Brokers and Agents Who are Walking the Walk
One of the questions I get a lot when I speak in front of groups is “Is it too late for me start getting involved in blogging/social media/social networking etc.?”
My answer is always firm – absolutely not.
There’s always opportunity to take advantage of the latest technologies and there is still plenty of room for folks to gain first mover advantage in many areas.
Just look at some of these agents and brokers who are still pushing the envelope with new technology.
Kevin Tomlinson of the South Beach Real Estate Blog has launched on his personal real estate web site what I think is the very first commercial implementation of Google’s Street View (see Google Maps Hits the Streets). You can embed them individually (see New Google Street Views Can Be Embedded on your Site) but Kevin has gone as far as to build them in to his condo map of Miami.
Fantastic tool – though I do wish the picture were just a little bit bigger.
Intero Real Estate has launched a new site based on Terabitz’s technology. Terabitz lets a user create a real estate dashboard (see Terabitz To Allow You to Make your Own Mashup) — think Pageflakes for real estate — it’ll be interesting to see if Intero’s clients respond to the new interface.
ChaseNation is the perfect example of what I call a niche network (see Niche Networks and Marketing Real Estate). It was started by luxury brokerage Chase International as a way to connect directly with consumers around Lake Tahoe and Reno real estate. Built on Ning (see Create Your Own Web 2.0 Site with Ning) Chase Nation was steered by Diane Cohn of Reno Realty Blog. It’s a beautiful looking site – and functional too. Of course the challenge will be steering and encouraging consumer participation now but if it takes off it could be very successful. Plus by choosing to use an off-the-shelf product like Ning, the cost of entry was so low that if it doesn’t take off – they could easily ditch it.
And I think that’s really the lesson here too. Don’t be afraid to innovate and experiment and then move on if it’s not working.
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11 Comment(s)
3 Trackback(s)
- From » Brokers and Agents Who are Walking the Walk | Apr 2, 2008
- From Real Estate Roundup - Week 14 | eCommission Blog | Apr 7, 2008
- From Rick Grant & Associates » Blog Archive » Social sites for real estate finance | Jul 28, 2008
Kevin Tomlinson | Apr 2, 2008 | Reply
Joel,
There is a button to enlarge the map in the right hand corner of the Street View screen.
Brad Carroll | Apr 2, 2008 | Reply
Hi Joel,
Kevin’s Webmaster here. Thanks for the feedback. I took your advice and made the “balloon” lager on the initial click and formatted it to a widescreen ratio.
Richard Dale-Mesaros | Apr 2, 2008 | Reply
Woah Nelly!!!
Too late for blogging and social networking? There’s still an alarming number of real estate agents who are hardly using their website, NEVER MIND venturing into blogging and social networking. Same goes for the real estate investors we deal with, it’s going to take a great deal of hand-holding and education to foster blog participation and any niche social network really has to think hard about the ways they encourage their members to embrace networking effectively.
The FOREM blog should be mandatory reading and that’s why it’s in my top five, which I just mentioned in our blog (along with good ‘ol Real Estate Tomato of course!)
Regards,
Richard
Chief Deal Weaver
http://www.BlackWidowNetwork.com
Victor Lund | Apr 3, 2008 | Reply
Three great examples of real estate companies stepping into technology to combat the number of technology companies stepping into real estate.
Trulia and Zillow have had a blast of success because the provided consumers with cool technology, but sometimes poor data.
As these examples show, the best consumer experience is coupling the great data that only Agents and brokers can access, with great technology -
Andrew Mattie | Apr 3, 2008 | Reply
Kevin’s site actually the third commercial implementation of Google Street View that I’m personally aware of. Realbird announced (http://realbird.typepad.com/news/2008/03/street-view-api.html) that they implemented it into their single property websites on Monday, and Diverse Solutions (us) announced (http://www.diversesolutions.com/blog/2008/03/28/now-available-in-dssearchagent-idx-google-street-view/) that we had integrated it into our IDX solution on Monday as well.
Diane Cohn | Apr 3, 2008 | Reply
Hi Joel,
Thanks for the mention. Chase Nation is a total science project, but with strong community management I think we can make it a huge success. Yes, we built it on top of Ning, but with many customizations and feature enhancements. It was an easy, expedient way to create a social network around the topic of Reno-Tahoe real estate.
Ning’s underlying user interface is extremely intuitive, making it easy for agents and their clients and consumers to sign on and engage. We are also inviting the community at large to join us in the conversation.
In time, with participation on so many levels, we hope to be the number one resource on Reno-Tahoe real estate. It’s kind of addicting once you get into it, and a far superior implementation of any corporate broker blog concept we’ve seen to do date.
Diane Cohn
Sebastian Diessel | Apr 4, 2008 | Reply
Hello Joel,
I completely agree with Victor Lund’s observation that… “the best consumer experience is coupling the great data that only Agents and brokers can access, with great technology.”
I also commend Kevin Tomlinson for his prompt implementation of Google StreetViews into his site. As a boutique agency operating in a niche market in Boston, early adoption of technology has been key to our success. The advent of Google StreetViews offered us an opportunity to add relevant interactivity to our site http://loftsboston.com. I emphasize “relevant” as I suspect too much of today’s so-called Web2.0 and/or Real Estate2.0 social media initiatives deliver a signal-to-noise ratio that is far too low for any meaningful (i.e., sustainable) business. (I don’t mean it doesn’t work… just that it can be exaggerated to an extent that late adopters feel overwhelmed and paralyzed into inaction by all the competing choices… begging the very question that Joel poses at the beginning of this entry).
Any way, I wanted to share my experience as another example of a StreetView implementation. I understand that Google has finally released an API that will hopefully make integrating StreetViews into different website content management systems more readily accessible. (Brad Carroll of Kevin Tomlinson will appreciate this story).
My site uses php MySQL to deliver dynamically generated pages of individual listings… so, the challenge was to find a work-around the simple “cut-and-paste” iframe embed code that Google initially released, in order to generate manifold unique street views for the 400 loft listings profiled on our site. The solution was to reverse engineer Google’s “customize view” option in Maps and integrate the latitude/longitude coordinate generation function for the street views into our proprietary CMS. We even took it further and added accessible KML files so users can interact with our property listings with the enhanced mapping experience of Google Earth.
Significantly, while we were testing our work-around we discovered a platform specific (PC – Vista) issue and my developer emailed the Google Maps team to report the bug. I’ve since learned from my developer that Stephen Chau, Product Manager for Google Maps — http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2007/05/introducing-street-view.html — has been showing our website internally at Google as “an example of a great use of map / street view embed”.
In any case, I believe the judicious use of technology applied to a focussed Web1.1 platform can deliver consumer satisfaction (and, hence, business results) over and above the “noise” of a very loud, yet diffused, Web2.0/Social Media cloud. In my example, as in Kevin Tomlinson’s, dynamic street-level imagery google maps of real property listings enrich the interactivity of a site, delivering a truly authentic marketing experience.
Regards,
Sebastian
Dee Copeland | Apr 6, 2008 | Reply
I really liked Kevin’s site, so hope I can do something like that soon. I’m getting ready to launch my Austin Real Estate Today community, which is just a simple wordpress implementation. Later, we want to expand, perhaps move to a different platform, etc.
I plan on rolling out the features in phases since it’s going to take time reformatting the posts from TexasRealtyBlog.com. I hope you like what we do. I want to integrate mobile, video and audio in a seamless fashion to really engage the Austin real estate audience.
Cyndee Haydon | Apr 6, 2008 | Reply
Joel – thanks for showcasing the trail blazers – it’s great to see this stuff in action. I love Kevin’s site and will check out the others you mentioned. Keep it coming – the future’s so bright!!
Rich Rogala | Apr 9, 2008 | Reply
You’re very right, it’s not to late to get on the wagon with social networking. It’s still growing and growing, and the median user age of sites like Facebook keeps going up. This is a great time to join in!
Thanks also for the links. It’s cool to see the other agents creatively use these technologies.
Rich
Matt Dollinger | Apr 21, 2008 | Reply
Joel,
Great article and I too, am a huge fan of the Ning-based community development site. The concerns that I run into with this are all based around, “Is this going to play in Peoria? — I’m from Peoria so I’m a little biased” What I mean by this is… What is the tech-level of the community that you are developing this for.
Take my market here in Chicago… There are maybe 5 areas out of 77 that I think this would really take off in. don’t get me wrong, where I think this is totally awesome, and I would use it, but often times, much like real estate… I have a problem seperating myself from the ACTUAL consumer. Not the future consumer, or that hip consumer… but the one that is actually making financial decisions.
I have shared the ChaseNation site with about 20 people thus far and about 17 out of 20 of them thought that they would visit it every once in a while, but not frequent it or take the time to contribute or build a profile.
This brings me to my dilemna, “Are we building or developing this stuff to ‘one up’ each other as brokerages/IT depts, or are we actually focusing in on what the client actually wants and would use?” I don’t know the answer…
Matt