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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Word leaked that #1 Real Estate Blog Curbed.com is getting into the listings game a couple of weeks ago. As of today, the new service is live in Manhattan.

Curbed’s new Marketplace lets Realtors and brokers list their properties inside a traditional classifieds-type environment. For 99 bucks you’ll be able to reach out to some of Curbed’s 300,000 loyal readers.

The price is right, but it remains to be seen whether those readers will take the leap and move beyond their RSS readers to dig for listings inside the Marketplace.

More interesting however, is what Curbed is calling its QuickListings – which are advertorial-type property listings that are inserted into Curbed’s blow flow. Call them Sponsored Posts, but since Curbed generally treats listings as content anyway, this approach does not seem so incongruous.

The more I think about it, I like this approach a lot. As a broker or agent, your listing gets top billing and placement rather than being buried in the back pages. As the publisher, Curbed has already warmed its readers to receiving information they may be interested in. Readers will appreciate the clear deliniation between the editorial and advertising but may also appreciate the relevance of the content.

Newspapers, especially those who still have local real estate sections, would be wise to watch was Curbed is doing. It’s to these sorts of ideas that those fleeing advertising dollars will be going.

The only question I would have as a marketer is what sort of analytics are baked into the Marketplace and QuickListings – can I get reports how many times my item was viewed, what the CTR (click-thru rates) were? Even a geographic breakdowns of who was viewing my listing from where? Having that sort of information would make this product a home-run.

Coincidentally, Trulia launched a blogging platform last week, which makes for the very odd situation where you have a real estate blog is getting in to the property listings game and a propety listings portal getting into the real estate blogging game. Worlds are starting to collide here.

Will we soon be seeing featured listings inside Trulia Voices too?

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Lockhart Steele is up on stage to keynote Bloggers Connect. He’s a great choice, being one of the most successful consumer-focused real estate bloggers on the web. Curbed is an example of what a dedicated group of good writers can do with a real estate blog.

Lockhart talks about how blogging is at it’s heart just a publishing platform. How the most successful bloggers realize that, and how it’s interesting to see people getting lost in the technology. Some of the best blogs from yesteryear look the same after 8 years and are still successful.

Three points:

1. Editorial
Curbed is obsessed with getting things “first”. It’s about getting the news out there as quickly as possible.

Let’s get comfortable with the idea of readers adding and extending the story (ex: boomtown)

2. Aggregation
A lot of casual readers can’t keep up with everything. Learn to radically link to others, even competitors, to do roundups of the news going on in that niche.

For many real estate bloggers it’s the quality of analysis and what they add to the conversation, not just breaking news which is what Curbed is known for.

3. Video and Podcasts
Lockhart is skeptical, it’s not what they’re good at. It has to get really easy and really cheap for it to work.

Other thoughts:
No one blog will be the place for all local conversations – each area will likely have it’s own blog that is the central node for community interaction. Curbed is doing it in NY and a few other cities, but there is room for this in other cities as well.

There are some commenters known for just being a good commenter. They don’t necessarily have their own blog/site. They can be seen as “sub-bloggers” on larger blogs, or across niches.

Some quotes:

“My greatest hope for the future is that blogging always stays fun.”

“The Curbed team works hard to write about fun things in the local community and it tends to bring in a lot of non-real estate readers.”

[Catch the streaming video of the talks at the Sellsius Blog.]

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Especially for real estate media.

by In search of Syd

Curbed, the popular local real estate blog network run by ex-Gawker Media editor Lockhart Steele, recently obtained $1.5 million in financing, as reported today by the New York Times. (see Not All Is Gloomy in Real Estate: A Blog Network Attracts Capital). Rain City Guide is predicting more investments in social media to be announced shortly too.

With the new cash now safely in the bank, Curbed hopes to expand its coverage and add several new cities to its roster. Makes sense. I’ve always maintained that even in a down market, media is a safe (ish) bet because, perhaps more than ever, people are looking for place to find analysis and guidance (or a mutual sense of Schadenfreude) in real estate.

The danger with any media play, of course, is the business model is predicated on having a stable base of advertisers to support it. And it remains to be seen whether the fallout from the sub prime meltdown and credit crunch will have any larger impact on advertisers’ marketing spends – a subject that I’ve been following with keen interest for a while (see Storms Ahead for Real Estate Sites).

Part of my curiosity is that I remember the years after the ‘00 tech bust being pretty lean for many technology publications. I remember this being illustrated quite vividly when my copies of Red Herring and Business 2.0 (R.I.P.) showed up on my doorstep and went from being the size of the local phone book to not much thicker than a pizza flyer in the span of no more than a couple of months.

Like most in this space, Curbed relies primarily on real estate advertising (a quick visual survey of their site reveals mostly ads for condo developments and one from Trulia) and so it is certainly at risk if there is a larger downturn. That said, I suspect their niche audience will still be attractive to smart advertisers and their low overhead makes them nimble enough to avoid any looming iceberg.

by Hugo*

The titan in this space (Zillow) however, is much more heavily encumbered and faces a corresponding greater degree of risk.

From the NY Times:

At greater potential risk are national-focused sites like Zillow.com and Realtor.com that depend on an active market of buyers and sellers to thrive. Nonetheless, Zillow, which estimates home values, last month obtained $30 million in its latest round of financing, bringing the total to $87 million for the site, which was started less than two years ago.

Now, to their credit, Zillow has reached out beyond the real estate niche and courted some brand name advertisers (I saw DirectTV and Verizon on there this morning) – but to what degree of success? I have to admit I was surprised to still see Google Ads filling their Leaderboard position on the search results page for my zip code this morning (YMMV).

[Aside - It wasn't even a well integrated Google Ad, either. The color scheme looked like one of the default palettes (Shadow, I think). Looked like someone had just slapped the Adsense code in there to fill out some unsold inventory. Pretty sloppy.]

So looking at Zillow’s ad mix right now – you’ve got some Google Ads, a handful of self-service agent driven ads (EZ Ads) and some big brand CPM campaigns sustaining a $90 million dollar investment. I feel like a bit of a broken record at times, but the big picture just doesn’t add up (pardon the pun).

In any case, the folks up in Seattle aren’t sitting idly by (they shouldn’t, they have some of the brightest minds in the biz on staff) and so I wonder if it’s not any coincidence that, alongside the article in the Times today, they announced their newest advertising product; Zillow Home Direct Ads. Home Direct Ads is a new intent-based advertising tool that allows advertisers to make an ad buy on Zillow that conforms to precise conditions based on consumer behavior on their site.

Pretty cool stuff. The two most interesting products in this release to me are the Move Predictor and Psychographic Clusters. From their news release:

Move Predictor: Because of Zillow’s extensive data on homes for sale and traffic activity around a home’s page views, Zillow can predic whether a household may be moving. This allows advertisers such as cable providers, financial institutions or home improvement stores to reach homeowners before purchase decisions around the move are made.

Psychographic Clusters: Advertisers can specify for their creative to be shown to households composed of any of the 65 psychographic clusters defined by the U.S. Census data, such as suburban households with children or high-income urban singles.

On Zillow Blog, Greg Schwartz, Zillow’s VP of Ad Sales, imagines a hypothetical scenario on how this could be used.

Imagine if a telecommunications provider could hone their advertising campaign to reach homes based on the products they have available on certain streets – down to a house-by-house level. For example, they could advertise sought-after high speed Optical Fiber Lines directly to the homes where the technology is available. Then target DSL to all other homes – as close as across the street!

This starts to make sense a little more. Zillow’s Intent based tools – which along with Facebook’s Interest-based targeting (see Marketing Yourself with Facebook Flyers) – should be intriguing to any sophisticated marketer and they have a right to be excited about it.

But – as cool as Home Direct ads are – the success of the site still depends on Zillow maintaining and growing its traffic (which by some measures, has been flattening lately). And that cuts to the heart of the matter.

Are people still even interested in real estate porn these days? Or have they just moved on to real estate gossip?

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This is a fun site: Blog Juice Calculator

Enter your blog address and category (Real Estate) and see how much Blog Juice (calculated using Technorati, Alexa, Bloglines and Google Links) you have.

For even more fun, you can add in your peers and see how you stack up against them. Looks like Curbed.com is on top. For now.

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