Two new online real estate companies that snuck by me

Crazy busy this week. Not much time for blogging (or eating, or showering...).

But real quick: Here are a couple interesting online real estate sites that launched recently that I somehow missed despite a fair amount of media coverage outside our industry. 

Home-Account

Home-Account is self-described as "Your key to always having your best mortgage." The site allows users to determine whether or not they are getting the best deal on their mortgage by submitting detailed information on their current loan, tolerance for risk, and larger financial picture.

Home-Account is different from most other mortgage-related sites in two ways:

First, the resolve for the consumer is not a hailstorm of offers from mortgage originators (think LendingTree or Zillow Mortgage Marketplace). Instead, they are presented with various mortgage products along with the the level of savings they personally stand to realize. Home-Account also displays loans the user might be able to get if they take certain steps to improve their credit score (which is provided as part of the profile process). Users are also alerted when loan conditions move to a point where action (e.g., a refi) may be warranted -- something like an email listing alert for mortgages

Second, consumers will pay for this service. $9.95 per month to be exact. I like that.

What I don't like is the site's very confusing interface and dialed-to-11 design. It needs improvement.

Nonetheless, Home Account is a welcome addition to the sparsely populated online mortgage landscape. 

RentWiki

RentWiki was launched late last year by Jamie Gallo, who ran Realestate.com for Primedia before it sold the site to IAC.

RentWiki bills its offering as "Social rental search," which it achieves by pairing apartment listings with neighborhood profiles, user-submitted reviews and a nice Twitter integration that captures the ambient online noise about a given neighborhood.

Online rentals is a crowed space. And neighborhood sites haven't exactly been a home run. But RentWiki is nicely executed and offers plenty of cues for anyone looking to create an interesting search experience.

Back to work!

-- Brian Boero

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

"Seeing" the future of online real estate

A couple weeks ago, Frontdoor.com released its City Guides product [Disclosure: Frontdoor.com is a 1000watt Consulting client]. This is worth noting for several reasons. The user experience is first rate; the balance between content and design, data and vibe is pitch perfect; it supports the decision to live a life somewhere, not just to buy a house.

Their implementation of real estate-relevant APIs is well done. They've done a great job organizing Yelp reviews in each city, and display local events through eventful.

A slice of life

But it's their use of Flickr that got me thinking.

Flikr has been around for a long time. It has been plugged into thousands of websites and blogs. But the volume of geotagged photos it holds is now to a point where users can get a good visual sense for most any place. Frontdoor.com is taking advantage of this.

Check out Fairfield, CA

Or Athens, Georgia.

Or how about this: My wife is from Marshall, MN, a small town way out in corn country. Flikr brings it to life. This image illustrates why my wife now lives in California. 

You get a slice of life from each of these places, usually seen through the eyes of people who live there. I may know that Athens is a college town, but now I can actually see what a University of Georgia college student looks like these days. I can look at a map of Marshall mashed up with points of interest, but this gets me deeper. 

These photos pull you back from the tight focus on the home and touch on the blurry edges of decision making. And this, I think, presents really interesting possibilities for online real estate.

I am not certain what those possibilities will amount to. But the confluence of visual search, location awareness, Street View, online video, and massive stores of goetagged photos will get us closer to "virtual real estate" than we could have imagined even five years ago.

Something else to consider: There are hundreds of millions of photos sitting within MLS systems across the country. Most brokers have thousands of images they're not using. We focus so much on listings data; is there hidden value in the images?

-- Brian Boero

Lots of big news yesterday

It's been an eventful 36 hours in the world of technology and real estate. In case you missed it:

Google launched Latitude, a service that lets users identify their location, and that of their friends, on a mobile phone. We've seen location-aware apps before (from Loopt, Brightkite, Yahoo! and others), but this is of a different order of magnitude. Work in this area has lots of implications for real estate, but just think about the advertising possibilities alone -- targeting may be taken to an entirely new level.

The New York Times released and API that unlocks all the paper's stories going back to 1981. It's hard not to see the parallels to MLS. Marshall Kirkpatrick, writing on Read/WriteWeb, nails it (just switch "newspapers" for "MLSs"):

"It's a transformation moment towards interconnectedness and away from isolation. A quality API could throw the doors wide open to a future where "newspapers" are important again."

Trulia set up an MLS Advisory Board. They've been knocking on MLS doors for a while, but now they're putting the pedal to the metal. It makes me think there is something to this MLS thing.

In a move that should have big brokers everywhere speed-dialing their IT directors, Box.net, the online file storage/management company, announced enhancements to their platform aimed at the enterprise. I ask again, "whither transaction management?"

A big day. Onward!

-- Brian Boero

Real estate lessons from the newspaper nosedive

I caught this on boingboing this morning:

It's kinda funny. But it also reminded me that newspapers, now on the precipice of oblivion, were actually pretty quick to jump on the Internet. This piece is but one example. Newspapers were logging into (albeit proprietary) networks years before the 1990's boom. Early newspaper website efforts like Mercury Center and, later, networks like RealCities, were online early in the game.

But newspapers are nonetheless in dire straights today. Sure, craigslist was a withering blow, but I think there's more to it than that.

I think newspapers, like the real estate brokerage business, tended to approach innovation in a "same thing, different place" manner - meaning structure of the business, and its culture, remained the same even amid significant moves to embrace new media.

So, today, a newspaper can have a great website, yet still have a newsroom full of journalists from journalism schools that prepared them for a world that no longer exists. It can build significant online readership, but fail to effectively monetize it for fear of cannibalizing what remains of its legacy business. 

This is starting to change, but it may be too late.

Think about this in terms of real estate. Is a great website going to save a brokerage unless its structure and culture changes? Can its (independent) workforce be expected to help drive change when they are almost congenitally wired not to?

I have more questions than answers at this point. But the newspaper case seems to suggest that if the real estate brokerage business is to survive, deeper, more structural change -- executed now -- is in order.

What do you think?

-- Brian Boero

Good news: Real estate-relevant API's keep coming

Mashable reported today that HopStop, a site that tells users how to get from Point A to Point B using mass transit, has released an API.

This adds to a slowly growing list of free real estate or real estate-relevant API's. Google Maps is the granddaddy of API's in our space, but there's more out there now for real estate web developers to work with.

For brokers, online real estate companies, MLS organizations or anyone looking to create a richer online real estate experience, these can be invaluable resources.

And - let me say it again -- they are free.

Here's list of API's I've seen put to good use, with links to their documentation. I'm sure I am missing something - so please point that out.

Yelp: Local business reviews

Walkscore: Determine the "walkability" of any listing or neighborhood

Education.com: Comprehensive school data

Zillow: Home values, demographics, market trends and more

Cyberhomes: Home values, sold data and market trends

Trulia: Market data, trends

Flickr: Photos that can be displayed by geotags

Eventful: Community events and meetings

-- Brian Boero

The MLS moment

We're bullish on MLS. Or rather, the potential that lies within most MLS organizations. In fact, Marc and I think MLSs hold some of the most exciting possibilities in real estate and technology in 2009.

I know that may sound odd, and more than a little naive. For those of us with a close-in view of the MLS world, it seems at times hopelessly hamstrung by politics. Those just a little further removed see a fragmented, somewhat mysterious assortment of acronyms.

But let's step back for a minute. Way back. Out to Mars. Looked at from this perspective -- with political fault lines and puzzling borders blurred -- we see an industry in a pretty compelling position.

Here's why:

1. MLSs have the most valuable content assets in their entire category. And content, as we know, is King. No one touches them on quantity or quality.

2. MLSs have market share, adoption rates and, as a result, a distribution channel that is the envy of any other business entity on the face of the planet. Never mind why that is. It is.

3. The best and the brightest are lined up outside MLS doors. Everyone wants to do business with the MLS. There must be some value there, huh?

4. It appears as if users of the MLS really need it. It looks to pass the "if it disappeared tomorrow, would you really care?" test. That type of utility means the MLSs are not only relevant, but can solve problems for their customers.

These realities don't disappear when we come back to Earth; we just lose a clear view of them.

That was the crux of a presentation we gave to several hundred MLS executives at NAR a couple months ago: You can kick ass -- but you had better get moving. Click here for the slide deck, or view it below. You'll miss a lot of the details without the discussion, but it's a broad outline of our observations.

It starts with your brand. Yes, an MLS is a brand, and a brand is a unit of meaning. Ask yourself, "what does [my MLS here] mean? If you can't answer that in two seconds, you've identified a core problem.

We offer some ideas for moving forward with this broader perspective, but the important thing is in the stepping back. 

We absolutely believe:

1. Brokers have no better partner for surviving this market than their MLS

2. MLS organizations can take a leadership position in the online real estate category

3. Consumers -- and the Realtors that serve them -- can benefit immeasurably from products built by, or off of, the MLS (API, anyone?).

But that can only happen if MLS leaders step back and look at the bigger picture, forfeit near-term comfort for long-term value, and start messing with the playbook.

Last week at Inman, I moderated a woefully short session on the future or MLS that featured leaders that have done it. David Charron at MRIS [disclosure: 1000watt Consulting has performed work for MRIS] and Bud Fogel at Midwest Regional Data see the big picture and have done the hard work of sharing it with others.

It is my hope that more join them this year. I think they will be rewarded.

Here's the presentation:

MLS: A view from Mars

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Business Presentations & Slid branding real estate

Forget transparency: Let's find a new clarion call in 2009

 

That's my mortgage broker, letting is all hang out.

My Realtor? When my wife and I sold, I knew exactly what she netted. I knew her split. I asked.

The closing costs on my recent refi were of course conveniently broken down for easy scrutiny. "Document preparation fee" sounds like bullshit, can we get rid of that? Done.

Many called for "transparency" in the real estate business over the past few years. It became an easy Web 2.0 buzzword. I put a lot of stock in it too: If we just make the information available and uncloak the sales games, the real estate experience will improve. Zillow raised $87 million dollars on this idea.

I was wrong. Very little changed. Buyers and sellers, though armed with comps, Zestimates, school reports and trend charts, still ended up paying an under qualified agent too much money far too often. Brokers got less profitable. Good agents suffered armies of fools. And the public's view of real estate is more jaundiced than ever.

In reality, consumers could always see the compromised links in the real estate value chain quite clearly. They certainly knew the score on commissions. The light of day can shine with the power of a thousand suns into the dark corners and clauses of the real estate transaction. The real problems, which are structural, remain. 

Yes, some people did get burned. But that wasn't for lack of transparency in most cases. It was a double helix of profit motive and magical thinking that is, in retrospect, nearly impossible to untangle.

So as I head off to Inman's Real Estate Connect conference today, I am looking for a new clarion call for all of us who want the real estate business to be better.

See, real estate matters. We're not selling ringtones here, folks. We're talking about shelter. Lives. Families.

We can do better. But can has seldom been enough. Perhaps now, in a time of must, it will happen.

Coming down

Well I woke up Sunday morning,
With no way to hold my head that didn't hurt.
And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad,
So I had one more for dessert.
Then I fumbled through my closet for my clothes,
And found my cleanest dirty shirt.
An' I shaved my face and combed my hair,
An' stumbled down the stairs to meet the day.

I'd smoked my brain the night before,
On cigarettes and songs I'd been pickin'.
But I lit my first and watched a small kid,
Cussin' at a can that he was kicking.
Then I crossed the empty street,
'n caught the Sunday smell of someone fryin' chicken.
And it took me back to somethin',
That I'd lost somehow, somewhere along the way.

That's Kris Kristofferson's Sunday Morning Coming Down. Real estate's coming down pretty hard too. And many are finding they've lost something along the way: Perspective. Business sense. Integrity.

I'm hoping we can get it back this year. But to do so we've got to move beyond believing that if we open things up a little it will all be okay.

With what, then, do we lead the charge to a better industry?

Honestly, I'm not sure. People smarter than me have suggested possibilities in the past few months, but it's not clear to me yet.

I am hoping I'll come back from Connect with some answers. 

But please: Let's drop transparency. It didn't do the trick.

Stay tuned.

-- 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

It's time to focus on content

How do we fulfill the promise of Web 2.0 in real estate?

Content.

Yes, content. It's been lost amid the Web 2.0 rave pulsing in our business for the past three years, a party threatened by a harsh dawn of hungover reality.

Let's be frank:

1. Most agent blogs are really bad
2. Most brokerage attempts to participate in social media deliver little more than PR value
3. Most Web 2.0 plays in the online real estate space have failed to ignite large scale consumer use

Social media is not a cosmetic for fundamental business blemishes. In fact, it may actually aggravate them. A bad blog is worse than no blog. Display of previously unaccessible real estate or community data without intense regard for quality and context does little more than pique curiosity, or, worse, create confusion. 

New applications are great, but that's the easy part. Content creation is the hard part. It's less sexy, but it is what will win in the long run. This applies both to online real estate companies and brokerages.

A friend of my mine made the statement back in the Web 1.0 boom days that "The truth is, most of the applications out there don't really work." Today, we have tons of apps that do work, but too many are empty vessels, beautiful ships light in the cargo hold.

Hello in there ...

Let me give you some examples:

Agent reviews

Consumers reviewing Realtors. A great idea! Several companies continue to chase it. But has one broken out into widespread consumer use? When you go to these sites, do you, like me, catch a wave of loneliness? The number of real consumer reviews is terribly low. I make decisions based on review sites in other categories like TripAdvisor and Yelp. The Realtor review sites aren't even close.

Why?

Well, Yelp invested in paying people to generate reviews to prime the user generated content pump; they continue to invest heavily in editorial moderation and quality. TripAdvisor spent tons of money on the marketing and distribution needed to reach consumer contributors. Code and content go hand-in-hand.

That's not happening enough in online real estate.

Local

Intimate knowledge of the community has always been a key element of a brokerage company's value. Applications for leveraging that value online abound. Yet to this day, there are very few brokerage Web 2.0 success stories.

You can guess why. Blogs thrown up without a commitment to making them useful; shoddy writing; poorly conceived video. A lack of resources for creating the sort of content that creates the magic of "engagement" we all hear so much about.

Most brokers should remove or re-purpose their PR department. Make it an editorial department. "Managing Editor" not a typical brokerage title? Exactly. I am serious. Do it today!

Until this happens, you can expect few meaningful innovations here.

Listings

I won't subject you to another rant about listings coverage on online real estate sites (though that is definitely relevant to my post here), so let's just look at the larger quality issue. Listings are the most valuable piece of real estate content a broker or media property can display. We have apps for creating listing shows, video listing presentations, mobile listing delivery and more, yet too many listings still evidence few photos, crappy photos, all caps agent comments and just generally bad merchandising.

You can telepathically transport listing alerts direct to my cerebral cortex based on my mood and geocoordinates, but if the content is sloppy, you're not really nailing it.

What do we do? Brokers, get tough with agents. No more typo-ridden comments and poorly composed photos. You can't merchandise a listing online? Take your license somewhere else. NAR: Include minimum standards for online listings display in your Code of Ethics. I'm not joking. Getting online marketing right is no longer a benefit or differentiator, it's a solemn obligation to sellers.

Street of dreams

Online real estate has been like a ride down the Las Vegas Strip for the past three years, an Electric Circus of Ajax, Ruby and Mirrors. It's delivered some great things, but I am becoming more convinced that it is time to pull off to the side, grab a cup of coffee, and work on fundamentals.

Like content. 

-- Brian Boero