Notorious R.O.B.

Joel Burslem over at 1000watt has proclaimed July 9, 2010 as the day that the real estate blog died, and given the thoughtfulness and intelligence of the author, it’s difficult to disagree with his conclusion.  Given how Joel defines “real estate blog”, the conclusions he draws are somewhat difficult to escape:

For every Phoenix Real Estate Guy, there are likely umpteen dozen soulless me-too real estate blogs in any given metro these days. Many are filled with meaningless “market reports,” meandering “community updates” – and most were last updated many moons ago.

These blogs float like drift nets on the web, hoping to snare the clueless web visitor who stumbles in through some long tail Google search.

I, however, don’t necessarily agree with his premise.  In order for something to die, it had to have been alive at some point.  Since I don’t believe that the “real estate blog” as defined above was ever graced with the spark of life, I don’t know that I would mourn its death.

Instead, I would like to recommend some tools that are critical to the aspiring real estate blogger in the hopes that we might change the definition of a ‘real estate blog’ from “soulless me-too” Google-farming wanna-be blogs to an actual blog: a weblog, a series of thoughts.

These are not free tools, unfortunately, but for someone interested in blogging — whether in real estate or hyperlocal or something else — these tools are absolutely essential.

Read the rest of this entry »

Joel Burslem, whose intelligence is matched only by his ability to eat samgyupsal and drink soju with native Korean boys, opines on 1000watt blog that 2010 will be the year of mobile:

In my presentation yesterday at Virtual RE Bar Camp I made the case that 2010 will be the year the mobile finally matters in real estate marketing. But its not mobile by itself that matters…

2010 is the year the mobile web really begins to matter. In 2009, the mobile web grew 110 percent according to Quantcast. And just as advertising dollars flowed from print to the web, soon I suspect, they will flow from the desktop to the handset.

As much as it pains me to disagree with Joel, in this case, I’d like to offer two points to temper his (and others’) enthusiasm.

Read the rest of this entry »

Other folks have already praised the new Real Estate Marketing Report Card, which the company was kind enough to alert me to via email.  (/wave at Brian Thibault).  And if you can get Joel Burslem to say the following, you probably don’t need my two cents:

It’s a great promotional tool -  one that’s clearly designed to encourage people towards listing their home on the site (a $299 one-time fee).

The proliferation of consumer search portals has given rise to all kinds of syndication tools like International Listings as well as Listhub, Postlets, vFlyer, Point2 and others, that do the heavy lifting for agents and brokers to get their listings out across the web.

Savvy sellers, who in this market are going to want to see that their agent is doing all they can to move their home, are likely going to be checking the various search sites to make sure that they find their house. A tool like this one, while clearly a gimmick, helps make that possible.

But I blog to please myself, and honesty is more or less the first rule of blogging, so…

I give the Real Estate Marketing Report Card (RE Report Card hereafter) a grade of C-.  That is probably an unpleasant grade, but allow me to explain why.

The Good

The design is very clean.  The tool is actually fun to play with in a way.  And the report card makes excellent use of AJAX in displaying the information in a clean, visually appealing way.

It is simple to use (although, I do have some pet peeves) and the average consumer would immediately grasp what the purpose is and what to do.

The Bad

Given the grade, you probably anticipated that this section would be larger than The Good.

First, the data input has some odd behavior.  Why do I need to put in Zip Code if I’m already typing in the city and state?  Do a lookup, willya?

Second, more substantively, all that the RE Report Card does is to check to see if the listing is syndicated.  The quality of the syndication is not examined (and it isn’t clear that it could be examined by a computer program).

An agent could do a godawful job of listing my house — one dingy, ugly photo, horrible description, outright lies like “Desperate owners!  Going cheap!” and the RE Report Card would still give the syndication a green check mark, and up the overall grade.

For something like this to be truly useful to the consumer — instead of being just a cool little curiosity — there has to be a way of grading the listing & syndicated listing on quality.

Third, even on a straight syndication basis, there is no way to enter other websites.  That the agent’s own website/blog is missing is truly odd in this day and age.  Same with the broker site, or the franchise site (if part of franchise).

The Ugly

The Ugly goes to the heart of agent value.

What RE Report Card does, in my opinion, is to value the listing agent’s efforts strictly on one dimension: as a syndicator of listings.

In an age where agents are trying very hard to brand themselves as local and subject matter experts, picking out this one aspect of their job and grading them on it (and in a flawed way at that) can and will lead to rather unpleasant conversations.  No matter how many open houses you’ve held, no matter how many buyer agents you’ve negotiated with only to have things fall through, the client will simply regard you as B- material because his listing isn’t syndicated to  Lycos.

Furthermore, the natural question that arises in my consumer mind is… “I wonder if I can just bypass Ms. Six Percent and do all this syndication myself?”

As it happens, I get a suggestion right at the bottom of the RE Report Card:

Not happy with your listing’s web presence?

Put International Listings to the 30-day test and submit a luxury property listing today. Our real estate listing syndication technology is the best in the business. When you list with us, we’ll work with our extensive list of high-traffic partners to syndicate your listing wherever it’s eligible. Competing sites will list many syndication partners, but then their listings won’t actually appear! You won’t have that problem with International Listings; list through us, and within weeks you’ll see your property all over the Web.

Give us the chance to show you our value for a full month. If you then decide, for any reason, that your listing didn’t meet your expectations, just let us know. We’ll promptly refund the listing fee.

The listing process only takes a few minutes, and your listing is live within hours: Add your listing now! Just $299 – click here.

Um, okay… except that as the disclaimer says:

International Listings LLC is not a licensed real estate broker. We do not represent or negotiate on behalf of property owners or prospective buyers, advise property buyers or prospective buyers regarding real estate transactions, or take actual part in real estate transactions.

So if a consumer actually tried to call International Listings to do precisely what International Listings suggests, presumably they would be met with… what exactly?

If RE Report Card was never intended as a consumer tool, then it needs to be hidden behind some sort of security measure to prevent not-fully-informed consumers from running their house on it and making angry phone calls to their listing agent.

Way Forward

In commercial real estate, listing agents routinely provide the client with a weekly/monthly report of activities.  These reports can be a relatively involved, time-consuming affair.  But when you’re listing a $300M office building, you or someone on your staff had better be spending the time.

I think that’s the way RE Report Card needs to evolve: as an agent/broker tool (sort of as Joel Burslem suggests) with a far stronger qualitative measure.

If I were the customer, I would want my listing agent (who is taking 6% of the sale in my eye, since I don’t know about agent splits and whatnot) to send me an emailed report every week with:

• Listing Views, by site
• Inquiries, by site & total, for the week and month to date or YTD
• “Serious Conversations”
• Actions (e.g., contracts, walk-thrus, showings, home inspections, etc.)
• Buyer comments/thoughts even when deals fall through so I can judge for myself what the market is saying
• Appendix with a screenshot or links to every site where my listing is syndicated, including the agent blog, the agent site, the broker site, the franchise site, etc.
• Updated comps/CMA showing competitiveness with the rest of the market.

Thing is… I’m just not sure that an agent needs some online tool to do this.  An Excel spreadsheet would work just as well.

The issue is the “doing it” part, I suppose.

In any event…

RE Report Card — a beautifully designed, neat and easy to use tool, with serious flaws: C-.

-rsh

I went to post a lengthy comment on FOREM regarding this excellent post, but something went wacky with Joel’s Captcha system (socket not found or something?) and I lost it all.   Argh.  So I’ll just respond to Joel here.  But do read his whole post, as it is excellent.

My comment, which I attempt to reconstruct, had to do with this:

Agents should be syndicating their listings across the Net, taking dozens of high quality photos of the home, creating single property sites, doing video tours, blogging about their listings’ key selling features. Any or all of these approaches can add value (either real or perceived) to the bottom line of the transaction.

While Joel is absolutely correct on suggesting all of these steps, I can’t bring myself to blame agents at least for their failure to syndicate listings.  They are the victims, not the perps, at least as far as this issue goes.

Consider that in the 21st century, the real estate industry still lacks a common data standard for sharing listings data.  Consider that we still have hundreds of local MLS systems, each of which has its own data scheme and its own business rules.  Consider that we have dozens, if not hundreds, of websites each of which has its own data scheme and its own business rules.

As I’ve mentioned before, some agents are putting their listing into as many as a dozen different systems.  Even at 5 minutes per entry, that’s a full hour of the day that the agent is not spending actually practicing real estate.  If you have 8 listings, that is a full day’s worth of work where the agent has done literally nothing but put listings into websites.

Joel talks about taking dozens of high quality photos — great idea.  But how many photos can be displayed on any particular website or MLS?  In one site, it’s unlimited; in another, it’s one photo; in yet another, it’s three photos.  Is there any common way of designating photos so exterior shots and interior shots can be distinguished?

So who are the perps?  Who is to blame?  As the great sage Michael Jackson once said, “I’m looking at the man in the mirror / I’m asking him to change his ways.”

The perp is all of us in the real estate industry.  For whatever reason, we have failed to deliver on the promise of the computer era, the Internet age, and the networked world.  Without question, syndication of listings was in the best interests of home sellers and buyers everywhere.  Brokers, industry associations, MLS, technology providers — we all failed to implement a common data standard for easily and quickly sharing listings data.  In some cases, parts of the industry actually fought against sharing data.

Rather than trying to reduce the amount of work that an agent has to do to properly market her client’s property, we have put barrier upon barrier in her way.  The wildly disparate IDX rules are just one example of such a barrier.

I know progress is being made.  But that project has been a classic story of one step forward and two steps back.  And no matter what data standard we come up with, we still need to deal with obnoxiously complex IDX rules by a couple of hundred MLS organizations.  We still need to deal with common standards for photos (size, quality, number, labelling, etc. etc.).  There are business rules that need to be worked out — mixing FSBO with MLS listings, for example.  There are laws and regulations that need to be reexamined in light of the new technology and customer environment.

In any event, at least as far as syndication of listings goes, I am willing to give a pass to agents for now.  They are the victims of a system that has, and is continuing to, fail them.

-rsh

Should the Big Brands in real estate start blogging?

Joel Burslem over at FOREM thinks so:

Even with its obvious bias, the blog is actually a fantastic resource for anyone interested in staying on top of the beer wars. Several years ago I worked for Molson, before it became Molson Coors, so the brewing industry is still of interest to me (both professionally and socially).

But I think there is a lesson here for the real estate industry. Often when I speak to brokers, I hear a lot of them complaining about the negative press the real estate industry gets in the mainstream media.

One thing I suggest is for them to create their own blogs to counter this noise. Not fill the space with meaningless marketing platitudes like “Now is Great Time to Buy…” but actually contribute meaningfully to the conversation and to debate the issues.

The big real estate brands would be wise to take a lesson from Miller; create a real estate blog and hire a full time blogger. It could be an agent – but they’re (hopefully) too busy selling real estate. Rather, carve out some dollars from that bloated print marketing budget and hire a social media guru or a cub reporter fresh out of journalism school, then let them off the leash a bit to create stories that are relevant to the conversation but maintain your brand integrity. (Emphasis mine)

It’s an interesting idea, and I’m sure that at least some folks in Big Brands are thinking about it and experimenting with it.

For some reason, however, the idea makes me sort of queasy in the belly.

For one thing, the Brewblog itself referenced in the WSJ story that sparked Joel’s post makes me sort of queasy in the belly.  For Miller, and for the limited purpose they’re trying to serve, the Brewblog works.  Basically, the Brewblog exists to piss off Anheuser-Busch.  I didn’t read the WSJ story as being all that complimentary to what Miller was doing with Brewblog.  It’s not exactly a trusted source of information, and its biases are plainly obvious.  (Although, I suppose the plain bias puts Brewblog ahead of things like the New York Times and Washington Post… so that’s saying something.)

But it does seem relatively clear to me that the Brewblog is not adding to Miller’s own brand in any significant way.  It’s an industry blog for the brewing industry, aimed at industry insiders.  And its goal is more or less to be an ankle-biting annoyance to Anheuser-Busch.

Does that hold true in real estate?

Would, for example, Re/Max spend a bunch of cash for an industry-focused website that trashes Century 21 or Keller Williams for the sake of annoying their competitors?  What purpose would that serve in our industry?

Furthermore, I’m afraid there’s an even bigger issue for the Big Brands.  As I’ve highlighted above, if a Big Brand is going to do nontraditional PR via blogging, then it has to let official blogger(s) create stories that are part of the conversation while maintaining brand integrity.

But brand integrity is the one thing that is honestly lacking from the Big Brands.  Seriously.

What is the brand image of Re/Max?  What is the brand image of Century 21?  Of Coldwell Banker?  Of Keller Williams?  Of Long & Foster?  Of anyone in the business?  How are the brands different and distinct from each other?  Say you take a survey of 1,000 real estate customers.  Put the logos of the top ten brands in real estate in front of them and asked them to write a sentence next to each one describing the brand image of the logo.  Could they actually do it?

Besides, do you really get the sense that the Big Brands actually compete against each other if the media?  I don’t.  If anything, I think it’s more of a Us vs. Them mentality, where it’s the real estate industry (particularly the brokerages) vs. the Media.  I don’t know that you’d get serious disagreement between the Big Brands or between real estate agents of every stripe and market about the treatment of the entire topic of real estate in the media.

That being the case… I think it might be smarter for the Big Brands to let the RE.net worry about messaging, and for the brand themselves to worry about creating distinctive brand identities.  Here’s how I’d handle it.

Rather than hiring a corporate blogger, hire a corporate blog PR person.  Make sure that you have a guy or gal whose job it is to reach out to the RE.net constantly.  Every good, bad, or indifferent thing that happens should be publicized to the RE.net as soon as possible.

They all already do this with the dead-tree media.  Why not the RE.net?  Don’t just think about press releases; think about getting word to Joel or to Dustin or Greg Swann or Pat Kitano or any one of the numerous industry-focused RE.net bloggers.

We’re all hungry for the inside scoop.  The RE.net has blogs that are industry-focused with an audience that is primarily industry participants.  The Big Brands could start to leverage this fledgling online trade media by a coordinated effort to keep us informed and up-to-date.  Some of us will knock them, and others will defend and praise them.  But they will be part of the conversation.

Add in an executive or two who may be willing to post comments, and I think you have the recipe for success in growing an alternative media.  No need to hire a blogger and let him go out on the limb under the company name.

Simon Baker of REA Group recently stopped by my little corner of the Internet.  Frankly, I was shocked.  And he provided some good detailed information.  Frankly, I was shocked again.  That’s amazing outreach.  Even if I were to go on and trash REA Group, Simon has a fan.  If some dead-tree media type wanted to find out about REA Group, my post may show up, with the conversation Simon and I are having about international real estate.

Imagine if Alex Perriello did that.  Or Dave Liniger.  And not on just my tiny blog, but on the big RE.net blogs.

Don’t become the media.  Don’t try to convert the dead-tree media that hates you anyhow and has no idea what the @&*% it’s talking about anyway.  Grow the media instead.

-rsh

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