1000watt blog

A short Flash this week. Yes, Facebook went public, and the NAR Mid-Year meetings happened in DC, but where I sat things were pretty quiet.

So I’ll offer up just a few things that got me thinking as they streamed by…

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The updated Bing is worth a close look. Make sure to login with your Facebook account.

Whereas the “Google plus your world” mess feels like all my loose acquaintances have invited themselves over for dinner on a weeknight, Bing’s “search with friends” feature allows me to interact with them only when I want to. They’re there in a little drawer I can pull out if I want to go beyond the blue links.

This would be an interesting angle for social integrations with home search. Zillow’s play here, Neighborhood Advice, is pretty amazing, but I’m not sure I need to see that my sister’s insurance agent checked-in to my neighborhood sushi place by default on a search results page.

I want to hide my connections while searching homes until I decide I really need them.

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I hate to quote our own blog posts, but the comments from Buyfolio’s Susan Daimler in her interview with Joel are really worth thinking about.

This, for example:

“If you looked at airline tickets on United.com, would you want a United rep calling you 5 minutes later – to ask you again, where and when you wanted to go? Yet, that’s the first instinct of a real estate agent who gets an online lead: I’ve got to call him/her. The industry needs to embrace that great customer service can be delivered in the online domain and that is actually what many homebuyers want. And no, we’re not talking about emails.”

There’s a big opportunity – and, really, an imperative – here. Buyfolio is chasing it from a buyer/agent collaboration angle; DreamPro (which launched just last week) is doing it with a focus on mobile; Cartavi is on it with a document management focus.

I think there’s room for plenty more.

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I spent time digging deeply into analytics with a couple big brokers this week. This reminded me of something that is frequently missed when discussing listings, distribution and lead-gen:

Leads don’t just lead to business for a broker, but in many cases they are a business for a broker.

If you think broker angst about syndication is irrational or retrograde, you’re missing this reality.

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I’m thinking there’s a listing feedback app in here somewhere. Seriously.

Enjoy the weekend.

We are pleased to announce that Jessica Swesey has joined 1000watt.

Jessica will be helping us with a bunch of client projects, with a special focus on content development, content strategy, and copywriting.

If you’ve been around the industry for a while, you may remember Jessica as Managing Editor at Inman News. Joel, Marc and I all had the pleasure of working with her there. Since then, she’s run content strategy for a national consumer site and served as managing editor at a digital communications firm.

Jessica is a gifted writer and understands the power of content to engage, entertain, convert and spur conversation.

Good writing, and quality content in any medium, is something many of our clients very much need. So it’s a great match.

We have long subscribed to the maxim, repeated often over the past few years, that every company is now a media company. This is particularly true in real estate, where brand differentiation is difficult yet the potential for content-driven marketing is especially rich.

Real estate brands that get this will be real estate brands that endure. We can now help more of them.

Jessica will also be writing here on 1000watt Blog and helping us with the marketing effort for our new Nudge application.

Welcome Jessica!

April 1, 1999.

After signing up to “receive my newsletter” on countless agent Websites throughout March, my inbox was filled to the brim on April 1st.

Each email contained a Realty Times Newsletter.

Each included the same exact content.

The content was irrelevant. Not location-specific. And completely impersonal. All the things great marketing isn’t.

But the agents who bought this newsletter product weren’t told this. They were sold on the idea that…

Touching people with anything is better than nothing

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We released a new indicator for Nudge, our marketing app, this week. It communicates the degree to which distressed properties play into local market forces. Check it out.

Many more of these to come.

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The public online real estate players reported Q1 results this week.

Here are some quick impressions:

Market Leader (Details)

• Revenue is up and losses are down. The company has stabilized. I wonder, through, how much of the revenue increase was bought through the acquisition of Sharper Agent and Realestate.com and how much was organic?

• The company’s strategy is to sell through big franchise channels, and they’re doing well there – lining up Keller Williams, Century 21 and Better Homes and Gardens in the past year. But while the KW deal came with some nice up-front cash, it will be interesting to see if the brand channel has the sales power it used to have.

Zillow (Details)

• Wow, pretty bitchin’ all the way around. $90M run rate, solid EBITDA, and direct customer relationships with 18,616 agents.

• Spending roughly half your cash to buy a company like Rent Juice signals maximum confidence in future operating and stock performance (which, incidentally, at the moment of this writing, has cracked $40 for the first time since the IPO spike and fall).

• The company is positioning the Rent Juice acquisition as a strategic play into the rentals market, which surely it is. But this also strikes me as a move towards more customer share with Realtors, many of whom are trying to expand their practice to rentals in light of market changes. Rent Juice is also a great piece of software – one that could be bent toward more Realtor-focused purposes.

Move (Details)

• They’re still hanging at that $180M rate, though company projections for the year have it approaching the $200M mark again.

• The company is seeing growth in new products, and the Top Producer business is stabilizing as new features are released (including a mobile HTML 5 version).

• It’s hard for a company that has been public for almost 15 years to match the sizzle of the Zillow story, but let’s not forget that Move has many more agent customers than any of their online competitors, far fewer data vulnerabilities, and $95 million in cash.

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The GoodLife Team, a small brokerage in Austin, pulled its listings from Trulia.

This company gets the web and is anything but retrograde in its thinking about online advertising. So this move is instructive.

They acted because Trulia placed ads from competing agents on GoodLife Team listings even though The GoodLife Team was a paying Trulia advertiser. That violates my “everyone be cool” approach to syndication, but the Good Life Team’s reasoning was still more principled.

It seems they have a brand standard that requires listing agents to respond to inquiries within five minutes. An agent buying ads on their listings is bound by no such requirement, therefore undermining the standard from the sellers’ point of view. Trulia wasn’t willing to pull the other agents’ ads, so pulling the listings was the only play for the Good Life Team to make.

Straw men and red herrings litter the syndication debate, but I buy the Good Life Team’s position here. Good for them.

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In related news, Trulia launched a mobile ad program this week. Makes a lot of sense, and it looks great. But if you thought the tension over ads on the big screen was bad…

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This is interesting: 42 Floors, a new commercial real estate search site, released something they’re calling Showroom.

The headline reads, “So you’ve found a great office, we know you’ll need ________”

It’s a small directory, really. But the positioning here is compelling.

A home purchase triggers so much other commerce, yet most real estate sites – including some broker sites – simply throw display ads at this opportunity. What 42 Floors did here suggests more interesting possibilities.

Enjoy the weekend!

[Disclosure: Move, Inc. is a 1000watt client]

I think finding the right Realtor is the great unsolved problem in online real estate.

If we can mine our social graphs to find a pet sitter, surely we can transport an ingrained offline behavior – getting referred to an agent by a friend – to the online world. It’s just a matter of time.

Trulia has stuck a toe in this water with Social Search, but it’s positioned as an agent tool and limited to the Trulia agent directory. Realtor.com has gone deeper with its Hyper Social initiative but it, too, is an agent focused play.

A couple of promising, if flawed, data-driven attempts to solve this problem have been smothered in the cradle, launching and disappearing within days.

So the problem remains. It would be good to see brokers and MLSs jump on it now, not respond to and recriminate over an outside entity’s innovation later.

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ListHub, the listings syndicator owned by Move, released a new dashboard that gives brokers more information about the publishers to which they can distribute listings.

Brokers (ListHub does not allow agents to syndicate listings directly) can now sort publishers by filters like “Does not re-syndicate” or “Displays listing broker name.”

It might be simpler just to offer a “Does not mess with my data or business model” filter.

But seriously, I think brokers now have a better basis upon which to make informed syndication decisions. Perhaps less obviously but more importantly, they now have a platform from which they might collectively bargain with publishers.

The brokers’ responsibility? Pay attention!

The sooner the broker/publisher relationship settles into a place where everybody’s cool, the better. There are more important things to focus on.

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Since I mentioned re-syndication, I’ll give you an example:

When you visit this page on Curbed, the real estate media site active in about a dozen markets, you see a “House of the Day:”

This is a property listed by Houlihan Lawrence, a large brokerage north of New York City (and a 1000watt client). Curbed attracts consumer attention with this content and then sells that attention to advertisers. Curbed got this listing from Zillow (that’s the re-syndication part) and links to the listing as it appears there.

Curbed gets content. Zillow gets link love and distribution and Houlihan Lawrence exposes its listing to a very large audience.

Win-win-win? Or shall we get out the pitchforks and torches?

The answer, either way, should be based on analysis, not impulse.

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This Silicon Alley Insider interview of Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff is worth reading. Spencer lays out the market opportunity they’re after very clearly.

The salient quote:

‘We’re trying to move to a world where agents wake up, roll out of bed, and pull out their tablet or PC and manage their day and their workflow based on the tools that Zillow provides to them.”

He also reiterates what Zillow will not go after:

“We have been very clear with the industry that our grand vision is to be a media company, and not to be a brokerage. They want to make sure that we will not have Zillow real estate agents and we will not actually compete with them.”

I believe him.

But here’s the thing: If you’re giving agents marketing support, training, tools for managing your business and loads of information all wrapped in a brand that has resonance with consumers, you’ve essentially created something akin to “I Can’t Believe it’s Not Brokerage!”

I wonder what Fabio is up to these days.

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You may think this post is a Zillow-hating rant. It’s not.

It’s a call to action to brokers to create new ways to engage consumers and deliver value to agents.

It is possible.

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Holy cow. They’ve done it! The spill-proof beer.

Enjoy the weekend.

[Disclosure: Move, Inc., which operates Realtor.com, is a 1000watt client]

Realtor.com released its new suite of “Hypersocial” tools nationwide this week, bringing to fruition its acquisition of SocialBios last summer.

Agents can now collect and promote testimonials gathered on Facebook through both their social connections and on their Realtor.com profile page. The core of the original SocialBios application – mashing up the social graphs of a consumer and an agent to surface commonalities – is also active.

One of Realtor.com’s frequently overlooked assets is its accurate list of every Realtor in America (ok, I know, you can just buy one yourself). Now that list has been enlivened with a bit of social interaction.

Smart move.

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Online brokerage Estately went after a “terrestrial” broker in Canada for ripping off its front-end code and interface. Looks like they had a legit claim.

But this dust up reminded me just how much combustible material surrounds companies like Estately that have brokerage licenses in multiple states, significant traffic and access to IDX, but refer the vast majority of their leads off to agents hanging their license with other brokers for a fee.

They exist largely under the radar, given cover by looming DOJ demons, while companies like Redfin, Realtor.com and Zillow take darts from many in the industry.

Don’t strike a match!

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So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

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Google filled in some details on its magic glasses project.

In the mid-nineties, a friend told me how we’d soon wear cell phones on our ears. It sounded preposterous.

Today, the Bluetooth earpiece, having moved from cutting edge to gauche, is clung to only by men of a certain age and those with mullets.

So I’m taking this glasses thing seriously. And expect it will come, go, and be replaced by something still more magical.

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Check out this new dating app. Once video messaging becomes widespread over 3G/4G, I’m betting we’ll see a video listing presentation app where consumers push the process of selecting an agent out of the living room.

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Redfin updated its iPhone and iPad apps to make something like “real estate search TV” possible.

They’ve hooked the apps into Apple’s Airplay API, which makes it possible for those with Apple TVs to throw the search experience on a TV screen wirelessly while controlling it from the iPhone or iPad.

Right now, this benefits a small, geeky crowd. But given all the talk about what’s next for TV, it seems like a wise move.

I believe Redfin’s are the only real estate iOS apps that have this capability, but please let me know in the comments if I have that wrong.

Enjoy the weekend.

[Disclosure: Move, Inc., which operates Realtor.com, is a 1000watt client]

We’re winding down 2011 here at 1000watt.

Thank you for reading, for commenting and for being part of the community that supports us. It means a lot.

If you are on our 1000Watt Spotlight mailing list you got this last week. As a very small gesture of our gratitude, we’ve packaged up some of our favorite issues of 1000watt Spotlight. Perhaps you’ll find something you missed; or, if you like, share it with an industry friend.

If you’d like to make sure you get every issue of Spotlight in 2012, head on over and sign up!

Thanks

Marc, Brian and Joel

Dear readers:

Today at five o’clock, the 1000watt office will dim its lights, begin to settle into the warm glow of our Hanukkah candles, yule logs and Christmas tree lights, and surround ourselves with our beautiful wives and amazing children. Ahhh!

The holiday is nigh.

2011 was a great year for us all. You have risen to face your challenges and you are the better for it. As a result, so is the real estate industry.

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