Google adds images to Street View

Google announced today that it has integrated location-specific images from its Panoramio product with Street View.

For online real estate, this means a more visual property search experience -- something I wrote about last week -- is coming fast.

Buyers on sites that have implemented Street View can now not only "walk down the street" on which a home resides, but can get images of the surrounding area in the same view.

This is good for agents too, who spend less time and money when buyers can get well down the path to decision online rather than relying on the traditional backseat tour.

-- Brian Boero

Show me the market!

You may have noticed I am a big advocate of putting real estate market information into the hands of consumers.

During most of the boom years, buyers and sellers made life-changing decisions based on thin slices of information. A few comps fished from the MLS. County-level market trends. And, too often, uninformed or skewed interpretations from their agent.

Sure, there were the monthly numbers from NAR. Or the Case-Shiller Index. But they lagged badly. "Recent" sales data on the web were not recent enough.

Zillow and Trulia improved the situation and should be commended for it. They served up tons of market metrics and nailed the user experience. But they were based on some of the same old data, or used fresher data that represented but a fraction of the total available in a given market.

This lead to my bullishness for the MLS: For they have fresh data, all of it. The problem is that MLSs and the brokers they support generally have no idea how to shape that data into something usable.

That is now changing.

Here are some examples:

The Minneapolis Area Association of REALTORS, in partnership with Northstar MLS, recently launched a suite of market reports that are very well done. A detailed summary for their entire region is produced each week; numbers for 100 area communities are published monthly. The visualization of the data is excellent and intelligent commentary is paired with the hard numbers. MAAR even created a blog -- "The Skinny" -- through which they publish and comment on the data.

Jeff Allen, Research Manager at MAAR, tells me the information is being gobbled up by consumers and professionals alike.

There are obvious limitations here (that reports are only available via PDF is the most problematic), but they intend to address them in the coming months.

I have discussed Redfin's use of IDX to create market metrics before. They have done an amazing job. But Estately appears to have made some nice moves in this area as well. They offer neighborhood level market pages that present at-a-glance views of the price median, inventory and days on market. This, again, is based on their use of IDX. 

Top Producer made an early move with their Market Snapshot product. While it's a vastly superior option for agents looking to move beyond marketing with recipes and saccharine proclamations of home ownership dreams come true, it suffers, in my opinion, from some data visualization issues.

I understand MLS data aren't perfect. And, yes, brokers in some markets still play hard-to-get with their listings. But the bottom line is clear: The MLS is the fountainhead of possibility for delivering consumers current, reliable, hyperlocal real estate market information. Brokers, associations and technology companies are starting to tap into it.

And that's exciting.

-- Brian Boero

No, it's not okay

The late morning silence that typically pervades my home was broken by expletives emanating from my bedroom. From my study, I yelled, in a similarly frantic tone, if all was OK. My wife responded, "No, all is definitely not OK!"

What did I do?

Lori is a quiet, introspective lady. Those who know her can attest to her gentle demeanor. And she is quite my opposite in her reserve when it comes to four letter words. So I charged upstairs concerned about what was not OK. 

She was at her desk, facing her computer. As I approached, she swung around and pelted me with a verbal assault. "I'm so damn frustrated," she said. "This whole real estate thing sucks and it's not gotten any better over the years." "I know it's not your fault, but you can do something about this. You have too. People listen to you."

No, it's not okay

The bone of her frustration was clear. She was searching for homes with a sense of urgency. We are seriously considering moving. Next week she will be flying out to what could be our next destination for three days to visit schools, meet with an agent, and tour homes. She is madly surfing websites, saving searches and participating fully in the online real estate experience.

But all is not OK. Many homes lack a sufficient number of photos.  
Or contain bad photos that illustrate elements that have no bearing on the property.
Or contain no photos at all.

"Gavin is 7 (referring to our youngest son) and he's already filled the picture library in my cell phone with hundreds of photos of his Webkin," she ranted. "And they're all good photos! If he can do it why can't every agent take a lousy dozen photos of a home and post it? Why?"

I stood in silent agreement. I've been asking that question since 1998. 

"Maybe we can hire Gavin out to agents and put the income away for his college fund," she said. 

Lori pointed out homes with agent comments that sounded great. But descriptions of homes aren't enough. Not if you are serious about buying one.

According to my wife this presented her with two distinct problems:

1) She could not make an informed decision on which properties to tour with her agent

2) She would have to email said agent and ask her to go look at the homes, determine if they are right for us, take pictures and send them to us ASAP. 

In her mind...

Neither prospect is OK

Not for her and not for our agent, who is now burdened with the task of performing the job of the listing agent.  

As I stood accepting punishment for all that is wrong with real estate, Lori reminded me of a task I performed a while back for a broker who wanted to market a $3.5 million listing here on the Central Coast that wasn't moving. I drove over to the home, took a few pictures and used the Wifi inside the house to get online and upload the photos to an account I set up for her with Real Estate Shows. I spent a few minutes writing the subtitle copy and pressed submit.

In no time she had a compelling tour of the home ready to be syndicated all over the web.

A day later, I had one of the voice artists we work with at 1000watt record the audio of the script and sent the file to Jeff Turner (President of Real Estate Shows) and requested he customize the tour for me just a tad. After all, this was a $3.5 million home.

This is the result:

I know, no big deal. And that's my point. In less time than it takes an agent to explain to a seller why a listing is sitting on the market longer than it should, a simple show (minus the audio track) that effectively merchandises the listing was created.

Such an effort also creates a better experience for the prospective buyer (My wife, for example).

"Real estate is stressful enough," Lori said. "Agents should be doing what they can to reduce the stress, not add to it." 

Yup. 

Settling a great debate

Not long ago, Rob Hahn's post What Makes a Realtor Good launched a debate that tendered only a vague definition of what makes a Realtor good or bad. Well today, I can clarify that definition:

A bad Realtor is one whose marketing effort for a six figure listing pales in comparison to a seven-year old's playful regard for his $11.95 pet dinosaur.

A good agent is one who says "no problem, I'll take care of that" when asked to compensate for the bad agents job. 

- Davison
Twitter: 1000wattmarc

Brokers caught between a rock and a virtual hard place

It began innocently enough. A broker sent me a link hoping to get my thoughts on his new website. When Brian or I get these requests we'll scan the site quickly and, if time permits, respond with some quick observations. Sometimes we're drawn to do more. Especially when the broker's good intentions are nowhere to be found in the results. 

Between a rock and a hard place

Meet Eirik Olsen. He's a broker in the Pacific Northwest caught between the rock of excitement surrounding the launch of his new website and a hard place of concern he now feels as he comes to terms with what he actually has.

We are all too familiar with Eirik's dilemma. As a broker he was handcuffed to a Website product that cost too much and provided too little. And a vendor that bound him to a ball-and-chain contract trusting that their system was so deeply woven into his business he could never leave. 

This problem afflicts many brokers. And most choose to hang onto a dysfunctional vendor relationship because they are fearful of what happens if they move on -- of the possibility that they can't do any better.

Eirik gambled and moved on. He contracted a new vendor. And all seemed fine until he went live. And began to seek opinion outside his corporate cockpit.

I called Eirik after looking at his website. We covered a lot of ground. At the conclusion of our call he voiced concern for all brokers caught in his position. Out of sincere desire that others learn from his mistakes, Eirik volunteered to let us publish a high-level assessment of his new site here. The list of issues below is not exhaustive, but will hopefully help some of you thinking about making a move.

Browser compatibility

This is Eirik's website. For those of you viewing this on a PC, you will miss the very first impression I had viewing it in Safari. It looked like this:

Making a site compatible with Safari isn't rocket science. And Eirik is based in one of the most tech-savvy cities in the country: Seattle. Ouch.

Brand

Eirik's online brand is Green Real Estate Center, a moniker that alludes to environmental education within the context of real estate. I expected the site to contain content about energy efficiency and environmentally friendly materials for the home. I imagined the site would also list green homes for sale and provide lifestyle information.

Those impressions dissipated seconds after I scanned the homepage and found no evidence of any such information. I explained how this creates confusion for the user and leads to distrust caused by discordant branding.       

Other site copy states that this center serves to protect consumers. Yet no where on this site could we find content to support that claim. Unsupported claims are a bad idea in real estate these days.

The RE/MAX branding at the top of the page added to the confusion since RE/MAX has not, to our knowledge, ever branded itself as being environmentally friendly. With the absence of any text stating a unique value proposition that would help explain what Green Real Estate really is, we were left on our own to weed through jargon that seems to do everything but explain what Green Real Estate Center really is.

Search 

How is it that three years since Trulia taught real estate how search should be done, this sort of thing still exists?

The instructional screen that hovers over the default map-based search was disconcerting. Why does search require a tutorial? Adding to the confusion were mysterious terms such as  "Focus Map" or verbiage that reads "Select the Draw Zoom tool, then click and drag to create a rectangle within to focus the map. Why is the map out of focus to begin with?

This search defaults to a map even though most online real estate sites have abandoned the practice for a simpler list display. Here'swhy: Type Seattle into the one search field and hit go. Numerous little house icons appear. The user is required to hover over each one to view the image of the home.

It's not a good idea to play hard to get with the user.

Eirik's search solution has a significant anomaly: No refiners. Other than price there were no fields for beds, baths or square footage.

More ouch. 

Other content

Agent Roster. We found little use for the agent roster other than perhaps viewing photos of 50 people we don't know or particularly care about. The agents all have the option of publishing details about themselves. About half the agents chose not too.

The shining star in this group was George Caudill, whose page should be a beacon for all the other agents. 

Contact Us. Here the user is presented with form, but is given no idea who it goes to or when they might expect a response. To the right of the form is a video from Eirik offering a commitment to full service that is with you every step of the way. The irony was hard to miss. 

Video. I love video. I love it when CEO's make a video and stand behind their brand. But as I pointed out to Eirik, throwing out terms like full service and client protection is great -- provided you explain them in detail and articulate them in terms of benefits to the viewer. His intentions were pure, but very little of what he described sounded special or different than any other broker's commitment. 

Forward! 

Eirik knows how to run a successful brokerage, but something got lost in translation on the web.

But he can fix that. Eirik is going back to square one with his IDX provider. He'll source a few alternative vendors he had not been aware of. He'll reformulate the site content and think through how his company is positioned on the site.

He'll get it right.

Thanks to Eirik for sharing!

-- Marc Davison
Twitter: 1000wattmarc

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

Don't be the "Slow Store"

"Honey, I have to run up to the Slow Store."

I utter these dreaded words about once a month when I am forced to go to my neighborhood "mail and fax" place. I had to do this last Friday to return a contract that had been mailed to me.

I call this establishment the Slow Store, because, well, everything about the place is painfully slow. Nothing there -- the people, the equipment or the transaction -- moves at my speed (which, at 37, is not really all that fast).

Have to send a FedEx? There's nothing quick about it. The clerk will write out a carbon copy sales receipt, but only after checking a laminated rate card and calculating the total cost on an adding machine. Forced to fax something? Get ready for business at the speed of syrup.

This would be charmingly antique -- like visiting one of those historical theme parks where people in period costume churn butter or make horseshoes -- were it not the case that I go here to get something done.

And it costs me money. Last Friday it was $17 for faxing 16 pages.

As I stood watching the clerk watch my contract inch through the fax machine, ZZ Top's "Sharp Dressed Man" pumped just a little bit too loudly through invisible speakers. It was the perfect bit of strangeness. I snapped the photo to the left during my wait.

I hate going to the Slow Store. But every so often I have to go there, despite the fact that:

The Slow Store's very existence is an anachronism sustained by the occasional tight spot.

It is the antithesis of customer-focused organization. The experience is driven by its needs, not mine.

It clings to old tools and price models.

It survives on the patronage of generations that know no better way.

I leave pissed every time. 

You see where I am going with this. What does the average human being experience when they walk into a real estate office (or hit a real estate brokerage website)? My guess is something not unlike my Slow Store episodes. They are sucked through a wormhole and emerge within a strange world of accordion files, fax machines and bad coffee.

They are slowed down, Steve Austin-style, by weird restrictions that make no sense. They are beset by fees that often seem as patently ridiculous as $17 for 16 pages.

And this survives, for now, barely, on the shaky ground of No Better Way. 

Don't be the Slow Store; be the Better Way

You can't make transactions happen right now. You can't market out of this thing we are in. But you can dazzle the customers you do get right now. Chances are you have the time. Craft an experience built around their needs, not yours. Eliminate artificial restrictions and pain points in the transaction. Go above and beyond.

These are just exhortations. I know that. Blanket prescriptions don't work here. What flies in one market or brokerage is inappropriate in another. But you know the boundaries. We make it our business to help you work within them.

The bottom line: If you are open to it, now is a great time to create true loyalty, to engender the cheapest, most effective advertising you could ever ask for: Word of mouth.

The people at my Slow Store seem nice. But their days are numbered. I wish for their sake they'd speed up.    

-- 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

Fresh air from the Northwest: Windermere unveils new Website

Windermere's new site launched yesterday. I decided to take some time and really dig into it because I like these guys and I know how hard they've worked at this.

For the most part they've really nailed it. I love the simple home page sans all the clutter and phony imagery that plagues most real estate websites.

I love that they made search simple -- a welcome relief to the eye, especially when held next to the text and image heavy John L Scott site that throws wizards, draw tools, quick searches, and interactive maps at you all at once. Windermere offers the user one simple option. The one they want: Home search.

I can smell the fresh scent of Northwest air laced with pine.

A thought though: Why not, at the very least, highlight the markets they serve? Does the average Bay Area resident know that Windermere has offices and listings in Washington State? I wonder.

Search defaults to a map. And a pretty darn good one at that. Personally, I would have preferred a list view, or a choice (map or list). Technically it's pretty cool. Young users will enjoy this. Boomers... not that convinced.

The search offers a host of refiners that place the user in the driver's seat delivering a nice Trulia - like experience. One request however: Let's move the City and State fields located above the map over to the right, above price, so all the refiners are in one place. That would do it for me.

What is "Clipping"? Sounds like something grandma did with coupons when I was a kid. Seems this is all about saving listings. Might be prudent to just call it Save Listings and not get fancy with the naming. Site navigation and nomenclature should steer clear of metaphors.

I could not find Listing Alerts. Maybe that's coming in phase II.

I clicked on "Advanced Search" and found it to be quite simple and not all that advanced really. We see that a lot. Quick Search. Advanced Search. "More Search Options" feels more appropriate.

The listing detail page seems a bit cramped and I wished I could have expanded it a bit and reduced the map some. The property ought to be given a bit more room to breath. Also, it took me an extra few seconds to figure out that the numbers under the main photo changed the property photos. Not a big deal but considering how cramped this display is, little things like this would bug me as a buyer and piss me off as a seller.

This site has greatness in the making written all over it. With a quality technology and marketing staff and a meaningful brand to build around, I think it's only a matter of time before it will become a key destination for those looking for homes in the areas Windermere serves.

What it's going to become is anyone's guess but I for one want a front row seat when it's unveiled.

Great job Windermere.

- Davison

1000watt Consulting and RealTrends release "Top Ten Real Estate Brokerage Websites in America" Report

Today we are proud to release a new report produced in cooperation with RealTrends, the highly regarded research and consulting organization headed by Steve Murray: "The Top Ten Real Estate Brokerage Websites in America."

You can download the full report here (be patient--the download may take a couple minutes.)

You can also view the report online here, on Scribd.

This report was compiled over a three month period, during which we examined the websites of every company on RealTrend's 2008 "RealTrends 500" list, which ranks the largest brokerage companies in America.

There are no doubt smaller shops that offer excellent websites. And many of you will offer your own picks. And that's the point: As we note in our introduction:

"We hope this report serves as encouragement for brokerage companies that seek to create websites commensurate to their already considerable offline success. We do not pretend to have the last word, and recognize that there will be legitimate disagreement over our findings. Let this then be the first word in a long and fruitful conversation. The real estate experience matters. We can do better. Brokers can do better."

We hope you enjoy the report.

The Swiss Army Knife problem

Realseekr launched this week. The site is the newest among a group of IDX-based search plays, which includes Roost, Terabitz, Estately and others.

Here's what I like about it:

1. The listings strategy. IDX is the way to go if you can stomach the legal, political and data hassles
2. The integration of chat and SMS
3. Grant Freer, founder and CEO. He's smart and has an infectious enthusiasm I really like

But these things are overshadowed, in my mind, by a problem that afflicts many in the online real estate category: Lack of focus.

The site, like a Swiss Army Knife, does many things but doesn't do any one thing especially well (if you've ever tried to use the little scissors or saw on the Swiss Army Knife you know what I mean.) It offers some home search, some local/social stuff, blogs, agent search and more. The site suffers from bad information architecture and I struggled with the extremely busy user interface.

One of my favorite books on Website usability is titled "Don't make me think." When I look at the Realseekr home page, I have to think a lot:

Here's just a sample: The consumer and industry facing messaging here is mixed, so I have to parse that. Then I need to think about what the check-marked benefits mean. For example, what does "Make friends and connections" mean here, on a real estate site? As a consumer, I may think, "what does "FSBO" mean?" I also have no idea what "featured properties" means. Why are they here? And in any case, any of these "featured" properties is almost certainly not the one property I ultimately hope to find (if I'm a buyer).

And it's quite possible (again, if I am a consumer) I will not know what any of these three search categories mean:

I'm not picking on Realseekr. I just think it's the most recent example of a larger trend in online real estate: Scope creep, feature bloat, Swiss Army Knife Syndrome ... whatever you want to call it -- there's too much out there that's too complicated.

I've been thinking this about Zillow for some time now. It does not suffer from the IA and usability problems Realseekr does, but it nonetheless seems a bit scattered to me.

I think about this like the difference between going to a barbeque and going to get a haircut. At the barbeque, I'm up for anything: A beer, a margarita, a little frisbee, some grilling and playing around with the kids. When I go to the barber, I'm there for one reason, and there's no confusion about what I'm going to get.

Online real estate, for those who are serious, is more like getting a haircut. I want something: A home, a mortgage, an agent -- not a half-satisfying taste of everything seasoned with a sprinkle of serendipity.

There are exceptions, of course. Companies that get lifestyle media and marketing can pull off a more experiential, less utilitarian sort of site. The thousands of Active Rain members demonstrate that real estate pros are willing to socialize online.

I just don't think that's where most will succeed.

The brass ring lies in making something complicated astonishingly simple.

-- Brian Boero