I first became enamored with Foursquare in December 2009 at Real Estate Connect in NYC. I was listening to our keynote speaker Dennis Crowley, and literally had an “aha” moment. Up until that point I had heard of Foursquare and even had the app on my phone, but didn’t really see the correlation to real estate. This was in late 2009 before Foursquare exploded onto the geolocation marketing scene.

Since then, Foursquare has been written up and featured on just about every major publication for the ground-breaking work they are doing. I love their concept of “check in, find your friends, explore your city.”

For a Realtor, I think Foursquare could be a great way to market themselves as the “local expert.” Who knows more about the local deli, or the best place for a cocktail, or a great family park better than a local real estate agent, right?

This year at Real Estate Connect NYC, one year after my Foursquare realization, I had the pleasure of meeting Matthew Shadbolt, Director of Interactive Product & Marketing at The Corcoran Group (@corcoran_group) in person. I had chatted with Matthew for sometime online, but had never met in real life. One of the things that really impressed me was what Matthew said about what they were doing at with Foursquare. Ironically, at Connect the year before, Matthew also had an “aha” moment with Foursquare and took that one idea and since then have been doing some truly amazing things with Foursquare. On a side note – that “one idea” completely epitomizes what Connect is all about – all it takes is one great idea to completely revolutionize your business.

The Corcoran Group now holds a coveted brand spot on Foursquare and to date they have over 1200 tips and almost 7000 followers!

I asked Matthew how Foursquare fits into their overall marketing, and he shared with me five ways that it does:

1. Foursquare is a natural extension of what we’ve been doing elsewhere in mobile for location-based marketing. Putting local Corcoran expertise into people’s hands in a venue and time-specific way is an incredibly powerful form of social marketing for us.

2. One of our core brand ideas is that the process of searching for a home is just as much about what’s outside of the 4 walls than it is inside. We believe that the idea of communicating ‘what’s nearby’ is a very powerful way of understanding a neighborhood, and sharing that information within Foursquare has been an exciting way to grow our brand’s presence within mobile platforms.

3. We don’t believe in selling within Foursquare. We do not post open houses or listings, and think that there are ethical issues in posting people’s homes as venues within the service.

4. Unfortunately, we also don’t ‘play’ Foursquare now that we’ve become a brand – for the first 12 months of using Foursquare, we were earning badges and mayorships like regular users, but since we’ve become a ‘brand’ within Foursquare, that part of the platform is no longer available. We’re still able to check in and post photos, but it’s always been about the venue tips for us, not badges or mayorships. Providing helpful information using Foursquare is our focus.

5. One thing we often get asked is why we’re not doing this on Yelp, given Yelp’s much larger user base. The main reason is that in order to post tips within Yelp, you have to be an individual, you can’t do it as a ‘brand’, so it’s tough to replicate our goals in using tip-based location apps if we can’t speak as the brokerage. I’ve seen individual agents have a lot of success within Yelp doing this as themselves though, we just don’t do it as an organization for that reason.

In addition, Foursquare is included in Corcoran’s overall social media agent education programs, and all new agents who join Corcoran are made aware of these initiatives as part of their ongoing efforts to help agents understand how mobile, social and video are part of their digital marketing arsenal.

Here is a video of Matthew explaining what they do with Foursquare at Corcoran:

(Can’t see the video, click here)

Are you using Foursquare? I’d love to get your opinion and feedback – please leave me a comment below!

Written by: Katie Lance, Social Media Director, Inman News, @katielance

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Guest blog post by Matthew Shadbolt, Director of Interactive Product & Marketing, The Corcoran Group, New York

Some thoughts on mobile marketing for real estate…

Many of us, over the past few years, have transitioned much of our advertising and marketing from print to online. Many of us still have not. I’d argue that most of us have not. But as that transition continues to take place, there’s another one going on simultaneously, that of a massive shift in web use from the desktop to the mobile device. Whereas advertisers used to upsell online with print buys, today they are doing the same with mobile as part of online buys. It’s a fascinating thing to watch.

When we say ‘being online’, it no longer just means clicking away at the big screen attached to the whirring box on your desk that’s plugged into the wall.

It means finding things near you, sharing where you are with your friends, video chat from the grocery store (“is this the one I should get?”) and so much more, but what’s common amongst all those use cases is that increasingly our use of the web is being informed by our location. Who better to capitalize on this trend than the real estate industry?

Last week, Corcoran launched an update to its popular iPhone app which allows you to search for homes in and around New York. One of the key differences in this app is the wealth of information that’s populated outside of the actual listing information. Corcoran calls this ‘going beyond the four walls’, and the concept is baked deep into its brand premise. It means sharing things to do nearby, places to go, restaurants to try, things to do at night – a better sense of what it’s really like there – can you get this from a shot of the outside of the property? Or the kitchen? Last week’s update added the ability for the user to now see local news for real estate, shopping and restaurant stories near properties, powered by Curbed, Eater , and Racked – 3 very popular blogs here in Manhattan.

You can read more about the project here on Corcoran’s Facebook page.

One of the main benefits that the phone brings to real estate searches is that it pushes the idea of contextual content around search. It begins to answer the question, ‘what is it really like to live there?’, and by providing a detailed, hyperlocal and comprehensive set of information, that has nothing to do with the specifics of the property but everything to do with living in a neighborhood, Corcoran’s app attempts to achieve this. Think about how this works versus how most online sites allow you to search for homes – it’s very poor in comparison. First, you usually have to ‘fill out’ a search page that consists of drop downs, checkboxes, perhaps even something as vague as a simple text entry box, then hit the all important ‘GO’ button. In mobile it can be automatic and simply ‘near me now’.

What gets returned, I believe, is not how people search for homes. Real estate search results usually consist of 2 things – pages and pages of list-based, thumbnail driven content, which forces the user to wade through the results in an unfocused way – this is the Google model of helping people find things, and that model is under some serious review this year. The second way is to plot those same results on a map. There’s been much talk recently about the effectiveness of map-based searches, and while they do provide some minor level of context in terms of ‘it’s near that road’, it still doesn’t answer the question, ‘what is it like to live there?’

The home buying process is at its core, an emotional one. Time and again, we hear our clients say “I bought with my heart, not my head”, or “I just knew as soon as I walked through the front door”. I’m not arguing that it isn’t a big financial consideration as well (of course it is) but do checkboxes and drop downs, or hundreds of properties plotted on a map, match what these people are telling us? Or is something like “here’s the latest news in the immediate neighborhood, combined with some great places to eat, some things to do, and a sense of what happens here at night” around each and every step of the process, a more person-centric way of doing it?

Of course, for the larger real estate portals, providing this curated, local and insightful information around every listing is a very difficult challenge to do at scale, and I fully accept that we are very spoiled for content here in Manhattan. But, the idea of ‘freeing’ real estate search from the desktop model, and putting it into people’s hands in a geographically specific way, which puts THEM in the middle of the map, I’d argue is a more effective and fun way of finding a home. Pair this idea with the filter of your network (perhaps through social media), and the Google model of search starts to evaporate rapidly. Being able to find homes based on your interests, hobbies, and goals, through the filter of your friends, is a very different experience from the ‘Enter your price range’ criteria so heavily used online, and mirrors that of how people truly find homes offline.

The best online experiences are the ones that most closely mirror offline ones. Facebook is great at keeping me in touch with my friends. Amazon allows me to get exactly what I’m looking for without wading through the shelves at the mall. These platforms solve problems. Who does the same thing in real estate? The first thing an agent does when they meet a customer is get to know them, not ask them the precise specifics of what they are looking for and dump hundreds of ‘results’ upon them. They curate the homes they show based on a thorough understanding of their client, combined with their expertise. Where is that concept online?

I argue that the mobile device will be the platform that solves this question for the real estate industry, simply because it has the ability to contextualize not only ‘results’, but what the customer is interested in, in a vastly better way than the desktop. We’re living in incredibly exciting times for our industry – some are embracing the changes and figuring out what needs to happen. Most are not. I call on you to spread the word.

To find out more about Corcoran’s app for real estate, visit www.corcoran.com/iphone or www.corcoran.com/android

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New York-based broker Corcoran Group has launched a new iPhone application to help real estate consumers connect with properties.

The app is very well executed and joins StreetEasy and Redfin as among my favorite real estate apps.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb91e0jqQIk[/youtube]

To promote the new app, they commissioned Swedish artist Kari Modin to illustrate the key features of app. The ads will run in media outlets, online and on phone kiosks throughout the city.

The images are striking and I think it’s an important takeaway here; while real estate search apps are a hot ticket item right now — and I would suggest that any decent sized brokerage should be seriously evaluating their mobile strategy for 2010 — simply building and releasing an app isn’t enough.

It needs to be fully baked into to your overall marketing plan and supported through a well-imagined and targeted advertising campaign, which Corcoran has done.

There’s a land rush going on right now for screen space on smart phones and the window of opportunity for any broker to stake a claim will likely be short-lived. A few years from now and there will be likely dozens of “me-too” apps in any given market. Now’s the time to strike.

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Pam Liebman, CEO of Corcoran Group answered my question – What should the real estate brand of the future mean to consumers?

Her answer was posted on YouTube. I’ve posted the video below.

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

Thanks Pam!

I’d also like to throw this question out to the rest of the real estate industry – send me your video response via YouTube and I’ll post them all here on this blog.

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