The Zillow/Yahoo partnership announced last July went live. Zillow now supplies the listings for Yahoo! Real Estate and sells the ads. Yahoo! effectively punted. No doubt, this is a big deal that extends Zillow’s reach significantly. It will be interesting to see whether that broader reach will translate into significantly more viable leads to agent and broker advertisers.
I am also feeling just a little bummed that Yahoo! – perhaps the most screwed up company in the online world right now – should be such a “big deal” in real estate. But hey, I guess I should be used to real estate’s rather unexalted profile!
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In the Real Estate Software that Doesn’t Suck category… FBS Data Systems, an MLS software provider, released an IDX plugin for WordPress and an API for developers capable of implementing a more custom solution for clients. It’s pretty slick. I’d like to see more IDX providers – a group notorious for challenging user interface design – follow suit.
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ReadWriteWeb reported on a soon-to-launch start up called Omniar that’s set to release a new “visual search” technology that may be relevant in real estate. In fact, real estate is one of the use cases they tease in their demo video. While Augmented Reality may have received more buzz than it deserved in 2009 and 2010, and the meaningful use cases for QR codes remain opaque, this lights up some more concrete possibilities.
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John Heithaus, Chief Marketing Officer at MRIS, the nation’s largest MLS, wrote a provocative piece wherein he asks the real estate industry to consider emerging from carbon freeze to come to grips with the fact that its listing data is strewn about the web like birdseed at the city park. This is an old battle – one that waxes and wanes but never ends. I’d like to see a climactic charge myself.
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Any Realtor with a Twitter account should absorb fully the lesson imparted by the Kenneth Cole Egypt tweet fiasco. I still see too many “Just back from Panda Express, now eating a pint of ice cream – LOL!” tweets from real estate professionals. Please, for the love of all that is sacred about housing, think before you publish!
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A great read from the Harvard Business Review blog this week – The new calculus of competition. The money quote “Does your latest, greatest snoozer of a product (service, business, experience) actually make people happier? (Really? Can you prove it?)”. I’ve thought for a while that the online real estate experience has become thoroughly joyless. Can you think of an online real estate site that’s fun to use? That makes you happy? This is something we’re going to be working on this year.
Enjoy the weekend!
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I’m not convinced that Yahoo is a big deal in real estate. Sure, they can drive a lot of traffic to pages on the real estate part of their sure by running news about Ashton Kutcher’s home for sale, but this is really weak traffic compared to what brokers have on their sites. Zillow does this as well. It’s good for press releases and Comscore numbers, but doesn’t likely convert to leads as the rates of sites focused more directly on attracting in-market buyers and sellers.
Brian, everything about real estate “marketing” is joyless. It’s all horrible. Just look at any listing and ask yourself if there’s anything of value that would make a viewer say WOW!. Realtors think it’s great, and think that everyone sees things the way they do. That’s so far from the truth.
Another past article in Harvard Business Review, pointed out that it’s a mistake for salespeople to believe that they think like consumers, and that’s what realtors do wrong. The I dusty looks at a listing and sees something wonderful, while consumers look at it and wonder who the heck wrote this crap., and they look at the low res pictus and think the same. And raptors think it’s a gt thing to spend their weekends touring homes with buyers, and that they (buyers) feel the same. But there isn’t a buyer around who feels the same way. The isn’t anyone I know thats happy spending all the time they have to with a realtor.
If it takes articles talking about Ashton Kutchers home to drive traffic to your site, what’s wrong with that. Obviously consumers love it, so why not give them what they want. Brokers don’t.
Why can’t brokerage see the business through the eyes of the of consumers…what are they scared of?
Steve,
Great point that the team here at ArdynnPR has been taking a very close look at recently. What we are finding is that consumer expectations can and do vary greatly from what REALTORS are delivering. Many would rather try selling themselves because the faIth isn’t there.
@Steve, my take is that brokers with great websites are doing better than many understand. The traffic they receive within their local markets is quite large. And it consists of people familiar with their brands, and who are in the market to buy/sell a home. That is far different from people who have 10 seconds of interest in a celebrity’s home that’s hyped up on the homepage of Yahoo.com. The latter is good for bumping up unique visitor stats, but is nowhere near as valuable as the traffic brokers with quality sites earn.
Ed, the point Brian brings up with the Harvard BR article is ….are there any brokerage sites out there that are exciting for buyersband sellers to go to? I have yet to find one. Sure some may be better than others, but that wasn’t the point. What’s “good enough” for brokers isn’t in-sync with the consumers pov.
@Steve, I think the Harvard BR (or, perhaps Brian’s take on it) is asking the wrong question. Celebrity home gawking may be fun, but it isn’t solving a property search problem.
Craigslist isn’t exactly fun to use, but it does solve a problem (although not as well as real estate sites that make it easy for people to find what they can afford in a location that interests them).
Ed, so continue “marketing” you firm and your listings the same exact boring way that you have for decades. It’s not what excites consumers…just ask them. Better yet, just look around you at what successful companies are doing to market themselves and their products, it it won’t look anything like what brokerage / realtors do. Stay asleep at the wheel and eventually someone will steal your business. It’s an entire industry that keeps ignoring the obvious. If only you had the ability to see it. It’s time for consumers to get what they want and need, not what you you want them to have
@Steve, I think we’d both agree that the industry needs to continually improve, but we seem to differ regarding our visions for the future. I’m not sure how to react to statements like “It’s an entire industry that keeps ignoring the obvious.” While there are plenty of people and businesses that are perfectly willing to ignore obvious visions for a better way to do things, surely someone can figure out how to do things better?
I like to think that the work I do is designed to get consumers what they want and need. Statistically, people keep coming back to the sites I work on in larger and larger numbers, which leads me to believe that they find the sites valuable enough to visit over other sites that are only a click away. And, they’re coming back to research their next home purchase – not to look at the latest price reduction to Ashton Kutcher’s home. AKA, qualified traffic.
This isn’t suggesting that real estate search is a solved problem, or that there is a single right way to do things. However, I do think that companies who focus on attracting the right type of traffic, rather than being mislead by inflated traffic stats, are going to continue to succeed online.