Candy Evans is one of the nation’s leading real estate reporters, bloggers and consultants. She writes for AOL’s Housing Watch, Joel Kotkin’s The New Geography, and is now a guest blogger for Future of Real Estate Marketing (FOREM). She’ll soon be writing for Move.com. Candy holds a masters degree in journalism from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and has been a published writer for more than 25 years. She was a longtime contributing editor to Dallas’ D Magazine and sister pubs, and in 2007 founded the wildly successful Dallas real estate blog, DallasDirt, where she broke the news on where former president George W. Bush bought his Dallas home in 2008. She is the founder and creator of SecondShelters.com.

Tag, you’re it! I recently interviewed a Santa Fe agent who told me that, to maximize internet presence, her firm advertises in at least 400 places on the internet. If they advertise through print, which they do rarely, that ad must have a media or internet component.

Besides being Harry Potter, how can you connect a piece of paper to the internet?

Easy. You play tag with a new communication tool:  the Smartphone Tag Reader.  A Tag Reader is a graphic tag printed on a regular print ad that, when scanned by a reader downloaded to your Smart Phone, immediately delivers a full photo gallery of the ad product — home, all property details including room dimensions, current pricing, even neighborhood and school information. Some even feature property videos. It’s almost as if the whole listing pops right out of your cell phone which I have no doubt, someday down the road, will happen.

Here in North Texas, the Ebby Halliday Companies, in conjunction with Luxury Portfolio Fine Property Collection, publish their own glossy, luxury home magazine of the most expensive homes or home sites in the area priced over $750K. The magazine is then mailed to 30,000 high net worth individuals in the north Texas area. The magazine, Grand Vie, satisfies Ebby agents’ demands for a glossy print product where they can showcase their homes without paying the outrageous prices commanded by local print media.  But this year, Ebby took one major technological step further, adding a Smartphone graphic Tag on each Grand Vie listing.  Clients run their Smartphone over that tag, and out pops a full gallery of rooms, going way beyond the capabilities of a one- dimensional ad.

Want to see how Tag technology brings print alive? Three easy-peasy steps:

1. Download the free Tag Reader to your Smartphone at http://gettag.mobi, then follow the    instructions for your phone type.

2. Open the Tag Reader and scan or photograph a Tag on any page in Grand Vie (or the Tag above).

3. Property details, more pictures and agent information will load as a web page where you can explore the property more thoroughly.

Tag technology has been extremely popular in Asia, and is rapidly picking up steam in the U.S. You can also see similar Tags in recent issues of Architectural Digest, and ads from retailers like Pottery Barn and Giorgio Armani. But Tag technology seems to have found the perfect mate, at least on paper, in real estate sales.

“It offers a great way to make print come alive,” says Randall Graham, Vice President and director of Marketing for Ebby.”We’re seeing great results and hope to see even more in the future.”

Have you tried Tag technology yet?

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J.D. Power and Assoociates just released their 2010 U.S. Automotive Emerging Technologies Study which measures consumer interest and purchase intent for new technology and looked at smartphone owners needs for in-car wireless. I thought this study was particularly relevant for real estate agents – who spend a great deal of time on their smartphone and in their car!

There are around 45 million smartphones in use in the U.S. now. Interestingly enough, smartphone owners are rethinking what they want to see on the dashboard of their cars.

The study says this:

“Among the 51% of vehicle owners who say they own a smartphone interest levels for wireless connectivity systems are higher than the industry average, both before and after price is revealed. Before price is revealed, 77% of smartphone owners say they are interested in in-vehicle WiFi (versus the industry average of 64%). Fifty six percent of vehicle owners with smartphones are interested in mobile routers, compared with an industry average of 46%.”

Here are a few things that really stood out to me in this survey:

• Texting and checking emails while driving? I see people doing this all the time although it’s illegal (at least in California!) Based on responses from nearly 18,000 vehicle owners last month, 30% of smartphone owners (who responded to J.D. Power’s survey) said they text and check e-mails while in the vehicle. I wonder if they also asked about Tweeting or Facebooking too?
• Read emails aloud? 40% said they would like to have the ability to have e-mails read aloud through their vehicle’s sound system. I could see this being a cool feature as long as it didn’t require pushing 10 buttons to make it happen – thus defeating the purpose of not looking at your phone.
• Text message displayed on the dashboard? 40% said would like the ability to have text messages displayed on an in-vehicle screen. I particularly like this idea – although this means you are still reading while driving!

What else are people using their smartphones for?

• Directions. 40% of vehicle owners with smartphones use them in their vehicle to get driving directions and more than half say they would like to use them to get directions in the future. This is something I use all the time on my iPhone – it is by far one of the best features. I love with Google Maps on my iPhone the ability to see traffic, type in the name of a restaurant and city (without an address) and it finds it, get turn by turn direction and much more.
• Music. 20% of vehicle owners with smartphones use their device to listen to music through connection to external or vehicle speakers.

So, if you are a real estate agent reading this, most likely you’ve invested in a smartphone and most likely you are in the car – a lot! What types of technologies are you currently using or would you like to see in the future to make driving and using a smartphone safer? Please leave me a comment below!

Written by: Katie Lance, Marketing Manager, Inman News

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I realize I’m a little biased in the world of smartphones. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a proud iPhone user. I love the apps, the ease of use, the large screen and the ‘bells and whistles.’

In real estate, having a smartphone is not just an option but a necessity. Everyone wants a response right now, not later today.

So the question remains, can the leader, the iPhone still hold their lead in 2010 as the top smartphone in the United States?

According to Nielsen…
According to Nielsen, The iPhone is still the most popular smartphone, followed by the BlackBerry 8300 series, but despite all the new smartphones flooding the market, Motorola’s trusty Razr (yep, the RAZR!) flip-phone was the third most-popular phone of the year.

What about Andriod?
Comascore.com, a leader in measuring the digital world, announced a few days ago the release of its latest report on the mobile market, ‘Android: Crashing the Smartphone Party.‘ The report provided an overview of the current U.S. mobile environment and offered an in-depth look at the Android OS. Among the report’s key findings is that consumer awareness of Google’s Android is growing rapidly, due in large part to the Verizon Droid ad campaign.

Here comes Google!
Coming to the smartphone party (possibly) next month is Google’s Nexus One. Nexus One puts Google in business against other providers of Android-based phones. Google is the major force behind Android. Will this create a backlash against the company, or did other providers get into the Android game aware that Google eventually would make this move?

A major shift happened…
A new survey of smartphone users by PC World and Macworld found that 85% of smartphone owners were extremely or very satisfied with their handsets, and the same percentage said they rely heavily on them. On a typical day, people use their phones two-thirds of the time for personal use and the balance for business. This highlights the HUGE shift that happened with smartphones from being primarily a corporate use to gaining a wider consumer customer base, courtesy of the iPhone.

So what is it about the iPhone?
I think one of the biggest reasons consumers, especially real estate professionals, love the iPhone is because of how easily they work – not the mention the incredible branding campaign that Apple has done to make you “feel” extra cool when you own an Apple product!

Did you know?
Did you know, Apple didn’t even launch the iTunes App Store until a year after the first iPhone became available? Over 2-billion-apps-sold have been sold as of late September 2009.When the iPhone was first launched in June 2007, Steve Jobs tried to sell developers on just making Web apps. When Web-based apps couldn’t match the performance or capabilities of native apps, developers asked for more. Apple announced that they were changing course in October, but didn’t launch the App Store until July 2008—just as Apple released the second generation iPhone hardware

So, in the spirit of the holidays, and because I do love the iPhone, I wanted to share with FOREM readers 7 FREE new iPhone apps just released within the last few days:

1. Ribbit Mobile
This app has already gotten quite a bit of buzz. You have to sign up and request to be invited to their beta trial. Ribbit Mobile will read your voicemail and then text or email it to you, it will save your messages forever, you can dictate memos on your phone, and answer calls on any phone.

2. CallRec.me
Pretty cool app especially for real estate agents –record your phone calls and voice notes with the push of a button. I could see this being especially helpful for agents to keep track of conversation records.

3.  HWA, Inc. – Home Warranty of America
Videos, sales tools, what’s news, and much more. Great app for title/escrow officers, mortgage lenders, real estate attorneys and agents. I’d love a Realtor’s first-hand experience using this app.

4. iParked
Ok this app was made for me – it helps you remember where you parked your car! If you dare to go shopping in the next couple days, I recommend using this app!

5. San Francisco Tweets
Search by categories or by SF districts. I like that it is a live Tweet stream so you could theoretically be walking down the street toward a restaurant and see if there is anyone inside the restaurant tweeting about the food, service, etc.

6.  New York App
Look up shows/events, places to eat, bars/clubs, tourist attractions, Yelp reviews and much more. Cool factor: there are links to some of the best lifestyle blogs in NYC built right in and a NYC Twitter stream. Not bad! Can’t wait to check this one out in person next month.

7.   ConnectNYC
Saved the best for last! This app is specifically designed for Real Estate Connect NYC  Jan.13-15th (#ICNY) includes live Twitter feeds, conference schedule, what sessions are starting within the next hour, exhibitor and sponsor booth info, as well as NYC hot spot info.

So how do you feel about this smartphone debate? Are you loyal to your iPhone, Blackberry, Andriod, or Razr? Are you holding out for something else?

Leave me a comment or send me a tweet here or here!

Written by: Katie Lance, Marketing Manager, Inman News

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