Notorious R.O.B.

Image: Nick_T at http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicholas_t/

One advantage of long road trips, particularly with say… one’s spouse, is the opportunity to talk without interruption. The car moving down the highway at 75 65 miles per hour (or whatever the legal speed limit is, officer) becomes a sort of isolation chamber without TV, without the kids demanding attention, and without any other distractions.

So it was on a recent trip to San Antonio. Having left the kids home with the grandparents (truth be told, we were sort of asked to leave so they can monopolize the time with The Spawns), Mrs. Notorious and I found ourselves with all this time to talk about things and catch up. Eventually, you run out of the domestic, immediately relevant, personal topics… so being that the Missus has a MBA and some twenty years experience in fashion retail, we got to talking about business.

She raised a complaint, and an ancillary point, that I thought was interesting enough to share, especially with the audience of this blog that tends to be almost all real estate people.

She thought that the retail industry needed to “go back to basics” in a profound and fundamental way.

I agree, but it’s worth understanding what “the basics” are.

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The Seven of Cups Means You're Batting .600!

It’s that time of the year when thoughts turn to chestnuts roasting on an open fire, sleighing through the snow laughing all the way, and making predictions about the future that are likely to be completely wrong. I’m working on that.

But in advance of it, I thought I’d take a look at my track record. In 2009, I made a Top Ten Predictions for 2010 on Inman.com (which you can buy here, though I see not a penny of it, so why I’m promoting it is unclear to me). A year ago I made the following predictions:

10. Social Media Will Divide Between E-Commerce (Can Prove ROI) and PR (Cannot Prove ROI)
9. RPR will reinvent itself
8. A Major Brokerage Company Will Hand the Reins to an Executive Under 40
7. Google Becomes a Real Player in Real Estate
6. Housing market will be worse in 2010 than it was in 2009
5. The New York Jets will once again not win a Superbowl in 2010
4. At least one of the major national real estate search web sites will no longer be around as an independent company.
3. REBarCamp will move closer towards conventional conferences, while conventional conferences will move closer to REBarCamp.
2. A wave of consolidation will start in 2010 within MLS industry.
1. Real estate enterprise CRM will finally make its appearance and start to create competitive advantage for those who have it.

So let’s see how I did.

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Few industries worship innovation as much as real estate does.  It is perhaps the highest compliment to a company or to an individual in real estate to say, “You’re so innovative!”

Thing is, I believe innovation is disruptive.  In fact, I think how innovative something is can be correlated to how destructive it is of older practices.  On that basis, I have a feeling — a hunch really — that Hunch.com is an innovation you’re going to want to watch.

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I happen to agree 100% with my old friend Joel Burslem over at 1000watt on this:

This technology is also a truely democratizing force, meaning your marketing collateral can now compete with the best that Madison Avenue can cook up. In the eyes of consumers, a boutique brokerage can now sit on a level playing field with the big brands with their multi-million dollar ad budgets. No more hokey Handi-cams. Please!

The listing video they use to highlight is an excellent piece of craftsmanship.

I love that the video stars the homeowner; who else would be as passionate about the house, or be as expert on what it’s like to live there?

There’s a second part of this “video is dead; long live cinema” idea.  More after the jump.

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“There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

- Milton Friedman

There are certain topics within the real estate industry that keeps coming back from time to time, like Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees.  The future of REBarCamp, raising the standards of professionalism, broker brands vs. agent brands, and so on. Some topics, you wish would just freakin’ die already (like one might feel about say Freddy Krueger) while other topics, you wish would live on forever like Mick Jagger and Cher.  Although I doubt I’d shed more than a single ironic tear were Jagger and Cher to hang up their spurs and retire finally, so to speak.

One of the more interesting recurring topics is the issue of “transparency”.  I put quotes around that word because it isn’t really clear what is meant by transparency by the different folks who talk about it, but the general notion appears to be that realtors, brokers, MLS’s, etc. ought to make more data and information available to the public in order to (a) drive innovation, (b) benefit consumers, (c) help brokers, (d) all of the above, (e) and so on and so forth.

An excellent recent post on UrbanDigs, the blog of Noah Rosenblatt, raises the issue of transparency once again.  The nice thing here is that because Noah is a real estate agent in the People’s Republic of Manhattan, where a MLS most definitely does not exist, he has a perspective on transparency that is a wee bit different from that of others who work in MLS-enabled markets.

As I read the blog post and the comments that followed, I began wondering if those who are in full-throated support for “transparency” have truly considered the cost of transparency.  This is not to say that transparency is a bad thing; indeed, I tend to argue for greater openness and greater transparency.  But I do so with some awareness, I think, of the costs involved.  Some folks, however, appear to think that transparency, like “social media”, is some sort of a magic bullet that carries no costs at all.

Well, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.  In that spirit, let’s take a moment (or six) to think about transparency, real estate, and the consequences of such.

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Image: Barack Obama, on Flickr

Starting a few years ago, I’ve been hearing a lot about how the Gen-Y or Millenials (people aged anywhere from 18 to 30 today) are going to change everything — but particularly in real estate.

A random sampling of opinions about how the Millenials will affect real estate, from a Google search I just ran, turned up these recent posts and articles:

MILLENNIALS – The New Face of Real Estate:

Text messaging, email, IPods, Facebook and being mobile as ever is a part of the new generation, the Millennial.  The Millennial are the young workers ranging in age between 21 to 29 years old.  They have the potential to create a lasting change in the real estate workplace because of the way they live, communicate and more importantly, the way they view their jobs.

80 Million Reasons to start changing your marketing….Millennials.

What do you think , will typical marketing work to attract someone that is buried in a laptop, ipod, FB, Twitter etc.. and values friendship more than work?

Hear Them Roar: Millennials make up almost a third of the U.S. population, and they will fundamentally change how you do business.

“Real estate agents may wonder why they should care about the Generation Y age group, ages 18 to 30,” Jessica Lautz, a senior research analyst at the National Association of Realtors, wrote on the organization’s website in 2008. “These unique home buyers are the youngest of the home buying segment and are the most likely to purchase a home in the next two years in comparison to any other age group.”

Sustainability, Urbanity, and You: How Millenials will Change the World (and Architecture)

Millennials grew up in suburbia; bland environments dependent on others for mobility. They are entering the adulthood seeking lifestyle: vitality, diversity, and community. But, Millennials are not the only ones who will be driving this sea change from suburban to high quality urban environments. Baby Boomers will soon be retiring by the boat load. Retirement communities in their current form resemble warehouses more than they do the most desirable of retirement “villages”—real communities where retirees can be independent and empowered, such as the Upper East Side and Key West.

And so on and so forth.  If you cared to, I’m sure you can find dozens, hundreds of other musings on the Millenials and how they force real estate professionals to be ever more online, ever more sensitive to these 80 million strong “Generation We” people who care more about walkability and lifestyle than large colonials on three acres, and so on.

The whole drive towards social media’s ascendancy in real estate was fueled in part by the insight — as is clear in the ActiveRain post above — that these Millenials are the FaceBook generation who are natives of the digital realm.

But a couple of recent articles make me wonder just how the Millenials will impact real estate; it may be rather different than what we imagine today.

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There is a viral YouTube video going around right now, a “parody/spoof” of Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind” with Alicia Keys.  Here it is, in case you haven’t seen it:

I understand that the people behind the video, one Pantless Knights, were making a parody.  I hope to God that they’re ridiculing the people being held up as examples of successful entrepreneurs by the media.  The intro in the sidebar hints that may be the case:

This is a Pantless Knights tribute to our favorite entrepreneurs (who are all “new dorks”). It’s a spoof of Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Mind,” from the guys behind Grasshopper.com (thank you!). We made it because there’s a new type of dork that is cooler than ever. Look at tech entrepreneurs, hipsters, Computer Science Barbie – they’re all super popular new dorks! Don’t forget to rate, comment and subscribe!

Trouble is, even if Pantless Knights were ridiculing the hipsters and Computer Science Barbies who flock to the latest get-rich-quick schemes that make up so much of the “Web 2.0/social media” world, there are entirely too many slackoisies in that industry making fools of themselves and cheapening the word “entrepreneur”.

Let me rage properly at these fools.

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On November 6th, at roughly 3:15PM Eastern Standard Time, the National Association of REALTORS declared war on the rest of the real estate industry.  To be fair, NAR probably did not realize that it did so.  Judging by the initial responses, it doesn’t appear to me that most people see what I saw.  But, probably because of my twisted nature and my penchant for focusing on the dark side of human nature, I am predicting nothing short of civil war in the real estate industry going forward unless REALTORS Property Resource (or RPR) in its current form is immediately scrapped.

What brings forth such hyperbole?

RPR, or REALTORS Property Resource, was a project shrouded in secrecy.  Brian Larson’s post of October 19th, 2009 is a pretty good pre-unveiling summary of the questions and concerns around RPR.  Brian Boero’s initial take is a very decent summary of the post-unveiling.  But since Brian is a much nicer, much sunnier, much more positive guy than I am, I believe what you’ll get from Brian is the “Glass Half Full” vision.

Strap in for the darker vision.

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Holy Bloggers, Batman!

Greetings from Las Vegas — I’m not sure what time it is, even though I’ve been fully awake for, oh, a few hours.  But some of the discussions at REBlogWorld 2009 have been so great that I wanted to get something posted now.

One of the more interesting sessions for me personally was the Branding in the Social Age session with luminaries like Jeff Turner (@respres), David Armano (@armano), Todd Carpenter (@tcar), and Ian Lurie (@portentint), moderated by a luminary herself, Nicole Nicolay (@nik_nik).  I thought the insights were interesting, and the brainpower on that panel was impressive.

There was one point, however, which I suppose yours truly raised, that could use some elaboration and explication: multiple brand layers and how they function in social media.  I was genuinely curious what branding experts, especially those from outside our industry, like David and Ian, had to say about the issue — and I don’t know that they understood the issue.  Plus, the inimitable Bill Lublin (@billlublin) had his views on the matter, but I’m uncertain that he understood the context.  So the fault is mine for failing to set the stage adequately and explain precisely what I meant, and why I think this is an issue.

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Okay, so with the comic book discussion sure to be going on (who knew there were so many comics geeks in the RE.net?), let me turn to something I think could be very interesting.  First, view this video:

This is a music video by the trance dance group OceanLab.  But it was edited from videos submitted by OceanLab’s fans.  From the YouTube description:

In November last year Above & Beyond launched a competition offering fans the chance to create the next OceanLab music video for “On A Good Day”. Jono, Tony & Paavo were overwhelmed with the quality and creativity of the entries and the official video has been made using the highlights from the best entries.

The resulting video is beguiling.  Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the track itself is haunting and beautiful.

Where my mind goes wandering is… is this sort of community-created marketing possible, especially in real estate?

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