Another brief update, before my day of continuous meetings begin….
Regarding my post yesterday on the syndication brouhaha brought on by Abbott Realty Group… first, you need to read Jay Thompson’s take on the subject. He takes longer to articulate the issue than I did, and I think more clearly than I have:
If you feel syndicators are harming consumers by making it difficult to contact listing agents, they you must, MUST, also keep your listings out of IDX distribution. The exact same issue of not reaching the listing agent that seems to bother so many in syndication also exists in IDX.
Trust me, we get calls and emails – seven days a week – from people searching on this very site who think we are the listing agent for the property they are viewing. Every. Day.
Don’t get me wrong. I **LOVE** IDX. It’s the lifeblood of my prospect generation efforts. 6,742 IDX search registrations in 2011 is a great thing. But if one of your main arguments for pulling your listings out of syndication is because potential buyers are confused and can’t reach the listing agent, then you MUST also pull out of IDX. The same problem exists in both systems. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Pulling out of syndication but using IDX smacks of hypocrisy.
The “syndication debate” will not end with smacking down TruZiltor. It will ultimately end up being a debate about buyer agency, the purpose of the MLS, the purpose of data-sharing. I’ve been predicting we’ll be doing that by NAR Annual in November. Maybe it’ll happen sooner than that.
I think that’s a wonderful, needed debate within the industry. Bring it on, I say, and sooner the better.
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Continuing the tradition that started when the earth was young (or last year… depending on your definition of “time”), I’d like to present this year’s version of “Predictions Guaranteed to be Wrong, Or Your Money Back”! As we saw in the report card post, last year, I went 4.5 for 7 in predictions. I hope to bat lower for this year’s predictions. Of course, I can guarantee 0 for 7 by making ridiculous predictions, like “The Jets will win the SuperBowl”.
Without further ado, the predictions for 2012…
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Image: bluefin_102 ~ Mike Forsman via Flickr.com
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.
There's An App for That
In my latest Inman column (link is for subscribers only, unless you made it in before the paywall dropped), I took issue with mobile for real estate, and called it the “eternal next big thing” for real estate. I didn’t have the space really to address what I do think is the future of mobile in real estate, as I was already pushing my word count limit, so I thought I’d talk about it here.
I wrote in my column that:
Mobile is the eternal Next Big Thing is real estate – a tantalizing mirage promising untold riches that appear to be right over the next sand dune… until you get there and… oh, it’s right over there over that hill. iPhone appears to me to be just the latest in the mirages built up about how consumers will use their mobile handheld computing devices to look for real estate. The next one may be the Droid, or the Apple Tablet, or the Kindle, or… whatever is next.
But, what I was and am really skeptical about is consumer-facing mobile, the B2C applications:
I am skeptical about the impact of mobile on real estate, at least as far as a consumer application goes, because mobile has been the Next Big Thing for about as long as I can remember
What I did not have space to talk about is mobile as the future in the B2B market in real estate. Let’s dive in, shall we?
