Future of Real Estate Marketing » Industry News

The lumbering beast that is Move.com is slowly transforming itself and just like a snake, it’s shedding it’s skin – but can it really get rid itself of an overwhelmingly negative reputation in this industry?

I think it’s trying to, with some degree of success.

They’ve scored some small scale PR victories of late with initiatives like sponsoring the Danny and Nina blog (which, by the way, was interesting when they were trying to decide where to live – but has degenerated into a boring personal lifeblog…. count me among the unsubscribed).

Technologically, they’ve made the leap into Real Estate 2.0 recently by leveraging Microsoft’s Virtual Earth platform for its new search tools (see Virtual Earth, a developer blog : Move.com Now Using Virtual Earth).

They’ve done a pretty neat integration that’s light years ahead of where they used to be. They still default to a hierarchal list of properties in the search results which is annoying, though you can easily switch to a map view.

They’ve added custom icons on the map that when you roll over they display expandable links that give greater detail of the property, including a bird’s eye view (note to Move.com developers – doesn’t play nice in Firefox in Mac OSX though).

It’s a nice implementation, though personally, I like the Extate and Redfin approach of moving that information off the map and to a side panel – I think it makes for a cleaner search experience.

Then comes the news that they’ve pulled in a new president in from Yahoo! and that David Lereah, NAR Chief Economist, is joining the team too. (That should make the folks at David Lereah Watch pretty happy).

It looks like Allan Dalton’s cooking up something big with his $6 million stealth project and it should be interesting to see what it is when it’s finally released… By the way, anyone with any inside information, let me know – futureofrealestate [at] gmail.com… anonymity guaranteed…

So can they execute on this transformation? I’m betting they can. There will be those who bear a grudge and they still have a long way to go to heal all old wounds. But the reality is they are a significant force to contend with and, even with all this new competition around them, just like any beast – they are the most dangerous when they’re backed into a corner.

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Stand Up and Be Heard

Joel Burslem — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 17:38:04 +0000

Over at Inman News today, Redfin launched its Real Estate Consumer’s Bill of Rights, a ten point piece they hope to eventually take to the National Association of Realtors and MLSes to codify.

At it’s core, the plan calls from greater transparency through all stages of a real estate transaction. From Redfin’s Real Estate Consumer’s Bill of Rights, here are the ten points:

1. Choose the services you pay for
2. Know how your agent makes his money
3. Know when you are committed to an agent
4. Know what services your agent will provide
5. Have an agent that represents only your interests
6. Know the commission refund you can get before you buy a house
7. See all the houses for sale
8. Have an open discussion about a house for sale
9. See all the information available about a house for sale
10. Be sure your agent will show your house to everyone

If you want to sign the petition, go here.

This is a very savvy PR move by the folks at Redfin – it’s bound to get people talking and it’s clearly a way for the company to continue to define themselves as mavericks in the industry (see Redfin Agents More Effective?). I suspect it’s also meant to drive a wedge between the old-guard players. Those that don’t/won’t line up beside Redfin will be labeled “anti-consumer”.

But, I’m with Kevin at 3 Oceans on this one, regardless of motivation – I think it’s high time someone stick up for the little guy here. While you can argue about some of the technicalities on the list (and I suspect many will) – the overall notion is a sound, which is why I’ve added my name to the list.

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Taking Video to the Mat: WellcomeMat Body Slams a New Release

Joel Burslem — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 01:30:40 +0000

WellcomeMat, the real estate video tour platform, released a new version of their software today. Rudy from sellsius and I had a chance to preview their new release this morning.

The new WellcomeMat refocuses the site around the idea of channels, and now allows anyone to create their own real estate channel. The new channel manager page lets you manage, activate, update and edit all your videos from one location, which you can push out to a single branded video page that includes your contact information (should you want it to appear).

I love this option as it now gives all Realtors a single place where they can aggregate their video listings. WellcomeMat even designed a video widget that lets you show all your videos from the comfort of your sidebar. (The example below is some of Doug Heddings of True Gotham’s listings)

But they don’t stop there. A number of new video player options included in this release means Realtors now have even more choices when it comes to taking their videos with them. WellcomeMat makes it even easier to post individual property videos on sites like craigslist, MySpace or even on a personal blog posting.

The guys from the Mat even let it slip that WellcomeMat videos will soon be able to be streamed from Realtor.com – which is a huge win for them and for all video-wielding Realtors. Now you’ll be able to add your video walkthrus to all your listings on the biggest real estate portal in the US (see Hitwise’s State of the Industry).

I asked WellcomeMat about pricing for this service (which is currently free) and they said eventually it will be around $30 per video per month – I believe that this is prorated, meaning if the property sells in less than a month, you are only charged for the number of days the video was live.

For the time being, while it’s still in beta, there is no rush to implement monthly fees and any videos uploaded before the switch will be grandfathered in at zero charge.

In my mind, this release crowns WellcomeMat as one of the heavyweight players in real estate video. Any other challengers to the title?

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OnOneMap Gives You More

Joel Burslem — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 00:43:01 +0000

OnOneMap is not a exactly a new site, but one I’ve only come around to reviewing recently. The UK based real estate site competes with others like Zoomf, Extate and Nestoria.

Renthusiast.org has covered it in depth. FT.com had some nice things to say about them too.

I’m onboard. OnOneMap has a truly awesome search interface.

I love how you can narrow a search using the postal codes and as you refine the search geographically it gives you a running total of how many listings fit the criteria you are looking for. A very smart and intuitive way to narrow down your results. It’s also a lot of fun.

Once you’ve arrived at the neighborhood you’re interested in, you can see all the properties currently listed for sale. But here’s where OnOneMap trully shines.

Now you can start layering in all sorts of additional information; recently sold properties, secondary schools, even the closest supermarket. And only just recently OnOneMap started plotting the locations of the nearest cellular towers on their maps – so you can judge how strong a signal you’ll receive at home. Handy in mobile-mad Europe, I guess. OnOneMap promises to add even more data to its maps over the next few months.

What makes this work is that the information can be quickly added to and removed from the map and is visible at multiple ‘altitudes’. Some brokers like Coldwell Banker and Real Living in the States have tried adding some of this information to their searches (see Big Brokers Going Local) but none as successfully as OnOneMap.

Some of the other cool things they’re doing – they have a number of widgets (OSX version here), as well as Pageflakes, Netvibes, Google homepage modules available so you can search off site.

One thing that strikes me here is, that the UK seems to have a much deeper pool of national search sites than the US. As such, competition is driving a much greater amount of innovation out of these sites.

Here, we have Trulia and, to a lesser degree, Zillow (though their true search aspirations aren’t entirely clear yet). That’s about it. Sure, there’s the Granddaddy of them all, Realtor.com. But innovation and Realtor.com are hardly synonymous lately.

The only companies that are truly pushing any degree of innovation on the search side (Redfin, Shackprices for example) in the States are still very localized in nature. (And none are live in Portland, unfortunately)

I suspect this situation is because the UK sites don’t have to navigate the myriad of byzantine rules and deal with courting the local MLS fiefdoms that their US counterparts are encumbered with. There, they can focus on rolling out new features (see Extate Launches Video Tours).

Hopefully, one of these days we’ll see some of these features spill over this side of the Pond. I, for one, can’t wait.

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Go Team Orca

Joel Burslem — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 22:21:44 +0000

Project Blogger is the brainchild of Jonathan Washburn of ActiveRain and will chronicle the development of a handful of new REbloggers, leading up to the Inman’s Bloggers Connect conference in San Francisco, this summer.

I was asked, along with a number of other bloggers, to choose a blogging apprentice, help them get up and running and crank up their online marketing efforts.

Dustin’s still looking; the Bloodhound has already unveiled the latest pup in his litter and Sellsius, Jim, Ardell and The Rainmaker have all picked their running mates.

So, not to get left behind, today I’d like to introduce my blogging apprentice.

Kelly Kilpatrick (exclusiveOChomes.com)

Kelly is an agent with Gold Coast Realty in Rancho Santa Margarita, California (which, apparently, is the longest town name in California). She’s been in the business for over 15 years, and before that was in the mortgage industry.

Kelly is very new to blogging, having recently joined the Active Rain network and is definitely excited to be part of this contest. (Who could say no to an application like this?)

I’m looking forward to working with Kelly and seeing what we can come up with. I’ll be detailing our efforts on this blog and on the Active Rain discussion group as well.

Oh yeah. I figured we needed a team name.

So we’ll be known as Team ORCA – shorthand for our respective States; plus a wicked cool, sleek, highly tuned killing machine. (Bonus points for being the part of the logo of my favorite hockey team).

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Now In FoREM News

Joel Burslem — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 23:24:52 +0000

The pace of blogging at FoREM has slowed a bit over the last few days. I’ve been buried wrapping up a number of projects for my current employer before I make a pretty significant transition.

I’m happy to announce I will be joining the nice folks over at Inman News, as of March 26. I will be joining them to help steer some of their social media projects as well as drive marketing to their popular semiannual Connect Conferences.

Inman News has always been at the forefront of covering and promoting
real estate technology, so I naturally saw them as a perfect fit for me. I will however, continue to blog here at FoREM.

Brad Inman, Jessica Swesey and the rest of the team have been very welcoming and I’d like to publicly thank them for that.

I’m excited for what we’ll be able to accomplish together. Stay tuned.

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Redfin Gets Schooled

Joel Burslem — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 23:55:53 +0000

Redfin added neighborhood and school data to its listing pages today, something some of the big brokers like RealLiving and Coldwell Banker have already done (see Big Brokers Going Local).

Visiting their site, I wasn’t entirely clear at first where on the listing page to find this information, it wasn’t immediately obvious ‘above the fold‘.

Scrolling down a bit and there, wedged between the sales history and Zillow Zestimate for the property, I found what I was looking for.

Surprisingly, clicking on either of the links takes you to an external page. I was expecting it to be built into Redfin’s listing pages. You can click here to view an example. Like RealLiving, Redfin’s neighborhood data is provided through a partnership with OnBoard LLC.

Overall the implementation is pretty decent. I far prefer Redfin’s approach to RealLiving’s, as they make extensive use of graphs and charts to provide some visual impact to the data.

One frustrating thing I found with the external page, was that when I tried to click back from the neighborhood data to the listing I came from, Redfin’s site would take me back the general search results page and not to the specific home I wanted to view. This got annoying as I was shopping around looking at different homes.

Community/local information continues to be the next big push for brokers looking to add more value to their search pages. While they are steps in the right direction, I haven’t seen anything yet that come close to the depth of information that Zillow, Trulia or Shackprices are offering.

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