Spencer Rascoff is ZIllow’s chief operating officer. A smart guy I respect.
He co-founded Hotwire and was part of Expedia’s management team.
Now, he’s explaining the foreclosure process to homebuyers and sellers.
He’s doing it clearly, credibly and in a manner that at once plays off and enhances the Zillow brand. And he’s offering up a nice little content morsel for the search engines.
Take a look:
If you’re a broker and you’re not doing this sort of thing, you have no right to complain about Zillow kicking your butt on Google, getting their chief economist quoted in your local newspaper, or conditioning the structure of your agents’ listing presentations.
Surrender
I know some brokers who think of themselves as being in the recruiting business. Others place themselves in the training business. But it is a surprisingly small number who are indisputably in the real estate business.
To be in the real estate business, you must know every square foot of your marketplace. You must be able to answer any question posed by a homebuyer or seller with the easy confidence of the Old Spice Guy.
And sitting in front of a camera for two minutes to explain foreclosure clearly and credibly should be about as challenging as brushing your teeth.
You could get away with not being in the real estate business ten years ago. Sins of neglect were washed away by the cool waters of prosperity. Recruit, rinse, repeat.
Today? Not being in the real estate business is senseless surrender.
Dust in the wind
They say that on a windy day, you can hear the erosion of the Great Sphinx at Giza – the chips of human effort flying off with the wind. So it is with the brokerage that does not place accretive energy behind its value proposition to, and credibility with, buyers and sellers.
“But we serve two masters – the consumer and the agent”
“I suffer from channel conflict.”
“The agent is the customer.”
Cling to these maxims and watch your achievement fade, with every passing day, with every blog post or video from someone else, in every moment you let the gap between you and the marketplace you depend on widen, into a history no one will even pause to appreciate.
You, $500, and the things you know
Good for Spencer. I mean that. He spent 15 minutes in front of a $500 camera talking about something people who come to his web site care about.
Is that too much to ask? More than you are willing to pay to give expression to the knowledge you have stored between your ears?
Don’t let it be too much to ask.
If you’ve got the goods, get into the real estate business.
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Great post Brian! Love the video by Spencer, and completely agree on the power of video…actually, useful video with information, & good content, & Hyper sensitive.
We currently have over 150 videos on our site (in just 26 days) that help the consumer create a real life portrait of what living in Long Beach is like. My Agents contribute some, Agents from other companies do, and the public as well. It is our plan to have have 1,000′s of videos that accurately describe, from a very local aspect, everything about living in this amazing city!
Stay Blogging My Friends!
@CBRELongBeach
Thanks for the shout-out Brian. We’re going to do a lot more of these at Zillow. In fact, I shot two more videos this morning. It takes just a few minutes, and you’re right that they can have an impact.
I agree — agents and brokers should be doing more of this type of thing!
It’s a great video Spencer – one production tip. Turn your phone to airplane mode before you start shooting and you’ll lose the interference in your audio. I learned the hard way myself.
Keep it up!
Great tip Joel. Thank you!
Brian,
Great post, and totally agree. That’s why we made http://plymouth-real-estate.us/2010/03/purpose-of-a-home-inspection/#comments and
http://p1fran.com/2010/03/code-of-ethics-get-your-radon-on/.
We also address the “direction of branding” issue at http://p1fran.com/2010/05/p1-branding-differentiation/. We agree that – gasp! – the CLIENT is the actual client, not, not, NOT the realtor. This is a MAJOR reason most of the big brands are in turmoil right now…as evidenced by our video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka8GaXU2t2w.
Sorry for all the links, but we actually refer to ourselves as “1000Watt Real Estate” internally (that’s NOT a joke), so we love to show our congruence with the great thinking we see from you, Joel and Marc every chance we get!
You guys are THE PREMIER Think Tank in real estate. Keep on rocking!
Your #1 Fan,
Michael
Steve deGuzman of Rehava and I were talking last week. Steve has done a great job transitioning Rehava into a virtual office and moving on to bigger things. The key was to focus on the customer, the buyer and seller.
When you do this, things just fall into place.
Nice job Spencer. I need to jump in and spend more time on my Zillow account.
Michael -
Love the video. And thank you for the kind words.
Brian
Brian,
Good post, excellent points.
It’s amazing to me how many agents and brokerages just have no idea whatsoever.
Here’s another big-picture-clueless-item: while emulating certain good things about Zillow & Realtor.com may be a good idea, these big box MLS aggregrators actually COMPETE against brokers and realtors for leads.
While this big rub exists, agents are asked to put Zillow WP Widgets on their sites, and god know what else. And many do, and comment on how great it is!
It’s all so unreal.
Only in real estate could you pull it off.
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Totally agree, video is super important. We significantly changed how we did business a few years ago and began totally focusing on video and helping agents get their videos out there. Video is the closest thing to meeting someone in real life.
I 100% agree with this article, I believe video is the way to the future. I actually haven’t produced my 1st video, so I feel I’m behind at this point, but that will change within the next few weeks.
Great post, guys! cool video too, however, i think it’s hard to explain to consumer everything they’d like to know about short sales and foreclosures in just 3 minutes. So, it’s good, but not a whole lot of new deep information. However, great for folks who don’t even know what a short sale is. I think it’s moving to where consumer not only wants to get information, but to get a quality information.
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