Notorious R.O.B.

Breaking news from Inman Blogger Connect: Trulia has announced that it is launching a blog platform. I don’t have a link, because this was on a piece of paper, but there will be an official announcement later.

I actually had a chance to speak with Vicky Gkiza, Sr. Product Manager for Community, at Trulia and… well… she’s a lovely, lovely person. In more than one way, actually — take a look:

She was really nice, very kind with her time, and extraordinarily smart — as is sort of par for the course for the boys and girls at Trulia.  But the point is not to talk about Vicky.

The point is this: Trulia may not intend to put ActiveRain (and others of its ilk) out of business, but the impact of this blog product is to do precisely that. As a matter of fact, I have a bet with Vicky now that I plan to collect at Inman in 2010.

Here’s the thing: Trulia has 5 million unique users each month, by their own count. If you’re a real estate agent doing a consumer-oriented blog, then what you’re after are consumer readers. ActiveRain, Agentgenius, and any of those guys may have a great platform, but until and unless they can provide consumer traffic to the tune of 5 million uniques per month… I’m afraid the value simply ceases the exist.

I have to take pains to point out again that Trulia probably doesn’t intend malice upon ActiveRain or other similar consumer-oriented agent blog networks.  As they see it, they just want to help their agent members connect with their consumer visitors.  Once you have listings, then have Trulia Voices, then Trulia Q&A, the agent blog is the obvious next step.

I’m just pointing out the obvious: if you’re an agent, and you want to have a blog somewhere, why would you do it anywhere other than at Trulia Blogs?  ActiveRain, as it is, has a tendency to be realtors talking to other realtors.  Which is fine, and might be great for an industry-focused blog like this one, or the Onboard Informatics corporate blog, but… for an agent who wants to blog to drive leads and grow business, I just don’t see the value anymore.

What this product does is divide the RE.net in half: those who are focused on consumers, and those who are focused on industry.  The agent blogs have to find a reason NOT to blog on Trulia.  (Presumably, a good one might be Zillow‘s answer, if they have one.)  The industry blogs may want to continue at places like ActiveRain or independently.

Perhaps after Inman is over, I’ll have to do some thinking about what this means in the even bigger picture: now that Trulia is creating a compelling platform for agent blogging, together with listings, together with Q&A, together with consumer traffic… what is the next evolution for the Big Brokerages like Century 21 and so on?

-rsh

Back in the day, I used to read the New York Times religiously.  I mean, I lived in New York City, was young, and was making a lot of money.  It’s what you do.  It’s kinda like going to church on Sunday if you were a Puritan in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, or doing the Starbucks run for an enormous segment of the urban yuppie population.

Then I realized that the editrix of the Old Gray Lady typically had no f’in clue about what they were writing about with such authoritative gravitas.  And nowhere is this more apparent than in the official Editorial section, the one written under the Times’ own byline.

We see this once again today in their editorial about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in which the Times Editors calls for a quick government rescue of  the two beleaguered  companies.  The editors write:

Unfortunately, support for swift passage is mixed from one important quarter: Mr. Paulson’s boss, President Bush.

On Monday, the White House renewed its threat to veto the foreclosure prevention bill if it contains a $4 billion block grant program for states to buy up foreclosed properties. The veto threat is misguided, first, on policy grounds. Mr. Bush wrongly portrays the grant as a handout to speculators when its main thrust actually is to protect communities from a destabilizing buildup of abandoned, unsold homes.

Ah, yes, well… so the Times hates Bush.  This is news?

What is news is the Times’ claim that the $4B block grant program will not be a handout to speculators.  Here is a situation where the Times confuses intent with impact.  The intent of the $4B handout may be to “protect communities” but the impact is to payoff speculators who took on financial burdens that they could not handle.

Where does the Times get the confidence to assert that the $4B will not end up in the hands of speculators?  What data or research can they point to to back up such a claim?  Oh that’s right — none.

Meanwhile, there are numerous other ways for communities to protect themselves from destabilizing buildup of abandoned homes.  Here’s just one suggestion.

Furthermore, there’s this laughable passage:

The veto threat also is a bad idea politically. Mr. Bush has not objected when the big firms and rich executives of Wall Street have been on the receiving end of federal assistance, but now he is threatening to block a measure to aid hard-hit neighborhoods filled with ordinary Americans.

Uh… dear Pinch & Gang… even with the bad financial news that probably means Fannie is bankrupt… it’s still a $15B company.  It’s hard to get any bigger, and it’s hard to be a richer executive than the boys and girls at Fannie and Freddie.  So.. WTF are you talking about?  A Fannie/Freddie rescue would absolutely be corporate welfare at its finest, justified by some mumbo-jumbo about stabilizing the market, or some such.  Those were the same arguments offered up when the government arranged for a bailout of Bear Stearns or Long Term Capital.  It’s the exact same thing.

Furthermore, the reporters of the New York Times itself are saying, “We have no idea what this bailout will cost us“:

The proposed government rescue of the nation’s two mortgage finance giants should appear on the federal budget as a $25 billion expense, the independent Congressional Budget Office said on Tuesday, but officials conceded that there was no way to really know what, if anything, a bailout might cost taxpayers.

Do the editors of the Times read their own damn paper?

Basically, the Times believes that we should write a blank check so the rich executives and investors in Fannie and Freddie can cash out.  Good idea, guys.  It sucks that the government is going along with it, but that doesn’t excuse the utter ignorance of the Times.

-rsh

One of the great things about conferences, especially one that features bloggers as the main attraction, is that you meet some incredible people and find out some incredible things. Some of them are so fantastic that they make you scratch your head and go… “Eh?”

The Believer is one of those things.

Despite the name, this is not the blog of the World Evangelical Alliance. Nor is it an Obama supporter site. It is a site about Swedish real estate, but written in English. (!)

The author, Magnus Svantegard, apparently thought that maintaining an awesome blog filled with pictures, screenshots, and compelling content is too easy and boring. So he thought to do it in a foreign language. C’mon, which of us bloggers hasn’t felt that way, where constantly updating a blog with interesting content gets so easy we sleepwalk our way through it unless we did it in Urdu, or ancient Swahili, or in Braille. Oh yeah… none of us… that’s right.

So that fact alone would make Magnus my shoo-in for Blogger of the Year. But wait! Not only does he blog better in a foreign language than you do in your native language, he’s also a handsome Nordic fella. But wait! Not only does he bear a striking resemblance to Aragorn, but he also works for a company that has a yacht. And takes said yacht to Cannes. To events where they apparently have so many yachts that they have to have separate yacht registration:

So… when are we gonna have yacht registration at Inman?

In any event, I know that real estate is local. And real estate blogging can become hyperlocal, sometimes intentionally, sometimes because that’s just what happens when you have a bunch of folks interested in immovable assets like land and houses talk to each other all the time. There is, however, much to be learned by looking at practices in an entirely different country, under different legal and cultural regimes.

For example… I learn from The Believer that there is indeed a darkside to not having 23095214098 MLS systems and 2350921 listing websites:

However, earlier this week Lars Kilander, CEO of Mäklarsamfundet (the Association of Swedish Real Estate Agents), made it easy for many papers this week to create selling headlines with the quote (my translation) “We don’t believe it is better with more listing services, it just gets more complicated for the buyers“.

Insight like this is simply unavailable here in the United States for the simple reason that we don’t have a single listing service for the whole country. Yet. (Although… give the boys and girls at Trulia and Zillow some more time….)

In any case, if you’re at all interested in some of the meta-issues in real estate, technology, and marketing, then you owe it to yourself and your readers to check out The Believer. Blogroll it. Read it. Learn from it.

And see if your boss is amenable to the idea of yachts as a sales tool.

-rsh

I suppose the fate of Ozymandias ought to keep things in perspective, but… at the same time, considering how much time and energy it has taken, I can’t help but crow a bit about what we just released.

As some of you know, my day job is as the VP of Marketing for Onboard — the premier data and geography company in the real estate industry. Over the past six months, I’ve been working on a total update of the brand from soup to nuts. New logo, new name, new website, new everything.

This has been, to say the least, extraordinarily difficult and time consuming. Reinventing a company’s brand is never easy, but it’s even more difficult when what you do is somewhat nebulous and difficult to explain. I think we managed rather well.

We launched the new brand and the new website last night. Take a look here:

Onboard Informatics

We changed the name, changed the logo, changed the color scheme, changed all our collateral, changed the website, and launched a new blog to boot.

Yes, it took a while.  And a lot of discussion.  Make that a LOT of discussion.

Ultimately, I’m happy with the new direction of the brand; it more accurately reflects our personality, our market niche, and our aspirations.

I’d love to hear from y’all what you think.

-rsh

During one of the sessions here at RE Bar Camp, an interesting point came up.

There was a company here presenting named Zipvo — they do real estate video for agents.  Their technology seems good; they seem like bright guys.  The issue was, as I saw it, their incredibly flawed business model.

They want advertisers to fund the site — they don’t want the agents to pay anything to upload videos, to market listings, etc.  They’ll get advertisers to pay for all that.  BUT, they’re only allowing banner ads at the bottom of the page.

I pointed out that as an advertiser (something I have a bit of experience with), that was just about the least compelling value proposition possible.  It’s a video site — but no interstitials?  No sponsorship opportunities?  How about in-video product placement?

The obvious advertisers are giant real estate companies, like Realogy or one of its brands.  But the agents who actually generate all the content will absolutely not countenance something like that.  Imagine you’re a Keller-Williams agent who spent all this time making a video, but before it runs, there’s a 30-second Coldwell Banker ad.

The non-real estate advertisers are consumer-oriented companies who have spent $10m creating their last TV ad.  But they can’t place that in the video ads?

Anyhow, in the discussion, one of the participants raised the point that what’s important is to start something, then iterate.  It’s better to have something “out there” than nothing.

That’s true to a degree.  A bad plan executed swiftly is preferable to a good plan executed with lethargy.

Having said that… there are some things you really don’t want to iterate as you go.  The basic business model — how you actually make money — is one of those things.  That kind of thing pisses off your customer (i.e., the advertiser) and your content producers (i.e., the agents) when you were doing things one way, then completely change the fundamental assumptions.

I wish the Zipvo guys a lot of luck — they seemed like great fellas.  But it’s in the spirit of helping them that I have to tell them… don’t iterate your fundamental business model.  Get that figured out first, then iterate the other stuff as you go.

-rsh

Seeing as how we’re stuck on the ground in Newark… just some random thoughts.

1.  What accounts for the immense incompetence of airlines?  I mean, they’re private enterprises, in a competitive environment.  Why do they all suck so uniformly?  Is it that they are so wrapped up in government regulations that they are effectively pseudo-government entities?

2.  Why is there so little information available regarding flights?  Here I am, with some three hundred other people, sitting in a chair that has less space than the average slave during the Middle Passage, and we’re simply told that the tower is holding us on the ground for 30 minutes.  We’re in the Internet Age.  Couldn’t the airlines simply throw up on the little TV monitors a continuous feed from traffic control of the conditions that are causing the delay?  Simply knowing why we’re delayed would help assuage the frustration most passengers feel.

3.  Is there some reason why airport security couldn’t be outsourced effectively?  The TSA employees I’ve had the pleasure of encountering have all been incredibly surly, rude, and unfriendly.  I can’t imagine that screening for security is all that rigorous for TSA — and in any event, no reason why private contractors couldn’t be made to follow the same procedures for security and screening.  Create some competition in airport security screening and see what happens.

4.  The exact same as #3, except applied to Departments of Motor Vehicles.

5.  Seeing as how I’m heading to Inman, and I’m interested in meeting bloggers… I wonder why there isn’t a blog advertising network for real estate blogs.  Inman has some blog network, but I don’t know if that’s an ad network as well.  I mean, 4Realz is an Inman Network Blog, but they’re not allowed to do any advertising because they’re hosted on WordPress.com.  I wonder if it makes sense for the RE.net bloggers to talk to guys like Pajamas Media or BlogAds or CrispAds etc.

6.  Mark Twain once wrote, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”  He was right.

-rsh

So I’m off to San Francisco today to attend RE Bar Camp and Inman’s Real Estate Connect.

I’m sure this is going to be a great week, filled with new people, new things to learn, and new stuff all around.

I’m hoping to meet many of the bloggers I’ve only communicated with over the Interwebs — many of you, I’m sure I’ll meet at one or more of the events.

Blogging may be very light while I’m over there, since we’re also a sponsor and I have various other duties, but… we’ll see what I can put up from time to time.

Just a quick little heads up before diving back into my real job.

If you haven’t done so already, read Analytics Apples And Oranges: Switching Web Analytics Tools Without Getting Fired.  Even if you’re an expert on web analytics, this brief little post lays out the issues so clearly and so cleanly that it helps confirm your understanding of the topic.  It did mine, and I knew this stuff already.  If you don’t feel 100% comfortable with web analytics, then read it, read it a second time, and then for good measure, read it backwards.

The author prefaces the single most useful passage in the post with this:

Warning: Geeky stuff ahead. If your eyes roll back in your head at words like ‘log file analysis’, skip ahead to ‘Analytics Package Conversion Factors’.

But seriously… if you skip ahead, you really need to tender your resignation and go do something else with your life.  Don’t call yourself a web marketer of any kind if you can’t understand even this basic distinction.  Without further ado:

The WebTrends installation my client had used the server logs to count visits and pageviews. It counted any page load by any visitor as a pageview. Even if the visitor started to view the page and then clicked away before a full pageload.

Google Analytics, on the other hand, waits until the entire page loads. The javascript that Google Analytics uses to count a pageview loads at the bottom of the page. If the whole page doesn’t load then Google won’t count it. Visiting search engine spiders and other non-javascript browsers don’t execute the javascript at all, so those pageviews never get counted.

Third-party tools like Compete.com further reduce pageviews and visits because they’re not measuring 100% of traffic to your site. They get a random sampling based on either traffic through your ISP or toolbar installations (like Alexa.com).

Now… yes, I know that some WebTrends packages feature javascript cookies.  Just classify them as another GA type of tool.  The basic distinction is to understand the difference between log-file analysis, cookie-based analytics, and third-party analytics.

-rsh

If you’re not reading Matt Ferrara, the extremely intelligent, entertaining and hyper master of Matthew Ferrara & Company, then you’re missing out on some of the most fun readings that can be had about technology and real estate.  He’s very insightful on a range of issues, as he works with some of the top companies and organizations in the industry teaching classes, providing call center support, and consulting with some of the top executives.

His latest post is actually hilarious. Just one example:

Recently, the National Association of REALTORS released it’s 2008 Association Technology Study. By and large there was nothing in it to make me fall off my seat. But that’s because I’m usually already sitting on the floor when it comes to REALTOR Association technology usage.

While his language is funny, his message is not.  Matt is a cheerleader and coach at heart, and frankly, the NY Mets could probably use him for a speech or two.

It’s time to get serious. REALTOR Associations don’t have the luxury of making slow, small incremental changes any more. It’s really do-or-die time for most of them: Even years after Board of Choice – in which a REALTOR could choose to pay dues to any Association within their state, not just the most-local one, the majority of Associations are still servicing local agents, most of whom never attend the meetings, use the services or come to the classes. As it stands, most Associations are still mostly just lucky. And not by much, because the number of agents is dropping across the boards, so the number of dues-paying members is dropping with it.

He follows up with five suggestions, which are all solid, if a bit reminiscent of a certain candidate for President in its lack of specificity.

My question is whether Matt is trying to be like Jesus and raise the dead.

I mean… the man is asking a voluntary organization whose main value is being an insider’s trading club, whose leadership is often elected for short tenures, to do things like “Get Radical” and “Stop Coddling Your Members”.

Best example of this, I think, is in his advice to stop doing SWOT analysis and start doing SO-What analysis:

Traditional strategic plans and assessments have focused on the “Strengths, Weaknesses, Oppportunities & Threats” model. Well, we think that’s junk – a total waste of time – because the emphasis always ends up on your weaknesses and threats. Never to SWOT model plans focus enough of your attention on what you CAN do WELL – and TODAY. That’s why we prefer to use our SO-WhaT model, which says: Identify your STRENGTHS and OPPORTUNITIES – and plan EVERYTHING you do around maximizing them, perfecting them, implementing them every day.

Um, Matt… what exactly can REALTOR Associations do WELL?  Take any of the main pillars of modern real estate brokerage practice.  There’s marketing.  There’s technology.  There’s training & education.  There’s market intelligence.  There’s financial operations, like mortgages.  What’s a REALTOR Association really good at out of these?

Technology?  How many REALTOR Associations even have a CTO, or any programmers on staff?  Is technology a core competence of such organizations, or even of its members?  Compared to companies like Move, Trulia, or Google, most real estate companies (nevermind voluntary associations) don’t do technology well at all.  (Nor, in my opinion, should they.)

Training and Education might be one area they could do well, if the members really took that seriously.  But considering that even brokerage companies, who benefit directly from providing training to its agents, often have trouble justifying the cost of training a newbie to become a top producer, I’m not sure I see the motivation.  That’s not even taking into account companies like, well, like Matthew Ferrara & Co. that does professional training all the time, as its central mission.

Financial operations?  Muscling in on the Mortgage Banker’s Association might not be the ideal growth strategy for volunteer associations.

Marketing?  Come on now.

Looking at the situation from the outside, being as strictly objective as I could be, the only thing that a local REALTOR Association can do really well — better than anyone else could — is Market Intelligence.  This is the one area where there is no substitute for local presence and local information.  Technology cannot help much here — as of yet, there’s no technology that goes out and gets raw data.  Training is required, of course, but it isn’t exactly rocket science to go find out bits of facts and put them into a system.  And marketing?  Well, marketing takes care of itself if you have the knowledge.

Matt is absolutely right that this will require Radical Change.  I’m frankly skeptical that any REALTOR Association will be able to do what is necessary to transform into a data-centered organization, comprised as it is of voluntary dues-paying members.  Data-gathering, you see, is a classic case of Tragedy of the Commons.

But at the end of the day, I salute Matt for his compassion.  For like Jesus, who had compassion for the dead Lazarus, Matt is filled with compassion (and hope!) for the REALTOR Association.  Perhaps he too will work a miracle.

-rsh

It is probably obvious by now that I have been letting this blog slide for quite some time.  The reason is that I have a day job as head of marketing for Onboard, and well, as is my wont, I’ve taken on a bit much at the same time.  In my defense, I feel that we had to do these things, but still… it’s about five or six major projects at the same time.  With but a fraction of the budget I was used to at Realogy.

In any event, we’ve been working our butts off (quite literally, as I’m down 5 lbs from the last physical) for the past several weeks, and I’m seeing the end of the tunnel.  I can’t show you all what my team and I have been working on so hard, but suffice to say that those of you attending Real Estate Connect in San Francisco will see some new things from Onboard.

You’ll have to tell me what you really think of the result.

-rsh