Todd Carpenter (lenderama), Jessica Swesey and myself at Bloggers Connect (Photo by Erik Hersman)

Don’t forget to tune in to Inman TV for highlights of the Real Estate Connect conference in San Francisco.

I’ll be back here next week, after I catch up on some much needed sleep.

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Bloggers Connect is a wrap! I want to thank all the great bloggers who joined the moderators (myself, Jessica Swesey and Kevin Boer) on stage at ConnectSF for sharing some incredibly valuable real estate blogging advice. Thanks to Glenn Kelman of Redfin for delivering a fine keynote too.

Most importantly, a big shout out to all the audience members who stuck with us through a pretty grueling schedule – it was encouraging to see so much enthusiasm for real estate blogging – I’m sure we’ll hear many new voices joining the conversation soon.

Congrats to Mary Pope-Handy of Live in Los Gatos for winning the Project Blogger competition. Though all the Apprentices deserve kudos for sticking with it and creating some fantastic new real estate blogs.

It was also great to catch up with some of the best real estate bloggers out there; Marlow Harris from 360 Digest, Kevin Tomlinson, Dustin, Ardell, Robbie and Galen from Rain City Guide, Dan Green from Mortgage Reports, Brian Brady, Kris Berg, Phil from BoiseBlog, Noah from UrbanDigs, and countless others who I’m sure I’ve forgotten to mention here.

There’s some of the great coverage coming out of Day One at Inman Connect, so make sure you stop by each one and catch up.

3Oceans Real Estate
Blogging Systems Group blog
BloodhoundBlog
Carnival of Real Estate
Inman News Blog
Oodle Blog
Zillow Blog

Don’t forget to check out the photos on Flickr.

It’s been a fantastic day and we’ve only just begun!

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Pete Flint of Trulia.com

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Jeff, the Xbroker, has slowly been leaking details of his newest venture, RealEspace, over the last few days. What is RealEspace? Well, no-one really knows just yet, but details are emerging. From a recent post at The XBroker, Jeff describes RealEspace as:

* A Best-of-Breed user interface to search property listings, backed by robust demographical analytics and localized content provided by qualified agents on the ground

* A single point of entry, syndicated listing solution for real estate professionals

* A transparent wholesale mortgage search engine—100% anonymous, automated mortgage pre-qualification

* A mortgage broker network offering true flat-fee, full-disclosure loans—you see what they see

* Standardized video tour production & marketing services

Reading through the list, these are lofty goals and while RealEspace hopes to raise millions in their first round of VC funding (see RSS Pieces) – it’s going be a tough play for them to take on some of the more entrenched players like Zillow or Trulia in the search game.

I do wish them well, and I suspect they have some interesting cards up their sleeve, but it seems to me they’d be best focusing on some of the smaller, under served segments with this push, rather then spreading themselves too thin trying to be everything to everyone right out of the gates.

Personally, like sellsius, I’m most interested in what they can do with a mortgage search engine. I think this is a critically overlooked space right now – one that is screaming out for improvement (can anyone say subprime meltdown?) and has been largely ignored by the Real Estate 2.0 revolution. One that could definitely benefit from Jeff’s experience.

Speaking as someone who is gearing up for a home purchase themselves, I find myself increasingly dissatisfied with all the mortgage tools that exist out there already. I’d love to see a place where I could research the loans available to me, find out what I qualify for and then contact a reputable mortgage broker; rather than having my email address and phone number snatched away from me and resold to some money-grubbing loan shark before I get any answers.

If nothing else I’m looking forward to seeing what these guys can pull off. Especially anything that involves a greased pig.

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John Cook, Seattle P-I’s VC reporter, asked the public relations professionals at Waggener Edstrom (HQ’d just down the I5 from me in Lake Oswego incidentally) to come up with a media map of the media attention surrounding Zillow.

WagEd’s Narrative Network software data mined all the media coverage around Zillow over the last year to create a visual map of common words used to describe Zillow in the media. The image uses color and weight to illustrate the relationships between the terms.

(Image: Waggener Edstrom)

A couple terms leaped out at me right away; “video” and “Youtube” being the most oddball. I doubt they’re referring to Zillow’s VNRs (some examples here)
or actual property videos on Zillow, which don’t exist as far as I know. Though, come to think of it, that’s an intriguing idea – WellcomeMat mashed with MakeMeMove….

More likely they got thrown into the mix as Zillow was mentioned in generic terms, along with Youtube, as examples of Web 2.0 companies.

In any case, based on their analysis of this data, WagEd highlights some of the core themes in the coverage – the accuracy of Zillow’s valuations being one of the biggest issues (highlighted in blue on the map). No surprise there.

Further, WagEd suggests in order to combat “attacks” on their business model, Zillow should continue to build their branding around their Zestimates, because:

• Zestimates take the edge off of appraisals
• Zestimates are built upon “publicâ€? information

At the same time they should further build their brand image around “key category words” like:

• Accuracy
• Estimate
• Value

The last two seem doable. The first, however, seems to me to be a loaded word I’d avoid at all costs. I think a term like “research” would be much more appropriate, but it’ll be interesting to see if Zillow heeds any or all of these recommendations.

The full PowerPoint deck with all of WagEd’s recommendations is available on John Cook’s Venture Blog.

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Realtor associations are a puzzling bunch.

I put this down largely to a general lack of focus in their overall mission or raison d’etre. Are they supposed to be market cheerleaders, lobby groups, representatives of the industry – what are they? I don’t think they even know sometimes.

Nowhere is this lack of focus more apparent than in their marketing campaigns, which generally range from bad to the downright awful and out of touch (see Buy a House, Or The Dog Gets It for example). They also usually suffer from a startling lack of creativity.

I have only seen a couple of truly creative marketing campaigns in the past – there was one a while back (from somewhere in Florida I think) that was along the lines of “Don’t DIY” or an anti-FSBO message, that struck me as pretty good. But my memory is failing me now and I couldn’t find it in any of my Google searches (Strike One, BTW).

Michael Smith from Nova Scotia Real Estate Agent, tipped me off to an excellent campaign created by the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) however.

HowRealtorsHelp.ca is a very clever use of Flash and video technology that helps consumers answer some of the questions they might have when facing one of the biggest financial transactions in their lives.

The message was bang on and it was delivered in a very soothing, yet not condescending manner (Kudos to whomever casted the talent). The site was comprehensive, easy to navigate and very personal – I almost got the sense that the Realtor was in the room with me answering my questions.

In fact it was so successful, I would say my only criticism was that there wasn’t enough video. I was enjoying just sitting back and have her tell me what I need to know. When I had to sit forward and actually read the text on the screen I was a bit taken aback.

Much of what makes this site successful in my mind is the attention to detail. I love that the Realtor welcomes you back if you’ve been to the site before and how she sits and plays with her Blackberry while she waits for you to make a choice.

This is the type of marketing a Realtor association should be doing. Putting a positive face on the industry. Demonstrating a Realtor’s
value proposition by positioning them in a positive light and show
them as caring, knowledgeable market experts.

By taking off their Industry hats for a moment and realizing consumers have a lot of questions they need answering, CREA has created a meaningful, impactful campaign that uses technology to provide the answers in a fun and engaging way.

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