time when your marketing was guided by an understanding of business fundamentals.

Now -- in 1992 -- where do you start in thinking about how to market your business?

Right here: Understand your customer.

Then what? Meet their wants and needs.

It is then reasonable to say that your marketing effort should be about telling and showing prospective customers you have what they want.

Let's fast forward back to today and apply this formula to your business and the Internet.

What are your customers' wants and needs? There are some things unique to your market, but a decade of research from NAR, CAR and others has pretty well established what consumers want and need most when they go online for real estate:

#1 Listings
#2 Home value information
#3 Community information

Now, let's meet their wants and needs.

First off, put a full IDX feed directly on your home page, front and center. No "featured homes", just quick access to a full feed of listings for your market and prominent promotion of the "homes by email" feature that comes with your IDX system.

Next, dedicate a full section of the site to detailed, up-to-the-minute information on home values in your market: Recent sales, list to sales price ratios, days on market and your own analysis of what it all means. Put this on a blog, email it in a newsletter and make it easily printable. Get it out there!

Lastly, leverage the local knowledge within your company by placing detailed neighborhood information on the site. Focus on the small stuff no one else covers. This may be done via a blog or blogs, or, if you don't have skilled writers in your company, at least hire a local freelancer to craft some core neighborhood guides.

You can forget about everything else about until you master these things.

How, then, do you tell and show prospective customers you have what they want?

First, eliminate almost everything that does not make a connection between what you know your prospective customers want and what you now have to offer them. Employ the electronic marketing platform you've been using to send e-cards and cookie recipes to distribute all that neighborhood and market knowledge you know have on your site. Switch out all those newspaper and bus bench ads touting your brand to simple calls to action along the lines of "Search every home for sale in _________ at www.___________.com" or "Sign up for weekly home sales prices in your neighborhood at www.__________.com".

If you look at online marketing through this lens, things will become much clearer. You'll also have a framework for judging what online applications are important for your business and which are not. You'll find a new focus that will move you beyond the clamor of the carnival.

--- Brian Boero

A home search wish for 2009: Let's get visual!

To properly merchandise a listing, one should:

A. Park a 1983 Oldsmobile Cutlass on the front lawn

B. Arrange a "Beeramid" on the kitchen table

C. Post blurry, poorly composed photos of the property on the web

For sooooo long, otherwise intelligent agents have failed to understand the necessity of properly merchandising a listing online. They'll obsess on curb appeal, but drop the ball on screen appeal.

But I am seeing signs of hope. Most luxury brokers have set standards for the number, size and quality of listing photos for a long time, but now I'm seeing this more and more in mid-market organizations. My informal sampling of listing sites the past few months reveals a noticeable improvement.

I think the down market is forcing brokers and agents to sharpen their game. And listings sites are moving in response. Yahoo! Real Estate announced a redesign with larger images a couple weeks ago. Realtor.com and the new HomesDatabase.com from MRIS offer "gallery" search results views that take users well beyond the traditional thumbnail.

But more interesting are the possibilities for fully "visualizing" home search. Trulia dabbled here last year with its release of Trulia Snapshot, but this felt more like an experiment than a full-fledged attempt to alter the search paradigm.

The best example of visual search right now is searchme, a site I've written about before. I believe we'll see this applied to home search in 2009 - perhaps as a "featured listings" component on one of the major listings sites.

Even more interesting is Cooliris, a browser plugin that allows you to search images on hundreds of sites, including Google, in something approximating 3-D. It's stunning and, unlike so many new web apps, actually works as promised. Download it and you'll see the possibilities for real estate.

I'd like to see Cooliris index some real estate sites. But what I'd really like is for one of the players in our category to take a flyer on something like this -- to overlay listings specs on photos the user can scan. In this way, all the most important stuff -- location, price and a visual of the home -- are easily digested at a glance.

It would be consumer a facing differentiator and could offer a unique up-sell opportunity for ad-based sites. It would also raise the bar for those just beginning to understand that crappy listing photos just don't cut it.

Do you see the value here?

-- Brian Boero

On the brighter side: 2 things that suggest a path for online real estate innovation in '09

My post on online real estate innovation yesterday was pretty bleak.

That's still my sentiment, but here's a counterbalance:

I think the single biggest opportunity in online real estate in 2009 lies in improving our grasp on the real estate market at a hyper-local level.

Yes, we have Shiller's index. Yes, NAR cranks out its numbers. And companies like Altos and Terradatum have done a great job using listings on public search sites or MLS data to provide metrics like DOM and price medians.

But still, as the owner of a 3-bed, 3-bath home in the Redwood Heights neighborhood in Oakland, CA, I am pretty much in the dark about my local market. I get a lot of information, but the level of analysis is off. Or the UI is crappy. It's always something.

Two things that popped up yesterday point to ways we may be able to improve on that in 2009.

Realius [disclosure: 1000watt performed consulting work for the company in 2007] announced a partnership with ZipRealty to place its property price prediction application on the Zip site. The idea is simple: Users predict the price they think a listing will sell for. The predictions are collected and run through an algorithm. What comes out is an aggregate prediction based on the "wisdom of the crowd."

I have concerns about accuracy (among other things, including legal bugaboos) but Realius CEO Chuck Teller tells me that, looking back, the model performs very well, which suggests that the model may perform well looking forward.

Which is the point.

We'll see if the idea takes off. HomePredict also plays in this space and has been at it for a while.

Second, REI, the outdoor gear retailer, announced an iPhone application that provides snow reports at ski resorts across North America. In other words: Current conditions at numerous and variable hyper-local "markets." 

I'd love to see a mobile app that applies this to real estate market conditions. To do it right, the data need to be good, the level of analysis needs to be right, and the interface has to be super simple.

The REI app offers some good cues.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. I am off base? What am I missing? Where do you see opportunity heading in '09?

-- Brian Boero

Cut print, but fill the value vacuum

If years of business turbulence and dubious ad performance weren't enough to move you to eliminate your print newspaper spend, yesterday's Tribune bankruptcy may be the signal you've been waiting for.

The Los Angeles Times killed its once-great real estate section three months ago. Now they're bankrupt. There are lots of sad things about this, but none of them have to do with brokers who have paid too much for too long for ads that are, as Google's Avinash Kaushik would say, "Faith-based initiatives."

Truth be told, most brokers know continuing to pour money into print makes no sense from a strict ROI perspective. These ads don't sell houses. There are two major barriers that come up time and again in our discussions with brokers struggling with the need to right-size and update their marketing budgets to reflect reality:

1. Sellers expect to see their home advertised in print

2. I need to be in papers to maintain my brand

These are legitimate concerns. Cutting print off at the knees probably will hurt you if you do not take action to fill the void of perceived value you create by doing so. This action cannot be taken in isolation.

Most brokers don't yet know how to fill the void and thus remain handcuffed to the old way they know makes no sense. They may cut a little here, shrink a little there. But the P&L still tells the same story.

It need not be so.

The embrace of listings syndication by brokerages was a step in the right direction. But it's just a start. A new marketing plan needs to be built upon the ruins of the old model. One that can be presented compellingly to consumers, the performance of which can be measured, and the value of which hangs not so much on money spent, but expertise and technology leveraged.

I refuse to accept that most sellers -- the median age of whom was 39 last year -- aren't open to a well-thought out electronic marketing strategy in lieu of the quarter-page ad in which their home shares center stage with an agent head shot.

As for the branding question? We've known for ten years that the first place consumers go in the real estate process is online. Plenty of room for branding there, even, despite what you might think, in the sterile world of CPC. 

So, the reasons why many brokers persist with print are valid -- but only for those unwilling to to take commensurate action to replace it.

It can be done. We're working with several companies right now to do it. They've stopped writing the big checks and sleep well for having done it.

-- Brian Boero

Real estate search's finest hour...

...has not arrived.

Not by a long shot.

Here's why:

Think about who actually engineered search for real estate.
Programmers -- guys and gals with 180 IQs -- guided by folks who get their kicks from Excel.

Not enough input from the people that really matter. Brokers. Agents. Consumers.

Everyone ought to stop for second and ponder this

Humans don't search by ZIP code.
Humans don't search homes from space. Or on maps filled with little blue markers.
Human don't analyze comprehensive census data that pop off listings like a Crayola box of colored graphs, charts and heat maps.
Humans don't understand the difference between a "Hybrid, Satellite, or List View".
Humans don't sift through 12,000 listings that "match my criteria".
Humans don't "save searches".
Humans don't want to view only 8 crappy pictures of a home.
Humans don't want their search experience cluttered with advertising.
Human don't benefit from poorly executed applications that include home value estimates that can never be accurate, no matter how many PhD's are thrown at them.

All of this...stuff. I applaud it for what it is. But it's not great. Because in the end it's very different from how humans actually search for homes. 

I am human and I need to be loved

Humans drive around neighborhoods.
Humans meet neighbors.
Humans ask lots of questions.
Humans like to talk to the seller.
Humans spend time vibing the neighborhood. 
Humans test drive the commute from prospective home to work.
Humans like to look at 6 homes that match their criteria, to a tee.
Humans require affirmation. They like to be gently nudged and influenced.

And most of all, humans like to converse.
They like to tell their agent who they are.
And technology has been making all this harder and harder to do.

If I could set the stage for what search should be, it would be a way to take this next paragraph and turn it into a search experience.

Hi Barb. This is Jim. My wife and I are hoping you can help us find a home. See, she is an artist. An illustrator to be exact. Works for Disney. Me, well, I can't draw a straight line to save my life. But I love to cook. It relaxes me. Anyway, we've been renting and now want to buy. We're planning to start a family. Actually, we've already been trying. What would be ideal is a home with an Arts and Crafts feel rather than the standard split level. But it has to have a cook's kitchen. And a nice backyard. One where I can plant basil, garlic and tomatoes because I make a mean marinara. We want to be as close to things like mass transit and city life as we can but just far enough away to see the stars at night, sit on the porch and hear crickets. Oh yeah, we want 2 bedrooms -- at the least. 3 is better. And enough room to entertain. And finally, a space where my wife can work from home and be inspired.

Innovation

Programmers: Want to be innovative? Create a natural search paradigm that gets us moving toward this.

Agents: You want leads? Imagine if you could actually describe homes in a manner that reflects how people think. Imagine being able to tag every key word inside the following description: 

Beautiful Arts and Crafts house, close enough to the city but far enough away to enjoy crickets. Or a starlight night. A home perfect for a young family, empty nester and anyone inspired by decor. With a great flow. And a backyard perfect for planting. Sunning. And gathering your thoughts.

Image posting 50 pictures. That are clear. With a description of what every picture is.
Imagine incorporating local data and writing about it.
Explaining what a "3" means when describing a school or a test score.

Or what a "66" means when describing a housing trend.

You may point out at this point that we can't even make RETS work across the country.
That agents don't take pictures.
That the MLS system is medieval.

I know.
But maybe, they've never been really inspired to change.
Or truly show how.

But those excuses are not going to make searches finest hour come any faster.

Keep pushing.

- Davison