Notorious R.O.B.

So now that I’m a member of the Unemployed Consultants Union, Local 182, Dustin Luther (@tyr) and I are chitchatting one night about all the fun things we might do.  Lack of corporate respectability does wonders for one’s creativity, y’know.

We come up with a truly wacky concept that as we keep talking about it sounds less and less wacky.  The basic idea is “sports talk radio” for real estate and tech and marketing and all that good stuff.

Thus, RE: RnD is born.  From Dustin’s announcement on 4Realz:

We’ve decided to launch a weekly radio show starting this Thursday morning!

Are you curious what the show is going to be like? So are we!

Here’s what we know:

• We’re calling it RE: RnD
• We’ll run it every Thursday morning for one hour starting at 9am PST/12pm EST
• We’re going to use TalkShoe, so you can get all the information you’ll need to call in and join the chat room here: http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/51093
• We’ve set up a Facebook Page at: http://rernd.com. Become a “fan” to get regular updates on the show
• We’re still finalizing the guest list for the first show, but we know the topics we’re going to cover:

• • Current news and events (i.e. real estate banter)
  • Ways to promote your biz with FB Pages
  • NAR’s new code of ethics around social media
  • Fun and games (follow @rernd for details on the “games” part)

I have to admit, I’m sorta looking forward to this little experiment of ours. Because it’s going to be pure fun.  At least for real estate marketing geeks like me and Dustin.

So come join us, “tune in”, and basically party with us as we take on all topics, try hard to not bore each other (no guarantees that we won’t bore the audience, however), and bring the time-honored tradition of pointless jabber and speculation that is sports talk radio to real estate.

-rsh

I didn’t realize earlier that the great interviews Dustin Luther got with Marty Frame and Alex Chang that I commented on here and here were of a series. Coz, I’m a RE.net newbie. They’re all worth a read. His latest is no exception. He got some great answers from Peter Flint, CEO of Trulia.com (total aside: Pete looks a little like a more masculine version of this guy, doesn’t he?).

There’s little question that Pete “gets it” about the future of real estate. However, I noticed that he — like many others in our industry — suffers from a cognitive dissonace, that I hereby name, The Significant Misconception.

Among his answers is this passage:

I don’t think it is a stretch to say that the big brokerages are only just beginning to use their websites to create a compelling consumer experience that competes with REALTOR.com. Why do you think it has taken the national brokerages so long to complete on this front?

Building a great site is REALLY tough and it is hard for large brokerage to attract the engineering and design talent to do all this effectively. Brokers should be building strong online experiences, but they shouldn’t be distracted from their strengths and core competency— selling homes!

Now, dozens of executives at large brokerages would heartily agree with Pete. Literally thousands of agents would nod their heads and say, “Preach on, Brotha Petah”.

They all suffer from The Significant Misconception.

(Before you go start making the effigy for the apparent arrogance of yours truly, do bear with me a moment.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Joel Burslem at FOREM (mildly) puts the hammer down on Seth Godin’s SquidZipper:

I think he (and Squidoo) may just be a little late to the party on this one.

I’m just not sure Agents really need yet another place to blog hyperlocally. And Squidoo, for all its promise as a destination for user generated content, has never really taken off.

Dustin Luther follows up (again, in a really nice way):

Anyway, I only remembered this story after reading Joel’s post about Seth Godin’s new product: SquidZipper.

Even two years after my call with Dan, the market for providing a free, quality, and local marketing platform for agents is still largely undeveloped… and while one of the real estate focused verticals like Trulia or Zillow could theoretically fill this niche, it still seems like such a no brainer for one of the big guys like Google, Microsoft or Yahoo to take a page from Seth’s playbook and create a niche-specific platform for their various tools!

Seth’s platform is a great idea… but it is still missing the one thing that could really make a platform like this work: an abundance of consumers!

Funny how that one little thing makes a lot of otherwise crappy platforms work (see, e.g., LoopNet).

But this isn’t a post about SquidZipper necessarily.  Nor is it a post really about Trulia.

Instead, it’s a post about HomeDepot.

A while back, the wife and I noticed a pretty significant draft coming through our windows.  Considering the house had been built in 1940′s, and hadn’t really had a renovation since then, we thought it wise to invest in some new windows.  So we went to HomeDepot like millions of Americans, and looked into getting windows installed.

Everything pretty much went according to plan.  We bought the windows, talked to the nice people at HomeDepot, and on the appointed day, a contractor showed up at our house and started work.

I noticed, however, that the contractor’s van didn’t look like a HomeDepot van; it didn’t have any colors.  It had some guy’s name on the side (like Joe Romano & Sons or something like that) with no hint of the ubiquitous HomeDepot orange.  Turns out the HomeDepot installation technician who was in my house wasn’t, strictly speaking, a HomeDepot employee.  He actually had his own company that installed windows, and did assorted contractor work specializing in decks and patios.  He was just one of the numerous independent contractors who had agreed to have HomeDepot send them work, presumably in exchange for some fixed rate, and for agreeing to certain HomeDepot rules and standards.

We had a nice chat, this contractor and I.  He installed our windows, and left.  I can’t remember his name, and I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup.  I don’t remember the name of his company.

What I do remember is that HomeDepot installed my windows.

What the )(@#*$ does any of this have to do with real estate, Trulia, SquidZipper, and so forth?

Well, since I asked what an agent needed a brand for, it seems more and more to me that various companies out there are targeting at disintermediating not the agent, but the brands.

Let’s suppose for a moment that SquidZipper or Trulia or Zillow or any of these guys do manage to launch some sort of a platform to help a real estate agent do local marketing extremely well.  All of the tools are there: maps, listings, content, data, etc.  Let’s further suppose that one of these platforms manage to acquire an abundance of consumers such that the agent can see leads coming in day in and day out.

Said consumer then has a relationship (or at least an experience) with Trulia or whoever; it’s how they found the house, and found the real estate agent.  Presumably said consumer would have a relationship/experience with the agent himself, since they worked closely with the agent in the whole acquisition/disposition process.

But the brokerage?  Or the brand?  Just like I couldn’t remember the name of the contractor that did my windows, would any consumer remember RE/Max or Coldwell Banker or whatever?

Would said consumer, upon resurfacing seven years later (on average), remember the agent who took such good care of him the first time around?  Or would he remember the really useful website where he found a house and someone to “install” the house for him?

Where exactly is the brand, or the brokerage company, in all of this?

-rsh

Speaking of Dustin Luther, he has posted a fantastic interview with Marty Frame of Cyberhomes.  Read the whole thing.  It’s filled with interesting observations and thoughts.

None more interesting than the conclusion:

What do you see as some of the biggest changes coming to online real estate in the next two years?

The herd will thin again based on two primary factors: performance and the degree to which each of the competitors unyokes itself from having to “monetize” by charging its content providers for traffic. Lagging the actual real estate market by just a little bit, we’ll see this turn from boom to street-fight pretty quickly, and only the insanely disciplined will come out the other side. The current cycle has given us a lot of good innovation to play with, however; so the survivors will have put the best of it together.

By the talk of “unyoking” and charging content providers for traffic, it seems clear that Frame is referring to the various ad-supported sites such as Trulia and Zillow, as well as referral-based sites such as HouseValues.com and LendingTree.

His idea that the survivors will have put the best of the innovations together is interesting if you think about it.  Is the idea that first, there will be a street-fight, and based on depth of pockets, on efficiency of operations, etc., there will be two or three survivors who will then pick up the pieces and put together the best of innovations?  Or that whoever survives will be those who can put all of the best pieces together?

And what is the business model for Cyberhomes anyhow?  They have banner advertising on their site, but that hardly seems worth the trouble considering the size of Fidelity, the corporate parent to Cyberhomes.  They’re giving away the content for free, but presumably, not out of the kindness of their hearts.  It must lead to some sort of a sustainable business plan, even if it is simply as a lead-generator for its title insurance business, or as a way to gather more traffic information, or a way to sell the AVM products.

In any case, this is a great interview.  Kudos to Dustin Luther for landing it, and for the job he does with the interview.

-rsh

And the drama has escalated once again.  The brouhaha was sort of dying down, but the flames have roared into life once again, with this from Dustin Luther (obviously a great and influential blogger), then this, and this, and I’m sure others I’m missing.

The comments in the Luther post are fascinating.

As a brand newbie into the RE.net, it’s fairly obvious that I have no dog in this fight, bloodhound or otherwise.  I like them all.  And Marc Davison’s original rock star post, despite my puzzling over it, hardly seems like the likely candidate for igniting such controversy.  He seems like a very smart guy — and apparently he held my current position before I got onboard (hey, a pun!), so I feel some strange connection to the man.  Seth Godin is a really smart guy too, but sometimes, he says crap that makes me scratch my head too.

I am a veteran in the political blogosphere (and even more vicious, the video gaming world), so this whole kerfuffle strikes me as a whole lot of much ado about nothing.  So some blogger was a prick to some other blogger.  Happens every hour of every day.  Far harsher things are said in that world than in this one, and I get that.  At least RE.net shares a common worldview, and a common reality, even if people disagree on what should be done within that reality.

If I might make a small suggestion — and I realize this may be presumptuous coming from a brand newbian — that everyone put away his or her outrage at one or the other side, internalize it, and move on?  Unsubscribe, bash each other, etc. etc. but I’m thinking it’s time to get back to business.  Maybe apologies all around and kumbayahs and joining hands might be good too.  I just don’t see the point in getting all personal about frikkin’ blog posts on either side of this controversy.

I figure, the blogosphere isn’t really about personality at the end of the day.  It’s about intelligence and insight.  Either someone says something worth hearing, or he doesn’t.  The nicest guy in the world could have nothing to contribute to the conversation, while the meanest son of a bitch might have insights that are useful to the various participants.  Or vice versa.

There is a valuable lesson here somewhere, however.  And I think it is this: On the Internet, it’s not who you are, but what you say, that matters.  These are just words on a screen — there’s no way to capture the tone of voice, the force of personality, the relationships, etc. that make up a person.  Some agents and companies love to blog about “personal” topics — for example, this post from Zillow.  In small doses, that kind of content can help humanize what would otherwise be a faceless corporation.  And that’s good.  But you have to have something worth reading, some insight, some viewpoint, some information as the rest of your content.  Otherwise, you’re just a nice guy with nothing to say.

As one might imagine, I’m trying to fit this into the official OnBoard blog strategy in my day job.  It’s actually a lot harder than it looks, so my hat is off to the people at Zillow, Trulia, Redfin, Bloodhound, 4realz, 1000watts, and elsewhere that keep a lively blog going with useful information, thoughts and viewpoints worth checking out.

As for me, I’ll read any blogger, any blog post, that has interesting things in it — even if I disagree, flame the post, flame the poster, whatever.  Because it isn’t about them, but about me — what am I learning, what thoughts am I provoked to have, what assumptions am I having to question, etc.?

Having said all that, seems to me it would be a simple thing for Mr. Swann to just apologize, Mr. Davison to accept the apology, and there can be a nice happy ending to this drama.

-rsh