Here lies Web 2.0

John Cable published a blog post this past October titled "The End of Web 2.0?"

His end was marked by the drained IV bag of venture capital that no longer pumped its lifeblood into the veins of all the loosey-goosey ideas hatched to amass audience rather than revenue. When the flow stopped, so did they.

Many are now on life support. Last December, Peter Schwartz published this article in the The Huffington Post. He cites the Web's most popular social network, Facebook, and the $300 million they earn as having little impact on the expenses they burn. With ad dollars evaporating and their need to add more servers and personnel, their future, in a way, looks grim. 

Peter talks about Web 2.0 burnout, and the "longing to return to the wholeness of the physical world." That has resonated heavily with me for a while now.

As Peter explains, Facebook grows by reaching new audiences but also recedes as old audiences shut it off. They unhook. And go back to taking long walks, reading books, hanging with real friends and seeking some white space in life. 

Twitter continues to grow at an explosive rate. In better, more fantastical times, fanciful conjecture such the late Portland journalist Russell Shaw's prediction that Google should buy it might be exciting. But this would'nt be too thrilling today unless Twitter or Google could explain how to monetize all those millions of disposable and time sensitive Tweets. 

The true fate of Web 2.0 

In recent months we've read about layoffs in the Web 2.0 space. Jaxter, LastFM, Mahalo, Yoomba, LinkedIn and YouSendit are some of the many firms doing everything they can to weather the storm.    

None of this comes as any surprise given the state of our economy. But does all this point to a pandemic that could wipe out even the most popular Web 2.0 sites? 

It's still too early to tell of course. But we all need to be prepared. There are plenty hanging on for dear life in real estate.

In order to survive they must evolve out of the primordial FREE waters of Web 2.0, deliver real benefits and start charging their users. This presents a challenge to the many people who have been enjoying and benefiting from these no-cost services.

A couple weeks ago real estate's largest online community, Active Rain, enacted a controversial subscription fee for new members. It would be absurd to think that AR could continue operating without finding some way to monetize members who use its platform to build their businesses.

Recently, on Twitter I posed the question, "Would anyone here pay for their Twitter account?" Every single single response I got was "not I."

Really? Mmm. I would. Considering the benefits I've reaped from a free Twitter, I can only imagine what I could garner interacting with a paid membership. The thought of Twitter going away because they can't create revenue from its millions of users who have been spoiled by free is alarmingly sad. 

So given the inevitability that many more Web 2.0 sites will perish, including those inside our own industry, do you have a game plan for what's next when the free service you've been leveraging either goes belly up or starts charging?

You should. After all, it's not likely that door knocking is going to come back into fashion.  

- 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

Google's OpenSocial and the future of the MLS

Brian published this post back on November 6th, 2007. The observations he made then about the social implications and viability of the MLS resonate today -- Marc

I’ve been chewing on the idea of Google’s OpenSocial for the past few days. I’d like to draw some direct connections to real estate, but I’d be stretching. As big a deal as it is in the wider world, it seems but a tangent to the real estate sphere at the moment.

Social networks surely hold opportunity for real estate practitioners. ActiveRain has demonstrated that. But the consumer-facing prospects have yet to come into focus. While examples of blogging success abound, cases of leveraging mass-market social networks to grow a real estate practice are next to non-existent (if you’re aware of one, I’d love to hear about it). And while it is certain that some online real estate companies will develop applications using the OpenSocial APIs, I don’t see any game-changing moves on the horizon.

The real value of the OpenSocial announcement for real estate is thus instructive. An object lesson on what might be – for MLS organizations and the NAR in particular.

Here’s one way we might look at this:

Consider that the MLS is really a social network. Its value has always been much more than as a warehouse for listings. It’s the marketplace, the cooperative -- the network of people with similar interests doing business -- that gives it its juice. Hang a few features off the core interface, say, a facebook-like profile with professional preferences and other elements of the “social graph”, and the decidedly uncool MLS starts looking pretty hip – and much more valuable.

This would be a “socialized” MLS. But one that is still walled in, limited by its increasingly problematic geographic boundaries. But what if NAR ceased conjuring a fantastical “gateway” that will take years to build and created a series of APIs -- children of RETS, if you will – that enabled vendors and MLS organizations themselves to inject simple applications into Web-based MLS systems?

Rather than drawing yet another circle around the outside of the listings world, why not create new pathways into it and let a thousand flowers bloom, as they say?

In this scenario, MarketLinx, Paragon and Rappattoni and the like are the real estate equivalents of LinkedIn, Orkut and Friendster – the parties who adopt the API protocols. Like OpenSocial, these APIs would respect the business and community rules of participating partners. Data integrity and ownership would be protected and worlds of new value would be unlocked for MLS organizations and their members.

Michael Wurzer over at FBS Blog has examined these issues with far greater insight than I have here. And there are MLS organizations cooking up progressive initiatives. But from my position on the periphery, it looks like far more need to embrace and advocate for the ethos represented by OpenSocial if they are to remain competitive.

-- Brian Boero

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

Real estate on steroids

Stattweets launched today, enabling sports fans to follow their favorite teams, get spreads, scores, standings, ranks etc.

The idea isn't new but their angle is. The content here is broadcast direct from the teams themselves rather than from the arbitrary public. 

Immediate info.
Direct from the source.
I love this.
 
And I would love this from real estate.

Imagine a REStatweets that broadcast Just listed, Just sold, Pending, local stats and spreads from every major, minor and collegiate real estate brand locally and nationally. 

Subscribers might include agents and brokers who would be able to acquire new listing information from any or every one of the brokerage brands listed in the network. If agent A gets a listing right this second, how much time would elapse before that listing is uploaded into the MLS and broadcast to out to the agent population? How much time would it take before it's broadcast out to the marketplace?

REstattweets could reduce that down to seconds. 

This does not replace the MLS. It simply acts a surrogate service that gets the ball rolling quickly. It's a listing alert on steroids. It's an open house alert on steroids. It's what's happening on every block on steroids. 

It's real estate on steroids.
 
Consumers could subscribe too. Now, I know sports engenders a certain fanaticism that you may think real estate does not have. But I'm not dribbling in that end of the logic court. I believe real estate is addictive. I believe it's voyeuristic. And I believe those who work inside it (agents, title reps, mortgage orginators, and the like) as well as those outside - the consumer - possess a healthy passion for it.

Especially now.

Micro-broadcasting in real estate is still in its infancy. Early adopters are currently focused on broadcasting about themselves and what they are doing. I've learned there is value there but I am still convinced that content only has a few seconds of real relevancy and pales in value to reporting useful data. 

Sports might be apples to real estate's oranges. But data is data. Any engine that could power the instant delivery of it is one I believe is worth subscribing to, paying for and driving. 

- Davison
Twitter: 1000wattmarc

This is why I love the Web

Estonia. Wow. I wish I could read the darn site!

BTW, you can download our "Top Ten Brokerages in America" report here (note: it takes a couple minutes).

-- Brian Boero

Facebook, your brand, and the company you keep

Recently, I shared some thoughts on Facebook here. And subsequently raised questions regarding Twitter here.

I view Facebook with some measure of reserve. It's catching on big in real estate and, while it holds great promise, the stampede to its banks may cause many to overlook the crocs that lie in waiting. 

While I believe it's a place to establish an online persona -- and a far better one than the "About You" section of your website -- there is also something undeniably bizarre and counterfeit about it that fuels my wariness.

Facebook began as a college directory, and, in that guise, the friend network made sense. As it moved beyond the collegiate environment, I toyed with the idea of Facebook as a new White/Yellow Pages that not only offered contact information, but a personal look at those listed and what they're about.

And I thought that was pretty cool.

But over the last year, as Facebook has finally caught on in real estate, I am getting more and more creeped out by the "Friend" thing.

Many of us are guilty of willingly accepting strangers as "friends" on Facebook. And Facebook does not offer a way to distinguish between a true lifelong friend, a casual friend, a client, a reader, a prospect, a stalker, etc. You might think, big deal. But next time you go check someone's Facebook profile and notice they have 3,000 friends, I wonder how honest of a representation you'll find that to be.

Through this mish-mash of associations, those who are really your true friends -- those whose own brands and reputations stand as testimony to yours by virtue of a true connection -- become diluted.

For the casual Facebook user, this might not mean a darn thing. But for a real estate person who intends to derive professional value from it, one who is seeking ways to offer a more transparent look inside their business and themselves, I not only question the value of surrounding oneself with hundreds of strangers called friends, I worry about the potential adverse affect this might have on the very reputation you are trying to build.    

I'm not the only one dwelling on this. Meezoog, a startup out of Israel with a core focus on dating, has built a social proximity meter into its platform dealing precisely with this issue. Unlike LinkedIn or Facebook or most social networks that allow us to play in the six degrees of separation game, Meezoog believes that placing a value on our connections is not only important, but serves to enhance the trust which, in their world, the one of dating, could lead to compatibility.

In our real estate world that very same trust leads to building a better brand.

This is an interesting and consequential development in light of the user generated love-in that has characterized the Web 2.0 phenomenon.

I won't deny the success many in real estate have had scraping Facebook's surface for business and or marketing opportunities, much like I won't deny the success some have had scraping bus benches, shopping carts, bus tours and magnets combing for opportunity. 

But I worry about the mark all these things place on the balance sheet of our brand P&L. After all, you are the friends you keep. 

What if we could evaluate our Facebook friends and categorize them according to who they really are in our world? That would be great. As it turns out, Meezoog plans to offer their proximity meter to other social platforms such as Facebook, which would allow users to do something close to what I am suggesting.

Wow. 

As we continue to show and tell ourselves on the grand online stage, we should be be careful about who joins us.

- Davison

Dwellicious: The "Meta Bucket"

Greg Robertson will always be known to me as the guy who combined Fabio and an hourly cash drop (literally bills falling from the ceiling) in the eNeighborhoods booth at NAR a few years ago. Pure genius. I don't think I've met Dan Woolley.

Now they are the Dwellicious Guys.

Dwellicious -- which has received a lot of play in an out of real estate the past few weeks -- is a social bookmarking application focused on property listings. User can save listings from a bunch of sites in one place. Every listing is complemented by data piped in through third-party APIs.

I really like this idea. Here's why:

People start their home search online and browse for about two months before even contacting a Realtor.

The search process, particularly for younger users, is often collaborative.

Agents need a more efficient way of surfacing buyer preferences in this market.

Most sites have a less than all of the listings.

Home search is harder than it should be. 

Dwellicious hits on all of these issues.

Think of it as a "shopping cart" for listings. This metaphor works really well even if we can't complete it in the real estate transaction.

I have thought for some time that The "my account" feature on sites like Trulia, Realtor.com and other listings sites -- long considered an ancillary utility -- would emerge as a central piece of the online real estate experience, functioning as something of a home base online during the search process. You can see that many of these sites have put more effort into this feature lately.

The trouble with this is that the home base sits within the walls of one particular site. If users want to gather information from other places (a behavior we should expect according to NAR research) they need to throw it in another bucket or buckets.

Dwellicious is the meta-bucket.

For those of in the industry, this is something of a delicious irony. Listings aggregators threw an umbrella over brokers; Dwellicious, if it is adopted widely by consumers, does the same to the big listings sites, stepping in front of them as perhaps the first point of interaction.

We'll see. The idea rocks. Building a user base is the tricky part. But these guys know what they're doing.

-- Brian Boero

From the 1000watt Archive: Lead generation is dead

We're a little light on posting this week because Davison is on vacation. So here's a piece we published about a year ago. It's tongue-in-cheek, and there are a hundred nuances we leave out, but it raises questions that are important. I'd be interested to hear what you're seeing in terms of online lead gen these days.

Lead Generation is dead

The following fake press release appeared on my desk this morning:

Tampa, Florida – October 2, 2007

The National Association of Tired Ideas today issued a brief statement noting the death of online real estate Lead Generation. Lead Generation – which emerged on the scene scarcely ten years ago – met its demise on Saturday, September 29th at 2:30 a.m. on a template website belonging to Don “The Deal Maker” Davies, an agent who “goes the extra mile for his clients,” but rarely checks his email. 

“I noticed a glitch in our lead system and found that it was trying to pass along the name ‘Boris Yeltsin’ to Mr. Davies” said Steve Hendstrom, the attending technician. “I tried everything I could to free up the system, but in the end, all I was able to get it to do was belch, make a clanging sound, and utter the word “Rosebud” to absolutely no one in particular … Lead Generation crashed, just like that." 

Lead Generation was born on March 22, 1994 on the website of Minneapolis agent Dale Montrose, who was able to get trusting consumers to give him their names, contact information, social security numbers and sexual histories in exchange for an offer of “FREE REPORTS”. Recalls Montrose, speaking from his vacation home on Grand Cayman, “Those were the salad days. I stacked leads in my inbox like cordwood. Thank god for my autoresponder."

Soon, companies emerged that took Lead Generation nationwide, using it to sell thousands of agent and broker websites. In 1996, a website product called “Agent e-Generator Gold: Platinum Edition” set a new standard by using Lead Generation on no less than forty three forms on a single site. Lead Generation was the talk of industry listservs, feted at conventions and touted in real estate offices across America.

In the late nineties, Lead Generation went big time, cutting deals with several high profile internet companies. These firms worked with Lead Generation to scrub, verify, incubate and route leads – which were previously known as “people” -- to eager real estate professionals. Thanks to Lead Generation, millions of homebuyers and sellers were successfully captured during this period.

In 2000, Lead Generation partnered with Drip Email to deliver hundreds of millions of holiday greetings, recipes, high school football schedules and inspirational messages to consumers hungry for random information from salespeople. 

But by late 2005 Lead Generation was in trouble. It was stretched across thousands of stealth websites, pop-ups and landing pages; tucked behind millions of “contact me” links and “home search” forms; and, sadly, taken advantage of by lead arbitrage outfits and black market dealers peddling “human free” leads. By early this year, many saw the end coming.

“Nothing will ever replace Lead Generation” said Don “The Deal Maker” Davies. “Some incredibly famous people passed through my inbox over the years: Moses, Louis Pasteur, Gary Coleman, Nancy Reagan, Flava Flav, Dick Cavett … those were just a few of the celebs that took the time to fill out one of my Website forms.”   

Mike Nesbitt, a recent college graduate who purchased a condo in Dallas, Texas in 2004, was not so sentimental. “It took me forever to find a decent Realtor and I had to sift through so much fluff … all those dog pictures -- WTF?” Continues Nesbitt, “In spite of Lead Generation, I did end up finding an agent who actually got back to me in a flash and took the time to answer my questions – she was awesome.”

Lead Generation is survived by Customer Engagement, its decidedly more social, open and confident offspring. Some industry observers familiar with Customer Engagement note that it also shows the influence of its grandparents, Conversation and Value. 

-- Davison/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