Greg Robertson will always be known to me as the guy who combined Fabio and an hourly cash drop (literally bills falling from the ceiling) in the eNeighborhoods booth at NAR a few years ago. Pure genius. I don't think I've met Dan Woolley.
Now they are the Dwellicious Guys.
Dwellicious — which has received a lot of play in an out of real estate the past few weeks — is a social bookmarking application focused on property listings. User can save listings from a bunch of sites in one place. Every listing is complemented by data piped in through third-party APIs.
I really like this idea. Here's why:
People start their home search online and browse for about two months before even contacting a Realtor.
The search process, particularly for younger users, is often collaborative.
Agents need a more efficient way of surfacing buyer preferences in this market.
Most sites have a less than all of the listings.
Home search is harder than it should be.
Dwellicious hits on all of these issues.
Think of it as a "shopping cart" for listings. This metaphor works really well even if we can't complete it in the real estate transaction.
I have thought for some time that The "my account" feature on sites like Trulia, Realtor.com and other listings sites — long considered an ancillary utility — would emerge as a central piece of the online real estate experience, functioning as something of a home base online during the search process. You can see that many of these sites have put more effort into this feature lately.
The trouble with this is that the home base sits within the walls of one particular site. If users want to gather information from other places (a behavior we should expect according to NAR research) they need to throw it in another bucket or buckets.
Dwellicious is the meta-bucket.
For those of in the industry, this is something of a delicious irony. Listings aggregators threw an umbrella over brokers; Dwellicious, if it is adopted widely by consumers, does the same to the big listings sites, stepping in front of them as perhaps the first point of interaction.
We'll see. The idea rocks. Building a user base is the tricky part. But these guys know what they're doing.
– Brian Boero
Local, Mobile, Social and the future of real estate
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Seems like this tool will require the consumer to register with the site in order to create her 'shopping cart'. It's one more bit of proof that folks developing online services are not afraid of requiring registration, and that consumers who want valuable content and services are willing to register.
Brian I could not agree more as a consumer this is a great tool and i would have no problem registering in order to bookmark the properties that interest me in the area i am interested in living.
Dwellicious does look pretty cool. I like the idea too, but… (and here comes the doomsayer part of my personality)… I do wonder what the adoption will be when Dwellicious goes fully public.
I mean, del.icio.us (now delicious.com) passed 2 million registered users in 2007, four years after its founding. 2m registered users is not 2m active users, of course, but still.
2 million registered users spread out over the entire world. What % of them are Americans? I don't know, but let's just go with 75% for the sake of it. That means 1.5m Americans are using Delicious — which, arguably, has a far wider applicability and general utility.
If there are 300 million Americans, 1.5m represents 0.5% of the population, for a tool that is not limited to real estate for bookmarking purposes. This is after four years.
Does this not give you pause regarding whether dwellicious would actually be widely adopted by consumers?
-rsh
Thanks Brian for a great post. As we get closer to our official launch (January 7th 2009 at Inman Real Estate Connect in NYC), we have been getting more comments regarding the question of whether consumers will widely adopt our new site, Dwellicious.
A couple comments:
Our revenue model is not dependent on traffic to the site.
We are launching a "Pro" version of the web application which we will sell on a subscription basis to real estate agents. We believe Dwellicious will be a great tool for real estate professionals to engage with today's buyers and sellers (mostly by pulling them in).
This is a world that Dan and I are completely comfortable in. eNeighborhoods was really the first real estate company to offer subscription based software (first on monthly CD-ROMs in the mail then via updates over the web). So we know the agent/broker subscription business inside and out.
Social media is a hot topic (and rising) in real estate right now. We also hope to capitalize on this by giving agents useful tools that incorporate "Web 2.0" design and functionality.
Our focus is on creating great tools real estate professionals will find useful in their business. That is a tough business to be in, but much more pragmatic than creating the next big thing. But maybe, just maybe… ; )
gr
thanks for the comments. Rob, you and I are thinking along the same lines here. I give these guys good odds because, a.) I think what they've created is genuinely useful, and b.) they actually know the real estate industry and how to sell into it.
Brian
@Brian – absolutely. The product is sweet, the idea is great… just wonder if the market is big enough to sustain a business. For their sake, I hope so.
-rsh
I like the idea because it seems to mirror the user experience for bookmarking sites– making adoption much more likely.
There is no need to fiddle with a Trulia or Zillow acct and a bunch of others to do what should be a simple clip and save operation.
Good luck to the lads.
Very nice.
I like the angle for Real estate agents as they could use this feature on behalf of their clients.
Keeping track of clients listings is the buyer's agent corrollary to seller agents sending clients' listings to listhub
The former is a service for buyers the latter for seller.
These tools and their proper use show an engaged real estate agent.
Cool concept…but is there that much interest in sharing your home shopping with others?
And what ever happened to Delicious? Does anyone use it anymore? I haven’t heard about it in years to be honest.
A lot of these Web 2.0 technologies come and go so fast that the majority of the web population doesn’t ever notice, largely because they aren’t necessities, just cool widgets.
Dwellicious does look pretty cool. I like the idea too, but… (and here comes the doomsayer part of my personality)… I do wonder what the adoption will be when Dwellicious goes fully public.
I mean, del.icio.us (now delicious.com) passed 2 million registered users in 2007, four years after its founding. 2m registered users is not 2m active users, of course, but still.
2 million registered users spread out over the entire world. What % of them are Americans? I don't know, but let's just go with 75% for the sake of it. That means 1.5m Americans are using Delicious — which, arguably, has a far wider applicability and general utility.
If there are 300 million Americans, 1.5m represents 0.5% of the population, for a tool that is not limited to real estate for bookmarking purposes. This is after four years.
Does this not give you pause regarding whether dwellicious would actually be widely adopted by consumers?
-rsh