I had an opportunity recently to speak with Jeff Bernheisel (@JBern) who is the the Marketing Director for M Realty in Portland. Jeff has a proven track record for Search Engine Optimization results for his company when it comes to VERY competitive search terms like “Portland Real Estate”.

Jeff has built several websites that dominate Google including one that was dedicated to the ever popular Angry Birds game! In less than 5 months he ranked the site in the top 5 results of Google for the search term “Angry Birds”, in the process generating 20,000-30,000 hits a day!

I wanted Jeff to share in our interview some of his best SEO tips and how agents can achieve comparable results in their own market.

(Can’t view the video? Click here)

My takeaway? Content and links are king.

Angry Birds, Viagra and real estate SEO all in one interview. Surely worthy of 3 golden eggs.

I hope you enjoy our chat and if you have any specific questions for Jeff after watching feel free to leave those in the comments below.

Chris Smith, Chief Evangelist, Inman News, @chris_smth

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Over the last few years many of the major real estate search sites have moved over to Google Maps from Microsoft’s Virtual Earth as their mapping API of choice (Redfin being the most recent notable defector). HomeGain, Trulia, Homefinder, Estately and others all use Google Maps. But, interestingly, both the #1 and #2 sites; Realtor.com and Zillow, are still Microsoft clients.

Given that, they will likely be interested to hear that Microsoft has announced that they are now rolling in Photosynth technology into the Virtual Earth platform.

Photosynth is a platform that grew out of Microsoft Live Labs (see Next Generation Virtual Tours) and allows for amazing 3D environments (“Synths”) to be stitched together out of 2D photographs.

From the press release:

Photosynth software analyzes digital photographs and generates a 3-D model by “stitching” the photos together. These models, or “synths,” can now be viewed using Silverlight technology across multiple platforms. Virtual Earth brings together features, functionality and content that help consumers, businesses, citizens and governments bring location to life. It helps businesses and governments share location-based information, build better connections with consumers or citizens, and helps organizations make better operational decisions. With the integration of Photosynth into Virtual Earth customers will be able to create detailed 3-D views of anything from places to products and from hotels to homes.

Most recently, it was used to create an immersive view of President Obama’s inauguration on CNN.com called The Moment. (If you haven’t seen it, go check it out – it really is pretty amazing)

Rolling Photosynth in Virtual Earth has some pretty big implications for real estate as one could imagine a developer could take widely available assets (listing photos) and roll them into a pretty nifty 3D representation of a property that’s for sale.

You can see a sample “house Synth” on the Microsoft Virtual Earth site. (Click on the sales sheet for a really slick representation of what’s possible)

Cool factor aside. Whether or not this is a big enough feature to get some of these other sites to switch to VE, that’s another question all together.

Update: Here’s Microsoft’s video on the integration.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGWwOAz2AiQ[/youtube]

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Two well known real estate bloggers have launched a new training program for real estate professionals.

Jeff Turner and Bill Lublin have announced the creation of the new Social Media Marketing Institute (SMMI) and now offer a new designation to Realtors; Certified Social Media Marketer (CSM). The course is designed “to educate business professionals in the effective and responsible use of Social Media to generate business through permission-based marketing.”

Both instructors certainly have the chops to pull this off; Jeff is better known as the founder and president of the virtual tour company Real Estate Shows. He is a deep thinker and true pioneer in the social media space – you can follow him on Twitter (@respres) and on his blog Turner’s Perspective.

Bill is the CEO of a Century 21 affiliate in Phildelphia; you can read him on MOVEPHILLY blog, on Twitter (@billlublin) and is an active contributor to AgentGenius.

For more on the SMMI, read today’s Inman News article.

Other social media/online marketing resources:

• 1000Watt Consulting
• Reachd
• 4Realz
• New Media Labs
• Domus Consulting

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Housevalues lost $1.3 million in the 2nd quarter of 2008, the company reported in a press release last week. John Cook also reported that they lost over 400 customers in the same period.

But don’t shed a tear for HV – they’re still sitting on $62.7 million in cash. And that’s a bucket of cash that they’ve been willing to swing around a bit recently.

The press release highlighted RealtyGenerator, a company HouseValues acquired in November of last year. RealtyGenerator is a pretty slick product that functions as a lead generation and CRM tool for brokers and agents.

Personally, I was more curious in seeing what HouseValues had to say about its other investment – the $2.75 million they plunked down in January into ActiveRain.

Took a while for me to find any mention, but I did manage to dig this out of their Letter to Shareholders from the 2007 Annual Report (PDF link).

While the acquisition of Realty Generator will go a long way toward enhancing our products, we believe our investment in ActiveRain will help us broaden our sales reach. ActiveRain is a leading community and social networking platform for real estate professionals. The company has attained a high level of user engagement and has rapidly grown to more than 80,000 members. While ActiveRain will continue to operate as a completely independent business, our strategic relationship creates the potential for a new and rapidly growing channel.

Clearly Housevalues is excited about their new properties. I’m not sure investors were similarly moved however, as the stock price (SOLD) has remained relatively static.

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Here is the fifth and final installment in my Real Estate 2.0 Market Leader series. Homethinking.com is a relatively new entry into the field, but one with a very interesting business model. They promise to allow you to connect with and review agents currently selling properties in your market (unfortunately, they don’t seem to be live in Oregon quite yet).

Using their site, you can see exactly what homes an agent currently has listed (with the requisite Google mashup, of course) – more importantly you can see many of the properties an agent has just sold and exactly how much it was sold for. This is an extremely disruptive move and one that I’m not sure many are ready for yet…

In any case, here is my interview with Niki Scevak, Founder of Homethinking.com

1. What’s your elevator pitch? How would you describe your company in 50 words or less?

Homethinking helps home owners select the most exceptional realtor to sell their home with. We do that by monitoring what each agent has achieved in the past and collecting consumer reviews about the job they did.

2. What inspired you to create your site? What need did you identify that your technology could meet?

The decision to engage a realtor is becoming one of the most financially significant decisions in a consumer’s life (6% of the value of their home). At the same time, choosing one has never been harder: the number of realtors in the US has ballooned from 750,000 in 2000 to 1.2 million today.

But that’s just the numbers. We were really inspired by the movie Glengarry Glen Ross, which basically showed how the real estate industry should not have to be. By opening up objective data around the performance of each agent, and consumer reviews about the job they did, we hope that home owners wont get stuck with an Al Pacino or Jack Lemon selling their home.

3. What has been the biggest challenge getting your site off the ground?

The biggest challenge has been interacting and dealing with the real estate data we compile. Discovering and cleaning the raw data and reducing our margin of error.

Dealing with the eccentricities of different markets is a constant challenge we seek to overcome. For instance, in areas like New York, where co-op ownership is common, or places like Texas, where home sales data are not public record.

4. Real estate is generally seen as a conservative industry, what has the general reaction been to your site?

The reaction has been overwhelmingly positive (except from agents with poor reviews and results). No really. I know each interviewee will say the reaction has been positive to their service but I can honestly say that both consumers and agents have embraced the service. Consumers love the transparency and the great agents love their record being out there in an objective environment for all to see. In the end, we want to create rock stars that will have the best chance of achieving exceptional results for home owners. We don’t want to reduce or eliminate the role of realtors but rather recommend the best ones.

Our belief is there are way too many agents out there and we hope to point home owners to the great ones and away from the poor ones.

5. Who is your typical user?

Our typical user is a home seller seeking to list their home with a full service Realtor. That tends to skew the demographics older (45+) and slightly toward females.

In terms of geography, the majority of our users are in California, where home prices are high, the market has turned the most dramatically away from the seller and where the decision as to who should sell a home is more considered.

6. What’s your business model?

Our business model is very similar to that of Google and Yahoo search, whereby agents are able to be placed in the top three sponsored listings of a particular geography and only pay if a home owner contacts them via the phone or email.

7. Who have you identified as your biggest competitors? Why?

Our primary competitors are lead generation firms like Housevalues. Another deep belief of ours is that the lead generation industry has lost the trust of the consumer and is ripe for change. We hope to flip the model on its head by putting the consumer in control of the contact (rather than having it disappearing behind a form and then auctioned off to the highest bidder and re-sold 14 times).

And to a lesser extent the yellow pages companies. If anything, we aim to be a focused Yellow Pages 2.0 firm.

8. What have you found to be the most effective ways to market (i.e., build the brand awareness/mindshare of) your site?Companies like Apple and Google have shown that building great products is the only way to market. Great design, powerful features and ease of use are today’s marketing. Everything else – PR, search engine optimization, advertising – stems from there.

9. Web 2.0 is often defined as a web-based service that lets people collaborate and share information online. How does your site either a) incorporate these ideas or b) plan on incorporating these ideas in the future?

We allow sites to syndicate out our data via RSS and more recently GeoRSS, whether they be reviews of agents or recent home sales data in a particular geography. Of course we also allow consumers to post detailed reviews about their experience with agents online and email that to their friends and neighbors.

10. Why do you care about real estate?

In Australia (where I am originally from), we have a saying “A man’s home is his castleâ€?. No other asset has such financial and emotional significance than a home. It’s part science, part art and part pornography. In no other industry are consumers so enraptured than in real estate.

At the same time, the Internet has the potential to have such a profound effect on the masses of real estate related information. How could we not be excited!

* * *

In the next installment of Real Estate 2.0 Market Leaders series I’ll be looking outside US borders at what developments are happening around the world. If you know of any sites based in Europe, Canada, Australia or elsewhere that you’d like to see featured, please post them in the comments below.

Technorati Tags: Homethinking.com, Homethinking, Real Estate Market Leader, Real Estate 2.0, Real Estate Marketing, Real Estate Blogging, Real Estate Blog, Real Estate Blogs, Real Estate, Realty Blogging

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Propsmart.com is the outsider in the Real Estate 2.0 space. No VC funding, no flashy advertising or high-brow PR efforts – but yet they continue to win awards and recognition of their technology. I really like their gameplan, which is to focus squarely on building a great product. (I also like a company with a healthy sense of humor, which permeates this site). Propsmart has a number of great features, but I really love their use of Google Earth feeds, which you can take from any search and build a whole tour inside Google’s virtual world.

Here is my interview with Ron Hornbaker, President and CTO of Propsmart, Inc.

1. What’s your elevator pitch? How would you describe your company in 50 words or less?

Propsmart.com is a nationwide real estate search engine and community website. We feature over 1 million properties (MLS and FSBO, for sale and for rent) on a simple Google Map interface, and offer our users property ratings, comments, forums, and blogs to connect with others.

2. What inspired you to create your site? What need did you identify that your technology could meet?

Back in the Spring of 2005, I started hacking around with Google Maps and quickly realized it would make a killer interface for real estate search. I’m an industry outsider, and as a consumer of real estate search sites, I’ve always had a less-than-favorable opinion about their ease of use, so I wanted to create something simpler yet more effective and more visually appealing. When Google released their GMap API in July of 2005, we started hiring and developing the project out, then launched mid-December, 2005.

3. What has been the biggest challenge getting your site off the ground?

The web crawler took the most work – my app developer Joe Sparks kicked some real butt putting that together. There’s nearly infinite variety to the listing data out there on public sites, and making sense of it all while avoiding dupes and geocoding addresses accurately is a significant challenge. The website part came easily for us, because 5 years ago I created the popular and highly-trafficked BookCrossing.com site. We understand from first-hand experience how to build, grow and maintain community websites.

4. Real estate is generally seen as a conservative industry, what has the general reaction been to your site?

By far, most industry professionals that contact us “get it,” and tell us they love the site and want their listings displayed. A small number, mostly MLS association board members or officials, are threatened by our model, and have sent us cease-and-desists on our crawling efforts on impressive law firm letterhead. We promptly comply with all do-not-crawl requests, and add the letters to our trophy scrapbook. Thankfully, the resistance is waning, largely in part I’m sure to the number of players in our space and the futility of fighting all of us. Real estate professionals are rich and powerful, but they’re not dumb, and they see which way the information tide is turning.

5. Who is your typical user?

Our typical user is the 25-40 yr old early-technology adopter who is shopping for or trying to sell his or her home.

6. What’s your business model?

We’re fortunate in that we’ve deliberately stayed small and lean (only three techs including myself), and can self-finance Propsmart with our other assets, like BookCrossing.com. We like to bootstrap projects and let them grow organically, so there’s no real need for us to monetize Propsmart yet. For now, we’re focused only on growing the userbase and consumer acceptance, and adding listing partners and crawling schedules to make our listings more comprehensive. At some point in the future, we’ll take a look at adding revenue streams, after learning a bit more about the needs of the industry and our primary users.

7. Who have you identified as your biggest competitors? Why?

My favorite competitor is Trulia, because they surprised us last November by launching a few weeks ahead of us when we thought we had a chance to be the first to market. I love their minimalistic design and maximalistic data presentation, and am a bit envious of their new VC-supplied war chest (but not the pressure it comes with). I’m glad they’re still in limited markets, so with our nationwide footprint we have something we can brag about, for now. I recently heard something about a site called Zillow, but I haven’t checked them out yet… probably small-timers with a name like that. Regardless, I believe there’s room for several players in the real estate search game. It’s a big pie out there, and each of us will appeal to different subsets of consumers.

8. What have you found to be the most effective ways to market (i.e., build the brand awareness/mindshare of) your site?We don’t spend money on marketing. I prefer more of an organic growth pattern at this stage, so we just talk about Propsmart online where it’s appropriate, savor the occasional press mention, and focus on search engine optimization so that consumers find us naturally after starting on Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

9. Web 2.0 is often defined as a web-based service that lets people collaborate and share information online. How does your site either a) incorporate these ideas or b) plan on incorporating these ideas in the future?

As much as I’m tired of the term, I guess since we won a Web 2.0 award that we probably do have a number of Web 2.0-ish features. Let’s see: property ratings with rollovers and single clicks (ala Netflix), RSS and Google Earth feeds, free blogs for our members, Google Map mashup (of course), rounded edges (oooh!), and a 22-pt search box on our home page (heh). Seriously, though, that stuff is easy for almost anyone to do. The hard stuff is what you don’t see: clustered and load-balanced servers, intelligent caching of data so paging through 83,000 listings in Washington DC with various sort criteria is nice and snappy, a web crawler with some smarts that continues to get smarter, etc.

10. Why do you care about real estate?

I care about building web applications that people find useful and cool. Real estate is simply the context around this latest experiment of ours, and it’s a vibrant context because so many people care so deeply about it. I like to spend time and effort at points where there’s 1) interest, and 2) a gap between what is and what could be. Propsmart fits right in there, and now we’re just riding it out.

* * *

Technorati Tags: Propsmart, Real Estate Market Leader, Real Estate 2.0, Real Estate Marketing, Real Estate Blogging, Real Estate Blog, Real Estate Blogs, Real Estate, Realty Blogging

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I may have been a little harsh on Trulia in the past, criticizing their logo for one thing, but the truth is they are one of the companies I am most excited about in the real estate 2.0 space. I really like their clean, simple design and their embrace of RSS in their searches. Now, if they’d only go live in Oregon…

Read on for my interview with Pete Flint, co-founder and CEO of Trulia.com as he enlightens us on his site and even lets us in on the secret behind their name.

1. What’s your elevator pitch? How would you describe your company in 50 words or less?

Trulia is a residential real estate search engine. Our goal is to help consumers find homes for sale from across the web and connect them for free to the most detailed property information located on listing broker and agent Web sites. We act as a user-friendly consumer search engine and as an efficient advertising platform for real estate professionals.

2. What inspired you to create your site? What need did you identify that your technology could meet?

The site was inspired by consumer frustration. The real estate search process is highly complex and underserved by existing players, and we felt there was a better way to help all participants in the industry. Our advanced search and filtering technology delivers a superior experience for consumers while driving highly qualified traffic to agent and broker sites for free – that is the groundbreaking innovation at the heart of our business.

3. What has been the biggest challenge getting your site off the ground?

Keeping up with the consumer and industry demand for our service. I guess that’s a good challenge. Rather than instantly turning up service, we are taking a more thoughtful market-by-market rollout approach to ensure a great search experience for all.

4. Real estate is generally seen as a conservative industry, what has the general reaction been to your site?

On the whole, fantastic. The industry recognizes that the way real estate information is currently shared and accessed does not work as well as it could in the Internet age. We and many other real estate professionals and consumers believe Trulia is a great answer to the real estate search challenge online.

5. Who is your typical user?

Prospective home buyers and, in many cases, first-time buyers. And we are finding that the number of repeat users is steadily increasing month to month.

6. What’s your business model?

Our business model is based on premium advertising made available to real estate professionals and supporting vendors, consistent with the quality environment we promote on Trulia.com. At the same time, as a search engine, our basic indexing and links remain free.

7. Who have you identified as your biggest competitors? Why?

We don’t view other media services as competitors, just different marketing tools for real estate professionals to leverage and consumers to access. The good news is that there are a number of players in the market now, which ultimately raises the bar for all of us to deliver quality service to customers and viewers.

8. What have you found to be the most effective ways to market (i.e., build the brand awareness/mindshare of) your site?

Initially, we focused more on working with industry partners to deliver the best search experience possible. This has paid off in that the media has proactively reported on us in the midst of our regional rollouts. Also, word of mouth has been key.Also, true to our search model, positioning in search engines is an important aspect to delivering traffic to the true source of property information—listing brokers and agents. In other words, we’re following a marketing model similar to some of the most successful online sites in the market by delivering on good product value, technology, word of mouth and value-add business relationships.

9. Web 2.0 is often defined as a web-based service that lets people collaborate and share information online. How does your site either a) incorporate these ideas or b) plan on incorporating these ideas in the future?

We are excited about these possibilities and see lots of interesting potential in the future. Right now, we incorporate these by empowering agents and brokers to drive traffic to their site, offering them an effective marketing platform.

10. Why do you care about real estate?

Shelter is one of man’s basic needs. To help consumers find the right home, with the right agent, quickly and easily is truly a (or should I say Trulia) worthwhile and meaningful endeavor.

Thanks Pete.

* * *

Next up will be an interview with Ron Hornbaker, President & CTO of Propsmart.com. This series will resume on Monday, June 19.

Technorati Tags: Trulia, Real Estate Market Leader, Real Estate 2.0, Real Estate Marketing, Real Estate Blogging, Real Estate Blog, Real Estate Blogs, Real Estate, Realty Blogging

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As I’ve said before, I think Zillow is the 800lb. gorilla in the Real Estate 2.0 space right now. Certainly no other site in recent memory has gone live and generated as much controversy (and media attention) as they have. A quick look at their Google trend chart shows how completely they dominate the mindshare right now.

Zillow (Blue) – Redfin (Red) – Trulia (Orange)

So, without further ado, here is my interview with Amy Bohutinsky, Director of Communications from Zillow.com

1. What’s your elevator pitch? How would you describe your company in 50 words or less?

Zillow.com is designed to empower consumers with tools and information to transform the way they buy and sell homes. Step one in our beta site is valuations, or Zestimates – a way to research the value of millions of homes online, and modify those values based on recent remodels or renovations.

2. What inspired you to create your site? What need did you identify that your technology could meet?

The first question anyone asks when looking to buy or sell a home, is “what is this home worth?â€?. Prior to Zillow, there was no easy way to find this information online, for free and without registration, for just about any home. Our goal was to build a database of millions of homes in America, give information about their value as well as that of all their neighbors’, plus community and neighborhood trends for home values. We currently have nearly 67 million homes in our database, out of about 85 million that exist according to the U.S. Census. As a beta site, this means we still have homes to add, Zestimates to improve and room to grow – it’s our first step.

3. What has been the biggest challenge getting your site off the ground?

Our biggest challenge is and continues to be the enormous amount of data we work with – more than 2 terabytes’ in geek terms – which is collected individually at the county level across the U.S. (no two counties seem to record the same way), cleaned up and run through our Zestimate algorithm, synched with satellite maps and aerial photos, and updated on our site every week. We will soon be updating Zestimates and home data every day.

4. Real estate is generally seen as a conservative industry, what has the general reaction been to your site?

Consumers are generally very excited to have access to all this data and information on homes, for free, without registration. Many within the real estate industry are enthusiastic as well – seeing this as an opportunity to reach home buyers and sellers via advertising. That said, there are some real estate professionals who view Zillow as a threat and don’t like us. This is unfortunate, as Zillow is a research tool, not an agent, and we don’t have any plans to act as an agent in transactions. Likewise we don’t aim to take the place of an agent or his or her expertise; Zillow is a first step in researching the value of a home.

5. Who is your typical user?

Our users are anyone researching the value of homes – this can be someone looking to buy, sell or a homeowner wanting to know the value of his or her largest investment.

We recently surveyed Zillow users and asked what brought them to the site (note they were able to list multiple answers). Nearly 60% said they wanted to check the value of their own home; 50% said they’d like to get a feel for home prices in an area; and 30% were specifically looking to determine a selling price or bid price on a home. This tells us our users are not only people in the process of buying and selling right now, but people researching for the future and generally interested in the value of their own home for remodel or financial purposes.

6. What’s your business model?

Zillow is a media site – like any media business model, we generate interesting content (currently in the form of Zestimates and housing data) and sell ads around it.

Nearly 18 Billion was spent online in advertising dollars last year, according to Borrell Associates, with a third of that spent in the real estate or mortgage categories. And we think this is barely scratching the surface. As more and more real estate professionals and related services move their advertising online in the coming years, growth in this category is poised to take off.

7. Who have you identified as your biggest competitors? Why?

There are a number of places where you can get a simple automated valuation for a home, and there have been for years. So I suppose in our current beta site, which focuses on Zestimates, you could call any AVM a competitor of ours. But the ability to scan neighborhoods on a map, both with satellite and aerial bird’s eye views, and see a value on top of each home is unique, as well as data on every one of those homes going back 10 years. Not to mention the ability to modify these values based on specific remodels or additions.

That said, we’ve mentioned before that this is a beta site and Zestimates are our first step. I’m sure as we add more to our site our competitive landscape will change.

This however is not to sound smug – there is an enormous amount of innovation and creativity in online real estate right now. There are some really cool and amazingly useful applications being created by everyone. This is driving us to be better and move faster, as I’m sure it is with others in this space. It’s an exciting time for online real estate and consumers are going to benefit immensely.

8. What have you found to be the most effective ways to market (i.e., build the brand awareness/mindshare of your site)?

Early on, we decided that instead of spending on advertising we would invest the bulk of our resources behind building a great product. 70% of Zillow’s staff is on the technology and development side, and this will continue as we build out and release new additions to our site. Since Zillow’s launch in early February, comScore has consistently measured between 2-3 Million visitors a month, with traffic growth throughout the spring. This is solely based on word-of-mouth, with no dollars spent. This tells us we’re on to something very interesting.

9. Web 2.0 is often defined as a web-based service that lets people collaborate and share information online. How does your site either a) incorporate these ideas or b) plan on incorporating these ideas in the future?

Currently Zillow is what it is – a research site to help people determine the value of homes. We have a lot of fun and interesting plans for the future, but we don’t like to talk about them until they’re ready to go. Thus – sorry, we can’t give details on future plans.

10. Why do you care about real estate?

We care about real estate for the same reason many Americans are obsessed with it – it’s expensive, emotional, for some of us elusive, and for many of us often frustrating. It’s a lot of numbers and data, but it’s also evocative of where we lay our heads to rest at night and how we shelter our families. It’s this yin and yang that captures our obsession and fuels our interest.

Real estate online is still in its infancy. There is an enormous amount of opportunity to help people navigate the process and find more information online to make them smarter. This is where Zillow aims to make a difference.

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Stay tuned tomorrow for an interview with Pete Flint, Co-Founder and CEO of Trulia.com

Technorati Tags: Zillow, Real Estate Market Leader, Real Estate 2.0, Real Estate Marketing, Real Estate Blogging, Real Estate Blog, Real Estate Blogs, Real Estate, Realty Blogging

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In the first of our series of interviews with Real Estate 2.0 market leaders, I spoke with Eric Heller, Director of Marketing for Redfin.com

Redfin started as a pure tech play but has morphed itself of late into an online brokerage, competing with the more traditional agents and brokers. It started in Seattle, but flush with $8 million in VC funding, they’ve recently rolled out into the San Francisco Bay Area as well.

Those savvy Redfin guys have even trademarked the term ‘Real Estate 2.0’ – but they’ve promised me I can still use it… (Right, Eric?)

Anyways, on with the questions:

1. What’s your elevator pitch? How would you describe your company in 50 words or less?

Redfin is the world’s first online real estate brokerage. Customers can see listings, previously sold properties and neighborhood statistics on a map, and buy or sell homes online. Local Redfin agents handle the negotiations and paperwork, refunding two thirds of their commission to the consumer. Unlike other brokerages, we pay our agents only on customer satisfaction.

2. What inspired you to create your site? What need did you identify that your technology could meet?

Redfin was the first company to put real estate data on a map. We were inspired to create the site by the need customers had to see the location of each listing, and to gather objective data about what other homes had sold for in each neighborhood.

3. What has been the biggest challenge getting your site off the ground?

Getting direct access to real estate data has been the most significant challenge, requiring Redfin to operate a brokerage in each of the states for which its site is available.

4. Real estate is generally seen as a conservative industry, what has the general reaction been to your site?

The industry itself has been initially hostile, but agents we work with directly have been receptive, and consumers have been extremely enthusiastic. We are fanatic about customer satisfaction, which has been at 100% since our launch.

5. Who is your typical user?

Our typical user is 25 – 35, Internet-savvy, buying his or her first or second home.

6. Any technological achievement requires significant R&D, how do you plan on recouping the investment and remaining profitable? (Which is a very long winded way of saying, what’s your business model?)

Our business model is to act as a brokerage, making money from buying and selling homes on behalf of consumers. By exceeding the expectations of those customers, we keep them and their friends coming back to use our service.

7. Who have you identified as your biggest competitors? Why?

Our most significant competitors are traditional brokerages, who are investing significantly in upgrades to their own Web sites.

8. What have you found to be the most effective ways to market (i.e., build the brand awareness/mindshare of) your site?

The most effective way to market the site has been through viral techniques; without any significant marketing spending Redfin has become the #1 brokerage site in Seattle.

9. Web 2.0 is often defined as a web-based service that lets people collaborate and share information online. How does your site either a) incorporate these ideas or b) plan on incorporating these ideas in the future?

Redfin is a Web 2.0 site because it uses Flash and AJAX technologies to create an interactive experience via the Web similar to that of a Windows client. We also monitor user activity on the site to identify hot properties. We are developing community features that allow direct communication between buyer and seller.

10. Why do you care about real estate?

We care about real estate because it is a market in which consumers have not traditionally been empowered; they’ve lacked access to the information they need to make informed decisions, and they haven’t been able to transact directly with one another, significantly increasing the cost and hassle involved with every transaction. Since almost everyone at Redfin has bought a home, our personal experience has motivated many of our business decisions.

* * *
Thanks Eric. Stay tuned tomorrow for an interview with Amy Bohutinsky, Director of Communications from Zillow.com

Technorati Tags: Redfin, Real Estate Market Leader, Real Estate 2.0, Real Estate Marketing, Real Estate Blogging, Real Estate Blog, Real Estate Blogs, Real Estate, Realty Blogging

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