Bear with me through a short hypothetical exercise…
I’m a consumer looking to move to a new part of town. I have a question, as many in my situation do, about what it’s like to live there.
What to do?
First, I scoot over to Zillow’s real estate advice boards. More than 277,000 question threads are there and it seems to be a pretty vibrant and active community. Top contributor sunnyview has answered over 15,000 questions alone.
Impressive right?
Dig a little deeper into the Neighborhoods topic however and you find yourself quickly overwhelmed by some pretty meaningless chatter.
Noise.
Redfin’s Forums make it a little easier for me. They break things down by metropolitan area, but I still have to wade through over 120,000 open threads.
Too much work. Moving on.
Next I check out Trulia Q&A; Florida Realtor Bill Eckler seems to be the reigning champ there, having personally contributed over 8,900 answers out of a pool of about 140,000 questions.
Enthusiasm like this is commendable – but despite a fantastic interface, it seems that far too many of the threads on Trulia degenerate into a great big Realtor pile-on.
Ugh.
By now, I’m out wandering out on the wider Web and visiting some of the generic Answer portals. Believe me, there are plenty to choose from. And they all suck.
Mahalo, Amazon’s Askville, SMS service ChaCha (which just raised another $20 million in funding) and, of course, the granddaddy of them all – Yahoo! Answers – compete for my attention. But most of them seem to exist solely to sweep up Google Adwords dollars.
None of this is working.
Avoiding the Realtor pile-on
Seems to me that the problem with so many of these services is that they lack the right filters. I don’t want to filter by topic but rather by competency and trust.
Bottom line: Who is going to be answering my question and how do I know they’re not totally full of shit?
My social graph is the most powerful competency filter I have. In real life, if I have a question about plumbing I go to my buddy John who’s an engineer. If I need to find a developer for a new website I’m building, I ask my friend Rob who’s totally dialed in to the tech community. And so on.
The web can amplify this. And herein lies the big opportunity for real estate. A way to leverage your friends and friends of friends in an organized fashion to ask questions and receive quality feedback.
In other words, it’s a way of filtering out the Realtor pile-on, or least only allowing those that I know and trust to jump in.
Quora is a new site that gets us halfway there. Founded in April 2009 by Adam D’Angelo, formerly CTO of Facebook, Quora is an online answers service where the information is contributed, collected and organized by the community.
Importantly, your presence on Quora (mine is here) is built off your Twitter or Facebook profile so logging in brings your entire social graph with you – questions can then be directed to your followers and real names and real identities are then tied to the answers.
Trust is established.
So many questions, so little time
The opportunity to solve this problem is challenging but compelling. Perhaps the answer lies in a Quora-like site for the real estate vertical. Perhaps it’s a Peep.ly-like plugin that serves up connections in an “Ask the Broker” section of your website.
I’m not sure what form it may take yet.
All I know is I have lots of questions, but so far, no answers.
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It’s quirk of your example, but the last place you ought to go to find out what it’s like living in a particular part of town is any site where Realtors dominate, especially as we can’t comment on what a particular part of town is “like”.
To the bigger point, Quora could be the solution. So could digging a little deeper through the search engine results generated by more specific questions to try and identify what it is you really want to know about an area.
Joel, nice find, gonna see how this can play out for us…love this stuff, as I have most of your stuff for over 4 years!
If anyone wants some great answers about Long Beach RE, and in particular “Community” level details, have them visit our New site (A little radical, but amazing. Still workin out kinks so be gentle, only 60 days old, but close to 200 Blog Posts already!)
http://CBCoastalAlliance.com
@CBRELongBEach (@TheRECoach)
Joel, another great post.
The problem you point out is nothing new, it’s just another example of the industry losing control of yet another topic or conversation. Nothing new for our industry.
It’s so easy to be the go-to providers of local information, but realtors don’t want to do it, because they think it’s automatic, and sellers can’t possibly survive without them. Yearight!
How much longer can the keep their heads in the sand before they see that they’ve given up control of a huge chunk of their business, and pretty soon there won’t be anymore chunks to give away…because everything will be gone.
A company like Realogy could easily do what’s needed, but chooses to ignore things. And while the market is still in the tanker, companies like the you mention are under their radar nibbling away at the industry, and it’s only a matter of time before they take a collective chunk. They should send them and the NAR letters thanking them for the opportunity to steal their business.
The gift that keeps on giving
Joel,
No doubt those sites probably send away most folks dissatisfied, for all the reasons you mentioned.
The problem, as someone pointed out is they are over loaded with Realtors. All trying to look like experts while trolling for business. It’s really pretty pathetic.
One site that is NOT is the City-Data forums. If a Realtor tries to get on there and troll for biz, he’s censored…deleted.
It’s just a bunch of people talking about communities, cities, schools, whatever. People that live in the communities.
I go there from time to time to read a few posts, maybe learn something about an area I didn’t know. Sometimes I will post and I’ve had my hand slapped there by a moderator before for sounding too realtor-like!
City-data is very successful but won’t be embraced by Realtors since they really can’t participate in any huge way like the other agent-centric sites.
1000Watt blogs always seem to say exactly what I feel about many things that go on in our industry–and this great article is no exception! I very rarely will post answers (on Trulia, Zillow, etc.) because of all of the above. I also get very tired of someone in Ohio trying to answer what the real estate market is like in Los Altos, Palo Alto, Mountain View, and the rest of the Silicon Valley, or what it’s like in North Los Altos, or the Midtown of Palo Alto. If these sites had filters as you suggested, I would be much more inclined to share my knowledge. For now, it’s all “noise” as you’ve already stated.
Your comment:
“The web can amplify this. And herein lies the big opportunity for real estate. A way to leverage your friends and friends of friends in an organized fashion to ask questions and receive quality feedback.”
I’ve also tried asking questions of my “Likers” on a couple of my Facebook business pages. Low and behold, I’ll get local agents who want to chime in making the folks with whom I would really love to fear from and engage with shy away from the conversation. My only option on this particular forum is to “block” those agents from pages as they pretty much feel it’s okay to take over my wall. Very strange behavior in my humble opinion.
Bottom line–we as an industry must provide useful information to those we reach and quit trying to pee on everyone else’s shrubs as a primal marking of territory. It’s really not flattering!
I went to check out Quora and I did not sign up for an account. I took issue with the following statements with their facebook interaction, “…Quora may post status messages, notes, photos, and videos to my Wall… Quora may access my data when I’m not using the application.”
I hate it when an app posts my activities without my explicit permission on each post. Also I don’t see why they need to access my data when I am not using the program.
I just don’t see how quora will get far with this.
Once again you point out another item that realtors miss out on.
Tell me again-what’s the job of a realtor…overpriced tour guide?
Joel, great article. Glad you highlighted some of the shortcomings of trulia and zillow. 8000+ contributions. Really? That’s amazing. I’ve made more comments in this blog than on trulia or zillow combined and I’ve only done about 4 here. When will the buyer who’s relocating realize that someone that makes that many contributions doesn’t have time to actually practice real estate.
Can you find something for us to make it look like we’re “socially involved ” without actually seeming like we have nothing to do?
Joel: Your title effectively captured my interests, as usual, and your thoughts mirror my own. All too many times the ones who respond on Zillow and Trulia are not the ones most qualified to do so, especially if they are outside of the particular market area. I had hopes that ActiveRain’s Localism might have offered a solution to this problem, but unfortunately, they abandoned the project mid-stream. Perhaps Quora can incorporate a 3rd party testimonial feedback into the loop that would help further establish credibility.
You’re right about the need for some personalized filter of information. Discussion forums are old stuff, using more social network-like platform might be the right way to do this. Anonymous users can (and will) tell you whatever they want and you don’t even know whether they are the people who they claim to be. I’m curious about how this “quora” works, going to check it out..
For a while I was answering local questions on Trulia and Zillow, but realized that it was just taking up too much time. And I could put that local focus into my own blog which I have tried to make more conversational rather than 100% SEO focused (does that make sense?)like 95% of the RE blogs out there.
In my opinion, if those advice givers had spent time on their own blogs then they would have improved the odds when someone “Googles” their community and looked at organic results. Some of the comments that I see on those sites are the perfect length for a blog post, no?
[...] http://www.1000wattconsulting.com/blog/2010/10/with-so-many-real-estate-questions-there-are-too-many... [...]
Cool post! How much stuff did you have to look up in order to write this one? I can tell you put some work in. Che Ore Sono Sarah
Great blog! You make some good points. I do think that people that post on Zillow know the right answer for their question when they see it. Most site users want a straight answer not the industry talking points as replies. They appreciate outside links to solid informational sources and most do not want a pitch.
The quality of the answer is what should be important on any Q/A site. I think that Zillow’s best answer feature and the specific poster feedback that I have gotten makes it clear that most people do know who is totally full of BS and who is there to genuinely help. Agents who understand that get contacts/clients off the Zillow Advice board. I also think that the mix of RE hobbyists, active market followers and professionals offer a diverse point of view that is hard to get anywhere else online. Hopefully, that gives posters the opportunity to get the answer that they seek.
I agree that better filters and alerts would help alert people with knowledge of a subject to specific questions. That process seems to constantly be evolving so hopefully it will continue to bring people together in beneficial ways that allow the exchange of quality information and not just chatter.
Joel,
Business and life are relationship based. If we know the right people and have the right connections we can accomplish most anything. A savvy home buyer should hook up with a great local Realtor instead of hanging out on the forums. They can find a great Realtor by asking friends, family or co-workers for a recommendation. Most everyone knows someone who knows a great Realtor. Why gamble on getting the right answer for an important question about what may be the most expensive and important purchase of your life?
There’s no gamble in getting opinions on a forum since there’s no cost. A savvy buyer already has a good agent. It is the buyers or sellers who are seeking information that benefit most from the broader perspective that a forum offers. Why gamble on an agent that you are not sure about when you are not sure that you are getting the right answer. A fair number of people that end up on Zillow and other RE forums like Trulia are often there because their local agent’s advice is not ringing true or they want information that their local agent has not provided if they have one.
Forums are a great way to prescreen your agent. There is no pressure, you can call them on your terms and you can view their forum history to see if they put their money where their profile is. Recently, Zillow has implemented agent reviews so hopefully people that do not know a good agent or have one on a referral can prescreen agents even further based on their past client reviews online. I think that more information benefits every consumer.
[...] while there are no shortage of outlets on the Web to ask a real estate related question, in my mind none of them are great. Redfin has its forums. Trulia has its Q&A section. On Zillow, they call it [...]