Notorious R.O.B.

The average denizen of the RE.net cybercafe — that includes you, since you’re reading this on a blog — knows that the hot topic du jour is syndication. I wrote about it here and here already, but frankly, have been talking about this issue for quite some time. And influential bloggers like Jay Thompson and Kris Berg have weighed in, and Facebook groups are all over this issue.

And I’ve gotten a couple of phone calls, a number of emails, and Facebook messages and such debating my one critical issue with me. I wrote that the issue here isn’t syndication, which is more or less dead in its current form, but IDX. And that one cannot be against syndication but for IDX. Jay Thompson agreed, while Kris Berg (to take but one example) disagreed.

So I’d like to explore this connection more, to clarify why the distinction between syndication and IDX does not, and cannot, hold. And what that then means for the future of the industry, by connecting a couple of dots.

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It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The recently concluded NAR Convention in Anaheim that is. On the one hand, it was great to see old friends, make new friends, and engage in some wonderful conversations about everything from IDX Policy to branding to dating habits of college students. On the other hand, the entire convention was infused with an air of obstinate unreality, as if we all were jewel-bedecked revelers on The Titanic, dancing the night way sipping on champagne….

Based on hallway conversations, based on drunken whispers at industry parties, and based on what I’ve read and heard over the past few months, I believe there is an extinction-level event approaching the real estate industry. And all of the official groups, all of the powers that be, have failed to address it. So I will.

There is, I believe, a real chance that in the next three to six months, we will see the splintering of the foundation of the industry: the MLS and the Associations. The world that comes next, a world without the Multiple Listing Service, will be one filled with unintended consequences.

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So Zillow buys up IDX provider, Diverse Solutions.

First of all, congratulations to Justin LaJoie and the rest of the team at Diverse Solutions, as well as to Spencer Rascoff and the folks over at Zillow. I don’t know what the real motivations behind the acquisition were, but at a minimum, you can say that two great teams of real estate technology people are joining forces.

Second, I don’t have a whole lot of time to devote to deconstructing the Zillow acquisition of Diverse Solutions, but did want to present a quick reaction from three different perspectives: Friendly, Hostile, and Mine. I suspect most people’s response to the acquisition will fall into one of the first two buckets, while a very small minority (of one person perhaps) will fall into the third.

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Team Zillow in Times Square for IPO.

As I’m sure you all have heard by now, Zillow has gone public this morning and at least the first day’s worth of trading has been beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. Zillow priced its offering at $20 per share, way above the original $12-14 range, and in immediate trading, the stock went as high as $60. It is unknown where it will settle, but… that’s now a game for Wall Street traders.

I did have a quick question for y’all, though, because some of you are really smart folks in the real estate industry. This paragraph from GigaOM:

And all this from a company that has yet to turn a profit. Zillow made nearly $30.5 million in revenue in 2010, but ultimately posted a net loss of about $6.8 million for the year, according to regulatory filings. Ostensibly, the $70 million Zillow made in Wednesday morning’s IPO will be put toward initiatives that will boost the business’ bottom line.

So… what initiatives was Zillow unable to do in the past to boost the bottom line that it will now be able to do with an extra $70 million in funding? How do you think Spencer and team will spend that money to improve profitability?

Marketing? Technology? More salespeople? What would Zillow have to do to become more valuable/extract more money from the real estate broker/agent?

Speculate away! I doubt we’ll get authoritative answers from anyone at NASDAQ: Z since those are forward-looking statements. I’m curious what the community thinks these initiatives will be.

-rsh

I’m going to try to do a bit of a stream-of-consciousness “live-blog” here at Houston Association of REALTORS Real Estate Investment Symposium.  I put that in quotes because (a) I’m distracted often, and (b) the bandwidth isn’t the best off my little MiFi device.

I’ve already missed a couple of the early presentations from Zillow, Google, and Move, but a couple of interesting things from this morning.

Sam Sebastian from Google suggests that the future of real estate broker is as an ‘information broker’; I asked if he could elaborate on that, since the experience of the past ten or so years is the opposite: information that used to be held by realtors is now all over the public via the Internet.  Isn’t the trend more and more towards realtors becoming customer service people rather than information brokers?

The answer — and it’s a good one — basically seems to be (at least interpreting Sam) that by “information broker” he meant something more like an analyst.  That the future of the realtor is as an interpreter of all of the information and data that’s all over the place on the Internet.

Interestingly, Google’s search on real estate terms is up 20% year over year, despite the terrible market.  Incidentally, I think that’s contradictory to the experience of the other big real estate websites (or at least used to be a few years back), but I haven’t seen recent stats.

[EDIT: This is getting very long, so it continues after the fold.  And forgive me for the ugliness of the post; it's the nature of a "live-blog".]

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Hmmm... now, carry the two... square root of mouse...

From the lovely and talented Sara Bonert (@sbonert) over at Zillow blog, I learn that Zillow gets 55% of all California buyers:

Over half (55%) of those who reported using the Internet as a tool in the home buying process used Zillow. Realtor.com continued to be the most used site as 89% of buyers used it; with individual real estate company sites at 81%; individual real estate sites were used 66% of the time. Yahoo! Real Estate scored with 53% and Craigslist was at 49%.

I wonder (aloud) on the comments and on Twitter whether this is a good thing for Zillow, seeing as how they’re coming in fourth out of six options, behind Realtor.com (89%), individual brokerage sites (81%), and individual agent sites (66%).

The dashing and charismatic David Gibbons (@davidgibbons) responds:

@robhahn dude, you are not serious … try answer this … if you own a broker site do you get 81% of buyers? [hint: no, but Z does get 55%]

David does have a point.  But I fear 140 characters can’t do justice to my point.  So here goes.  CAVEAT: MASSIVE UNSUPPORTED SPECULATION FOLLOWS BELOW THE FOLD.

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I believe in zeitgeist.  Things seem to happen in groups, where one conversation is followed by another on a similar vein.

Last night, I have a great conversation with Stacey Harmon about a presentation she’s giving to realtors on the value of social media for real estate.  We explore the difference between branding and lead generation, based on this post of mine on branding and social media that Stacey found interesting.

Then today, I see this epic video blog by David Gibbons of Zillow — a response to this post by Courtney Cooper — on the topic of whether “Blogging is Dead”.  The video itself is below:

The gist of David’s video — which, sadly has no transcript and no bite-sized snippets I can post — is as follows:

• It isn’t enough to have a blog in 2009; you need to have a remarkable blog.
• Blogs require customers come to you in order for it to be useful as a marketing vehicle.
• Are home buyers and home sellers spending their online time on your blog?  If not, rethink.
• Most realtors aren’t great writers.
• The status-sphere, specifically twitter, is more important for conversation.  Photos, videos, and status updates on Facebook are becoming more effective.
• David’s noticed that starting around February of 2009, conversations on Twitter and Facebook started to exceed conversations via blog.
• Think way beyond blogs; look to other channels elsewhere on the Internet for people with real estate problems to solve.

There’s actually a lot more so I urge you to watch the whole thing.

David is a smart guy and he knows the Internet and social media marketing, so when he declares blogs to be 2008, and the “statussphere” to be more important to online marketing and conversation, it’s something to take seriously.  I happen to think he’s right in many respects, but due to a critical confusion, taking David’s advice at face value could be a bad thing.  The key is to understand the difference between branding and lead generation in your marketing efforts.

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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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Eric Blackwell of Bloodhound picks up on this story that Zillow has entered into a relationship with a number of newspapers and asks a series of pointed questions. The comments section has some hot and heavy action going on therein, and it makes for an entertaining read.

I saw this deal cross the news earlier as well, and thought it was interesting on many fronts. For one thing, unless I’m very mistaken about the nature of the deal, it simply means a co-marketing arrangement where the partners simply add ammunition to their sales teams:

The agreement expands the network to include display non-real estate related advertising. Greg Schwartz, vice president of advertising sales at Zillow, said the Web site will focus on “moving-specific” advertisers like home improvement and furniture companies in search of national coverage. Meanwhile, newspapers, such as the San Francisco Chronicle, for example, can offer a furniture retailer additional coverage through Zillow’s San Francisco channel.

So a ad sales guy sitting in the LA Times office can sell a million impressions on Zillow.com, and a Zillow sales person can sell Home Depot on a package deal of Zillow ads plus say 150 newspaper ads.

It isn’t clear whether this covers only online, or print also, but either way, all we’re talking about here is a “Hey, you can sell my stuff, and I can sell yours” deal. Makes a lot of sense to me without a tremendous amount of downside.

Now, David G. from Zillow goes on to say in the comments of the Bloodhound post above that:

Today’s announcement relates to a large advertising network advertising for reaching real estate consumers but there are also technology and content aspects to these partnerships. Later this year, Zillow will begin to power the online real estate sections of our newspaper partners’ websites. And listing content is already pushed to Zillow via newspapers that are selling featured listings on the site.

This tidbit is interesting as well. Because as it happens, there is an almost exact parallel on this play that might prove illuminating (or not).

Cityfeet.com did this exact play in commercial real estate a few years ago. They went out and signed up newspaper partners, powering the online real estate sections of these newspapers for commercial real estate search. I’m guessing that Cityfeet couldn’t get the online residential real estate sections, because those were too closely connected to major revenue centers for the newspapers. That Zillow was able to wrest those away from the newspapers is extraordinary. And extraordinarily interesting as commentary about the newspaper business.

It appears that newspapers are headed for some sort of a cliff.

That's a double black-diamond slope, son!

The news industry is panicking, to say the least:

The new bad news is the decline in online revenues.

In the best of times, online never contributed more than 10% of most publishers’ total revenues, but with double-digit growth, it was the sole bright spot in the middle years of the decade, holding the promise that interactive revenues might some day make up the losses on the print side.

Unfortunately, most of the growth in the online revenues was due to “up-sells” from print classified listings. As the volume of print listings declines at an ever-faster pace, that means there are fewer opportunities for online “up-sells.”

Considering that real estate advertising in newspapers fell by a whopping 36% in Q2, if online advertising also fell for newspapers, it isn’t clear that there is a sustainable business here for the dead-tree media companies.

So… Cityfeet couldn’t wrest away residential real estate sections from newspapers. Zillow did. In large part, this is because Zillow is many times larger and better funded than Cityfeet ever was.

However, let’s pause a moment and consider this.

• Newspapers lose 36% of real estate ad sales.

• Newspapers lose online ad sales for first time in years.

• Newspapers do a deal with Zillow that is essentially “We take 50% commission for selling your ad space, Zillow.”

• Zillow stands ready to “power newspaper real estate sections” — meaning all of that traffic probably goes to Zillow.

This looks like a total abdication of the real estate space by the newspaper industry, at least to me.

While that’s a big win for Zillow, I have to sound a cautionary note.

Cityfeet, you see, sputtered along for a couple of years before getting bought by Loopnet for $15m. (Since Cityfeet at the time boasted 100 newspaper relationships, including the big names like New York Times, Boston Globe, and the like, that means each relationship was worth about $150,000. Maybe. It isn’t yet clear that Loopnet has made back its $15m investment in Cityfeet.) The reason, quite simply, was that the brokers and agents who listed on Cityfeet were not seeing a lot of traction. Newspaper readers and newspaper website visitors tend not to be serious consumers for commercial real estate.

Now, given the differences between commercial and residential real estate, this may not be a problem for Zillow. 80% of commercial buyers/lessees do not start their search on the Web, for one example. But this should sound some warning gongs:

“This partnership allows advertisers with our papers to reach not only local real estate consumers who live in particular markets, but also consumers who may be moving to particular markets, via their searches on Zillow.com,” Lincoln Millstein, senior vice president of Hearst Newspapers, said in statement. “This is a significant opportunity for advertisers to target a very large number of consumers on the verge of major home-related commerce.”

Um, Lincoln… I don’t know how to break this to ya but… I doubt that visitors to Zillow.com can be described as being “on the verge of major home-related commerce.” Maybe Zillow has statistics that prove me wrong, which I would welcome, but going to a Zillow or Trulia or any of the major consumer real estate websites strikes me as merely the first step in a fairly long journey that may or may not end in “major home-related commerce”. If by “being on the verge”, Lincoln Millstein meant “within three to six months” then his expectations are properly set. If he means more like, “a matter of weeks”, I think he might be disappointed.

And his advertisers might be disappointed. Will consumers remember seeing some ad for a mortgage product on Zillow.com three months later as they’re finally sitting down with their realtor and going over mortgage paperwork? I really, really doubt that one.

As with all prognostications, I might be dead wrong on this one. But all in all, I’m not sure I see this major win here that the newspapers and Zillow would like us to see. Time will tell, but the trends are not encouraging for either party.

-rsh

Whatever do you suppose this is?

Zillow is a living, growing database of all homes — not just homes for sale (we currently have data on more than 80 million homes). More than 1.3 million owners have claimed their homes on Zillow and many have updated their home facts.

Kudos to Zillow for opening up their API’s.  One can quibble with Zillow (for example, their neighborhood data, which appears to be… let’s say odd…) but the decision as a whole is brilliant.

Just add Offers of Compensation and what do you get?

-rsh