Last week I was able to participate in an extraordinary and power-packed conference – the ERA IBC 2010 conference in Nashville (#ERAIBC).

ERA has done a really great job of re-branding themselves and truly embracing social media and web 2.0.

From their Opportunity Stations, to their Social Media Lounge, Twitter Sign-Up Station, Discovery Hub – it was clear that ERA is very focused on moving their brand and their agents into the ‘new way’ of doing business.

“Real estate is changing—it’s a new world for our industry,” says Charlie Young, president and chief executive officer, ERA Franchise Systems LLC. “Consumers are more knowledgeable, technology is delivering information that was previously inaccessible and the brokerage community is evolving in response to a new economic reality. At ERA, we are building ‘a smarter community’ of brokers and agents to meet the ever-changing needs of today’s consumers and real estate brokerage industry.”

IBC featured a variety of programs designed to enhance the learning experience and to help brokers and sales associates build meaningful connections that add value to their business. Specialized learning tracks featured education sessions, such as “Motivating Buyers to Buy,” “Make More Money with Social Networking” and “Seizing on the Recovery Market.” The sessions were hosted by industry experts and allowed ERA brokers to create a personalized plan to enhance their business.

I taught a one hour “Social Media Bootcamp” class where I coached agents through my “Top 5 Tips for Social Media Success” and helped to give them a simple and easy-to-use plan.

A highlight of the General Session was “Innovation Hour” with Inman News founder/publisher Brad Inman and ERA CEO Charlie Young. Brad and Charlie discussed innovation and technology in 2010 and what that means for the real estate community.

Personally, one of the best parts of the event was being able to meet and interact with the agents and brokers from all over the country (and the world) who came to Nashville. Some were not familiar with Inman News, so it was exciting to talk to them and let them know about the news we provide.

I know I am biased, but I am extremely proud to work at a company like Inman News where day in and day out, I get to see first-hand the award-winning and unbiased news that our journalism team puts together.

Hundreds of agents at ERA signed up for our free daily headlines service – if you haven’t signed up yourself I highly recommend it! You will get an email from Inman News 2x a day with the top real estate headlines of the day. It is a great way to keep up-to-date with nationwide real estate news and trends. I honestly think every agent should sign up!

I also met a lot of agents at ERA who had been enjoying our free headlines and decided to upgrade to a premium membership because it gives them unlimited access to our news, webinars, exclusive industry reports, discounts on our conferences (Real Estate Connect) and much more.

It’s very exciting to see the direction that ERA is headed in! ERA agents and brokers, if you attended ERA IBC please leave us a comment below and let us know what you thought of the event.

To everyone else….do you have an event coming up? Let us know! Leave us a comment below!

Written by: Katie Lance, Marketing Manager, Inman News

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Great news. The deadline for early bird registration for next year’s Real Estate Connect conference in New York has been extended for another week.

Plus if you register use the coupon code FOREM and you’ll save an extra $100.

Connect is by far the leading technology conference in Real Estate. There’s always a fantastic line-up of speakers… and next year is no different. Just take a look at the list of some of the folks who will be speaking there.

Dennis Crowley
Co-Founder, Foursquare

Jason Fried
President, 37 Signals

Saul Hansell
Tech Reporter, The New York Times

Max Ventilla
Zoo Director, Aardvark

Chris Pearson
Founder, Personified & DIYThemes

Vanessa Fox
Entrepreneur, Ignition Partners

If you’re serious about real estate technology and you’ve never been to a Connect conference – you don’t know what you’ve been missing. I’ve had the honor of being involved in many of these conferences and I’m hoping I can make it out to New York in January.

Full deets - Inman News Real Estate Connect runs January 13 – 15, 2010 at the Marriott Marquis Times Square in New York. You can check out the entire program here.

Full Disclosure: Real Estate Connect is produced by Inman News, which owns the Future of Real Estate Marketing blog.

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Terabitz has been very quiet lately.

A refresher for those of you might not have heard of the company – they launched in 2007 to much fanfare (see Terabitz Gives You Loads of Data) — as a sort of “Netvibes for real estate” — but the company made hard tack to starboard in the years since and have reinvented themselves as a platform for real estate brokerages.

It’s a crowded marketplace in that space, but certainly one that is always ripe for innovation. This week they’ve pulled the up the curtain on what they’ve been up too, with a new release of their platform.

It includes a number of back-end features that build off their data aggregation chops to allow brokers to create content rich web sites. From their press release:

Neighborhood and Community pages featuring business reviews, photos and school reports (via implementation of the Yelp, Flickr, and Education.com APIs) as well as hyperlocal news content (via implementation of Yahoo Pipes).

Real estate market reports featuring data and trends derived from live MLS (Multiple Listing Service) data and displayed in a way the average user can understand at a glance. Market reports are provided at the neighborhood and community level, which makes them far more useful than typical city or county-level views.

Property search that better merchandizes listings through a “gallery” view that enables the user to view large photos in the search results display.

Explore the Neighborhood™, a map-based tool that enables users to view amenities in the area of their home search – businesses, places of worship, recreational facilities and more – in order to better understand what it is like to live in a place.

Terabitz One-to-One™, a prospecting tool that enables agents to create dedicated, automatically updating Websites for homeowners that display recent sales, new listings and a dynamic home value estimate.

The Terabitz platform is modeled on the relaunch of Chicago brokerage @properties‘ web site. @properties is a company that’s proved its willing to invest in potentially game-changing ideas (see Real Estate Search Stores – Coming Soon?) so it seems like a natural fit.

The redesign is clean, simple and well executed. But I’m not a fan of having to register in order to search for a home — so I didn’t get a chance to test out the search tool. And it was doubly annoying that every listing I clicked on I had to create an account… how about a couple freebies guys?

Nevertheless, I did like Terabitz platform’s neighborhood and community pages (like this one for Lincoln Park, for example) which were a nice collection of a series of different data sources. My only suggestion would be to add more media; more photos (the Flickr stream pulls in some pretty random stuff) – professionally produced neighborhood videos would be a fantastic addition to those pages too.

In any case, it seems this release is why we hadn’t heard much from Terabitz recently. It turns out they’ve had their heads down coding.

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One of the things that always struck me at the last couple of Connect conferences was the number of folks in the audience that came from outside the US.

Last month in San Francisco was no different. I met people from Canada, Mexico, Germany, Australia, Spain, France and many others, all walking the floors of the Palace Hotel.

Every day, I look at the Inman News Facebook and LinkedIn groups and there are requests from entrepreneurs and real estate professionals from every corner of the globe who want to participate in the conversation.

So this got all of us at Inman thinking, why not give them that forum?

Let’s get the folks from Booli.se, Zoomf, Immobilien Scout24, Igglo, Properazzi or Immobiliare.it and connect them with the people at Zillow, Trulia, Redfin and others and share the insights.

Let’s examine REALTOR.ca, a truly national real estate search site, MLS driven and controled by Realtors. Sound familiar?

Let’s look at markets in North America, Asia, Europe, South America and understand how the greater global economy can impact even the smallest local markets.

Let’s learn how brokers and agents around the world are retooling, relaunching and reacting to ever-changing global real estate markets.

Let’s understand how new technologies like smartphones, video and social media are knocking down traditional barriers and borders around the globe.

Global Connect will be all of that and more… Mark your calendars, we’re bringing the world to New York City, January 7-9, 2009. You can learn more on the Real Estate Connect NYC 2009 web site. With much more to come.

I’m also looking for speakers, topics and anything else FOREM readers can contribute. I’m honored that this blog reaches the far corners of the globe, and over the years I’ve had many conversations on line and off with readers from around the world.

So whether you’re in Rotterdam or Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town or Chennai, Tokyo or Toronto; if you’re working on a cool technology, doing something innovative with your business, writing a blog or just have a interesting new idea – let me know. I want to hear about all of it. I want to bring you to New York.

Please contact me at joel [at] inman.com or phone me at +1 (971) 228-5704.

This should be a lot of fun. Hope to see you there.

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iPhone 2.0 turned the iPhone from smartphone to full-fledged pocket computer. Applications continue to pour into the iTunes store and I’ve been experimenting with a lot of them. Here are a few of my favorites, practical applications:

Evernote – Need to keep track of all the contacts and colleagues you meet on the road? Scan their business cards with the iPhone’s camera and Evernote will scan in the information so it’s waiting for you in text form back on your desktop.

Puluwai – The power of location-based, mobile real estate search can be seen in this app. Bare bones for now, and the search results are pretty sketchy – but familiarize yourself with this experience… the future is here.

Yelp – Keep track of your online reputation in Yelp’s reviews with this handy app. Better still… find a good place for lunch when you’re out on the road.

Nearby – On a neighborhood tour with out of town clients? Top up the databanks with useful local landmarks pulled from Platial’s geobits. Better still create your own neighborhood tours on Platial and pull them up on your iPhone.

Sketches – Take a photo of a property you want to email to a client? Use Sketches to mark it up, add arrows and notes right on the photograph.

Any others to add to the list?

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One of the questions I get a lot when I speak in front of groups is “Is it too late for me start getting involved in blogging/social media/social networking etc.?”

My answer is always firm – absolutely not.

There’s always opportunity to take advantage of the latest technologies and there is still plenty of room for folks to gain first mover advantage in many areas.

Just look at some of these agents and brokers who are still pushing the envelope with new technology.

Kevin Tomlinson of the South Beach Real Estate Blog has launched on his personal real estate web site what I think is the very first commercial implementation of Google’s Street View (see Google Maps Hits the Streets). You can embed them individually (see New Google Street Views Can Be Embedded on your Site) but Kevin has gone as far as to build them in to his condo map of Miami.

Fantastic tool – though I do wish the picture were just a little bit bigger.

Intero Real Estate has launched a new site based on Terabitz’s technology. Terabitz lets a user create a real estate dashboard (see Terabitz To Allow You to Make your Own Mashup) — think Pageflakes for real estate — it’ll be interesting to see if Intero’s clients respond to the new interface.

ChaseNation is the perfect example of what I call a niche network (see Niche Networks and Marketing Real Estate). It was started by luxury brokerage Chase International as a way to connect directly with consumers around Lake Tahoe and Reno real estate. Built on Ning (see Create Your Own Web 2.0 Site with Ning) Chase Nation was steered by Diane Cohn of Reno Realty Blog. It’s a beautiful looking site – and functional too. Of course the challenge will be steering and encouraging consumer participation now but if it takes off it could be very successful. Plus by choosing to use an off-the-shelf product like Ning, the cost of entry was so low that if it doesn’t take off – they could easily ditch it.

And I think that’s really the lesson here too. Don’t be afraid to innovate and experiment and then move on if it’s not working.

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I’m back in Portland and done washing off three days worth of casino stink. NAR was an enlightening trip and it was great to catch up with so many people, even if a broken plane sunk my hopes of attending the BloggerCon get-together.

Over the few days I was in Vegas I had a chance to talk to a number of people. I spoke front of a panel at the Homescape Summit, as well as presented to an enlightened group of Realty Alliance marketers and technologists. I also had numerous in-hallway conversations, where – let’s face it – the real education happens.

Here’s my take. There’s a seismic shift in Real Estate 2.0 underway right now.

The fear of new technology has largely dissipated. But it has been replaced by confusion and hesitation in the face of an uncertain market.

What do I mean? I think most people get Web 2.0 – they understand the power of a blog or a social network, for example. They understand the value of syndicating their listings. They know they should be thinking about video tours for their listings. The what? and why? questions have, for the most part, been answered. It’s the how? that they’re wrestling with more and more now.

As far as announcements this week, there were some significant developments; Zillow snagged some listings from the newspapers and introduced a Virtual Sold Sign program.

Rival REALTOR.com launched a neighborhood research tool for consumers. And CyberHomes has finally birthed itself.

I hope to chime in with a greater assessment of each of the announcements next week, but here’s something I’ll be chewing on over the weekend.

In the frenetic arms race by the portals for greater and deeper feature sets, does any of this really create a better experience for the users?

This mad dash for features has been driven by the dreams of untethered engineers, fast-tracked by the fears of being left out of the party and fueled by a need to prove a positive growth strategy for venture backers and shareholders. But, in the end, what does it all add up to?

The greater challenge here moving forward is not just the next gearing up for the next big release or more games of oneupmanship, but is going to be educating Realtors, and by extension, the general public, on how to use them.

Right now, I think this focus on features has lead to overwhelming confusion that is resulting in hesitation. The shift that has to happen is the move from the development of technology to the application of technology. The company that can best communicate the application of its product will win, not the company with the flashiest features.

Or at least, that’s what I’m hearing.

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When I originally started at eppraisal a couple years ago I discussed the idea of creating a service that would allow someone to sell and buy a house online. It would be an end-to-end transaction with all of the documents and tie-ins to vendors that might be needed to make that work. I quickly realized what a challenge that might be.

The Real Estate Journal is reporting on a new real estate web product called RealUmbrella that positions itself as the one-stop-shop for FSBO transactions. My first inclination was to think, “is this a Redfin clone?” It isn’t, it’s much more like that idea I was chomping on back in 2005.

Their basic offering is this: for $349 – $949 you can utilize their services, which will give you a bunch of tools to market your property and will give you all the legal documents to transact a real estate sale online with a buyer in real time – no agent necessary.

Most real estate agents will think this is ludicrous, and many home buyers and sellers will tend to steer clear of this type of a service. That doesn’t matter though. As long as there is a significant enough percentage of people willing to use RealUmbrella, they will do well. It’s a large industry and there is room enough for multiple business types.

Will this disintermediation of real estate agents matter? No more than the general FSBO market already does. The other 98% of the real estate industry can continue doing their own thing, and will continue to do well/not well depending up on their own actions.

Of course their claims use all the normal anti-establishment rhetoric used to garner attention. Understandable and expected. What I want to see is if they can pull it off and if they truly can create a paradigm shift in buyer/seller behavior.

I’m interested in hearing from someone who uses their service, so let me know if you have plans on being a guinea pig for the rest of us!

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What is the matrix? by t-mix

Virtual tours are on the verge of becoming just that; more virtual.

Up until this point, they have been well, frankly, disapointing. Greater adoption of video by real estate marketers could help this situation in the short term (see Inman Connect Highlights Real Estate 2.0), but thankfully there is some cause for optimism in the long term as well.

Google’s Street View (see Google Maps Hits the Streets) is just the tip of the iceberg as more and more technologies are deployed to bring ground-level context to individual locations.

EveryScape is another company that hopes to “bridge the gap between the physical world and the virtual one”. It allow you to navigate a two-dimensional image as if it were real. Essentially, it’s a 360 virtual tour, with depth.

Playing around with their demo and it’s pretty easy to see that someone could build a pretty cool virtual tour product on top of this. The ability to create tours or let users “drive” manually is a pretty slick feature.

But that’s not even half as cool as what’s being cooked up in Redmond.

Context and quality have been the critical factors in undermining most web based virtual tours today. Figuring out where in what relationships exist between photos (which hallways link to which rooms etc.) is very hard to accomplish in the current web environment.

Photosynth is another emerging technology (based out of graduate research done at the University of Washington and now being incubated at Microsoft labs), which first came to light late last year.

Photosynth allows you to “stitch” together photos in 3D space and assign relationships between them. The effect is you can navigate through a series of 2D images and get a sense of how they relate to one another. It’s pretty amazing stuff – you can see a demo on the Microsoft Labs site.

The blog istartedsomething says:

imagine a real-estate house tour with Photosynth. It would be light years ahead of slide-shows or even more complicated Quicktime VR presentations.

Quality is far more difficult problem. The need for fast load times have, to date, necessitated low quality or low resolution images on the Internet – unfortunately, this does no justice to the presentation of real estate properties.

Another Microsoft project called Seadragon aims to make the resolution and corresponding size of image irrelevant, so that images can be browsed smoothly in any environment.

A presentation at the recent TED conference demonstrates these two technologies can work together. Check it out, it isn’t hard to imagine how these could be the next generation of virtual tours.

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Another new blog to keep an eye on – 1000watt Blog. They’re also watching Facebook and real estate.

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