Notorious R.O.B.

Alan Webber by Gary Kelly / @issue Interview / vol. 6 no. 2

Thanks to travel, blogging is a bit light, but I did want to get this post out because more and more, I feel it’s a painful message that must be heard.

There are quite a few things that a real estate company can do to improve operations, but many of them will take immense amount of work, cultural changes, and rethinking the practice of real estate brokerage itself.  There is, however, one thing that any company can do that will immediately pay dividends: design.  All it takes is spending some money.

Start by reading this post by @Issue web magazine.  It is an excerpt of a book “Rules of Thumb” by Alan Webber, the cofounder of Fast Company magazine.  The excerpt speaks to Rule 28: Good design is table stakes. Great design wins:

Not long after that trip I went to Denmark for a conference that brought together architects, industrial designers, and graphic artists. I walked around Copenhagen, admiring the shops and stores, the comfortable restaurants, the overall ambiance of the place. Then I had a cup of coffee with a friend who had organized the gathering.

“Denmark has high wages, high taxes, and an expensive social safety net,” I said. “But your manufacturing is moving to cheaper countries. What’s the strategy for the future?”

“We’re not worried,” she said. “We intend to compete on the quality of our design. Denmark is famous for our design.”

Read the whole thing; it’ll be worth your time.  Then think through the implications for real estate with me.

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From the web publication (seems rude to call it a “blog”) @Issue comes this provocative article about the business value of design, which ends with this astonishing statement:

[Design is] the accelerator for the company car, the power train for sustainable profits: design drives innovation; innovation powers brand; brand builds loyalty; and loyalty sustains profits. If you want long-term profits, don’t start with technology, start with design.

The statement struck me quite hard because I love both technology and design. I had not given much thought as to which one takes precedence in driving business value.

Synchronicity.  In this week’s RE:RnD Radio show, I ended up debating with Benn Rosales of AgentGenius about innovation in real estate.  One of the sub-themes was that we had not seen true innovation in the real estate industry in a couple of years, ever since Web 2.0 exploded onto the scene with Trulia.  (And I would argue before then with HousingMaps.com.)  We discussed Roost‘s redesign, and I had dismissed it as “cosmetic changes” with no real fundamental innovation.

Perhaps I need to rethink that position.

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Just a quick note to say that the move to a self-hosted WordPress platform is ongoing.  It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, but haven’t really had the time to focus on it.  I still don’t really have the time, but… as much as I love WordPress.com’s hosted service, there were things I wanted to try and to learn that I simply couldn’t without going self-hosted.

The experience has been actually quite fun, and quite challenging in unexpected ways.

It wasn’t easy picking a theme, for example.  I must have looked at a dozen really interesting themes, including (of course) the Thesis theme.  Ultimately, I settled on Grid Focus by Derek Punsalan because it was so clean.  Since I can’t seem to say “Hello” in fewer than 500 words, legibility was a very important factor.  Plus, I tend to favor somewhat minimalist designs, with Subtraction by Khoi Vinh and the Pentagram corporate site being my two favorite website designs.  I think it’s fairly obvious that I’m completely ripping off both of them.  Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and in this, I am more than happy to flatter away.

I think I have most of the important things complete, but a lot remains to be done.

I’m not entirely happy with the top navigation, for example, but it’s taking a bit of time to learn enough PHP/CSS to make the changes I want.

I’ll probably keep on tinkering with little bits of the site, now that I can.  The color scheme of black/white/grey/red may see some changes over time.  Some of the rollover action isn’t where I want things to be.  And so on.

One sad note: I have had to lose the Vader image.  I tried to make it work, but with the new design of Notorious ROB, it just didn’t fit.  I may have to find a way to fit in Sephiroth, which is my Twitter icon, but even that will require some thought.

I’d love your thoughts on the design overall, where you see possible improvements, and any suggestions for resources (books, websites, etc.) for a relative newbie in the world of CSS & PHP.

Anyhow, posting has been light because of the move, but I will be getting back to it soon.  So much to talk about, so little time.

-rsh

Once in a while, Seth Godin will write something that makes me remember that the dude is really pretty smart.  This is one of those things.

Faced with the excitement of making a CD and all the knobs and dials, they overproduced the record. They went from being two real guys playing authentic music, live and for free, and became a multi-tracked quartet in search of a professional sound. And they ended up in the dead zone. Not enough gloss to be slick, too much to be real.

This happens at restaurants all the time. Give me a handmade huarache and it’s fine if it’s on a paper plate. Or give me something from Thomas Keller. But I have no patience for the stuff in the dead zone, the items that are too slick to be real, but not slick enough to be a marvel. Who, exactly, wants an industrial tuna sandwich wrapped in plastic wrap?

You can send me a hand-written note (but don’t write it in crayon with words spelled wrong) and I’ll read it. And you can send me a beautifully typeset Fedex package. But if you send me mass-produced junk with a dot matrix printer, out it goes. The dead zone again.

This insight has one of those head-smacking D’oh!’s built into it that makes what is profound seem incredibly simplistic.  But it is profound.

In our advertising saturated world, going halfway pretty much guarantees your marketing is going to get ignored.

In particular, I think this bears quite a lot of thinking about in real estate.

Marketing a house for sale cannot possibly be an easy job.  No way, no how.  Especially in this market.  At the same time, I do think that far too many brokers fall straight into Godin’s Dead Zone when it comes to marketing materials for the homes they are representing.  They are too slick to be real, but not slick enough to be a marvel.

I did a Google search and picked this flyer entirely at random:

Holy Dead Zone, Batman!

The flyer is too slick to be “real”.  And yet, it’s not slick enough to be eye-catching or attention-grabbing.  There’s no wow there.  No pizzazz.  Nothing that makes you want to check it out further.  (Granted, it’s a hard thing to judge printed material by online photos… but still….)

Note that this particular listing is for a $10m house — that’s ten million dollars.  Assuming a modest 2.5% commission rate, that means the listing agent stands to receive a $250,000 payday if the property is sold.  A quarter of a million dollars.

And this is the best he can do?

I’m not entirely sure what a “non-slick, genuine, real” marketing flyer might be for this.  Maybe a variation on this:

House For Sale! $10M and its yours!

Granted, the client might be nonplussed if you were to do a set of hand-drawn posters for his $10M alpine palace, but hey, it would probably get people to read further.  It might even get some buzz going, because of its uniqueness.

A step up might be to do a bunch of handwritten cards on beautiful stationery and enclose a personally shot photo (not a professional job) with it inviting the recipient to inquire further about this amazing property.

If you’re not going that way, then you have to go all-out, and be so slick that the materials become noteworthy.  You have to impress the person seeing the marketing materials with the professionalism, the thought, and the production values.  Something more like this:

Why yes, I wear coats to the beach....

In fact, Corcoran routinely does some very nice things.  Take a look at this for example.  If you’re going to represent $10M properties on the web, something like that is slick enough to be a marvel.  It grabs hold of your attention, invites you to play with the cool Flash toys, and makes you marvel at the beautiful homes.  It’s like very high quality housing porn.

The lesson doesn’t apply, I think, only to the super-high end either.  Every house is still going to be some family’s biggest purchase.  It’s likely to be the seller’s biggest sale as well — a key event in that family’s life.  Don’t you owe it to the client to do more than slap together some hasty templated flyer that lands smack dab in the middle of the dead zone, neither authentic nor professional?

It is my considered opinion that quite a few real estate professionals would benefit from a regular diet of design books, magazines, and websites.  I particularly like The Dieline — a package design blog that is regularly updated, and filled with some of the most striking designs I’ve seen.  And no, none of the designs are of real estate flyers, but ideas could translate.  The usage of color can translate.  The thoughtful design can translate.

Whether you pursue the simple elegance of simplicity that forsakes commercialized slickness in favor of authentic human voice, or the blow-your-mind power of truly slick, marvelous designed materials, Godin’s insight is really worth some serious thought.  Stay out of the dead zone.

-rsh

In case you have visited Notorious R.O.B. before, you will surely notice that I have changed my blog theme.

I was using the Blix theme before (y’know, with the glowing eyes and all) which was a great theme.

But in putting the Onboard Informatics blog together, I came across a WordPress theme named The Journalist.  It really appealed to me not because I’m a journalist — in fact, I really would rather not be one of those — but because of its simple, clean, minimalist design that really emphasizes the writing.

The increased legibility from the larger fonts and the lack of clutter made it appealing to me, since I tend to write lots of words for no real reason at all.

It’s sparse, almost Spartan, but… I am really on a simplicity kick of late.  So here it is.

Expect new content soon — the Inman conference and the RE Bar Camp were amazing experiences.  I’ve met so many great people, got to know quite a few, regret not being able to spend time with many others of you, but look forward to the next meeting.  Oh yeah, and I got a ton of ideas for future posts.

And of course, I should have more time now that my major project for the first half of this year is finished.

-rsh