Kaboom!
Everything around you just blew up.
Will you survive?
Shrapnel
According to William Gibson, the future is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed.
Gibson believes the future is ever present. It’s spread about in particle form waiting for someone to piece it together. Given the persistent inter-connectivity of people through the giant digital network called the Internet, this piecing together – the work of innovation – now occurs very, very fast.
My shirts are monogrammed, my sweaters are cashmere.
When I fly to Scotland each year to play St. Andrews, I come back with at least a case of the good stuff. In May, my wife and I head to Louisville for the Derby, where we talk about interesting things with other couples while sipping mint juleps.
Sometimes, when I’m down in Palm Beach, I get a pedicure.
Life is good.
But I am not a man. I am a fiction.
A finely tuned instrument of lifestyle branding.
In midtown Manhattan during the 1970’s, pedestrians clustered around street corners where “not from the neighborhood” kids spun upon flattened cardboard boxes to beats pulsating through gargantuan music boxes.
Street poets (MC’s) chanted their stories over these beats – rhythmic tales of a ghetto life that pulled an unfamiliar audience inside a world from which these young performers sought escape.
This street machine blasted Rap, Hip Hop and its many derivatives into public awareness.
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NextDoor, a social network play for neighbors, launched this week. Zillow co-founder Richard Barton is on the board.
This comes a couple weeks after AOL launched MapQuest Vibe, a service that ranks points of interest and things to do in neighborhoods by giving them a “Vibe Score.”
I’m not sure if either of these companies will be successful, but their existence points to an opportunity for brokers. Who’s better positioned to connect neighbors? Who has a sales force holding more local insights than MapQuest ever will?
We’re working with brokers who are going after this opportunity hard. I hope more will follow.
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Greg over at Vendor Alley was at it again this week after Rob published a post suggesting that RPR may need to go to the Realtor dues well to continue operations.
From Greg’s video:
“This will make RIN look like a parking ticket.”
Yikes.
…
Ziprealty, which was born as a discount brokerage that paid agents a salary and has now largely abandoned that path, has now abandoned something else: site registration.
This is worth noting because Ziprealty.com was the only site routinely among the top ten most trafficked real estate sites to require registration.
In an Inman News article, a Ziprealty rep is quoted as saying “we’re still a VOW,” but that the company won’t offer any of the data users could get at by choosing to register to see extra VOW goodies like recent sales.
I’m confused.
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Getting your website translated into a difference language has always been tough. Either you pay a bunch for a professional translator or deal with the sloppiness of a machine translation service like Google Translate.
Smartling, is a new company that offers a better range of options. You can do machine translation, but have a dashboard for making edits; you can pay for professional translation, but rates are reasonable. Or you can mix it up.
If you’re targeting off-shore buyers or operate in a market with a significant number of non-english speakers, this may make reaching them a bit easier.
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“Facebook’s Open Graph is about curating your life”
I read that headline a month ago, and it still sits uneasily in my brain.
I want to live my life, not “curate” it; celebrate experience, not the artifacts of experience; feel the touch of friendship, not the stream of nothingness.
Social interaction online is indisputably powerful. It can result in meaningful relationships. It can accelerate social movements. But so, so much of what’s happening in “social” these days – and with Facebook, in particular – feels to me like a cynical play to harvest data by pricking the loneliest, vainest, most dissatisfied of our emotional nerve endings.
I say this because we do a lot of work figuring out how to work “social” into the real estate experience. We’ve seen it work and we’ve seen it fail.
The key is to think about how to integrate social elements into, say, a brokerage website, in a way that adds value to the experience and helps the user get something done.
Otherwise, you’re just piping noise into your world.
Have a great weekend!
Like many others, I’ve been following the spirited discussion that has arisen over the last few months around real estate data.
It’s a big, chewy topic for sure. But I wonder if all this public mastication has caused us to choke on the big picture.
So I’m going to throw something out as bit of a thought experiment.
This morning I asked myself a question:
If I ran a brokerage website and couldn’t put any real estate listings on it…
Marc IM’ed me a link to a photo an agent friend of his posted to Instagram.
A nice shot.
Marc’s question: “How would anyone find this – and if they did, what would they do with it?”
It got us talking.
We work with a lot of big brokers. Organizations with hundreds or even thousands of agents. Some of those agents are comfortable online and inclined to create content as part of their marketing mix.
Your website is your digital front lawn. It’s where most people get their first impression of your brokerage.
It’s also their lasting impression.
It’s everything.
But somewhere along the line, the guard dogs you hired to protect your brand lawn have crapped all over it, leaving their messes to dry in the hot digital sun.
A bit of a grab bag in this post, as a swirl of events over the past couple weeks have gotten me thinking about the standard approach to a real estate website.
Click-to-call catching on
Trulia launched Instant Leads this week, powered through a partnership with Twilio. The service connects potential buyers inquiring about a particular property on the portal directly to agents through SMS or an automatic call.
Their rationale? From Trulia’s blog post:
With Trulia Instant Leads, agents have an opportunity for first mover’s advantage in responding to leads, increasing their chances of converting those leads into clients. Consumers often submit multiple inquiries while they’re performing an online search for properties, which makes a quick response time the single most important opportunity for agents to earn the consumer’s business. Instant Leads allows agents to catch the consumer at the peak of interest—while they’re still searching online and near a phone.
Bottom line? The agent that responds fastest, wins. Read »
SUNDAY AFTERNOON. OUTSIDE. DAY.
The sun emerged, a momentary victor in its never-ending battle for primacy here in the Pacific Northwest. The clouds stood down.
I hastily entered the Pioneer Mall in downtown Portland in a mad dash for the Apple store.
Get in, get out, soak up the rays.
The real estate market is still weak in most places. And it may stay that way for a while. The political scene is getting weird and we’ve got another decade’s worth of foreclosures to sweat off.
Nonetheless, this year I’ve been picking up a sense from those who survived the very worst of the housing crash that things may be headed “back to normal.”
But getting back to that normal – the one with the same recruiting system, the same business model, the same under-qualified people doing the same things – is nothing to celebrate.
It’s insane.