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

Thanks also for the links. It’s cool to see the other agents creatively use these technologies.

Rich

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.

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

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

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 -