One of the best parts about Facebook business pages are the ability to add custom tabs. For a while, real estate agents were somewhat limited to what type of tabs and apps were available specifically to them and their needs. Recently, we are seeing more and more companies come out with options and tabs specifically for Realtors’ Facebook pages. Just announced yesterday on their blog, Zillow has expanded its free package of Web tools and is now offering Facebook Tabs.

According to their blog,

“Zillow’s Facebook Tabs are a powerful informational and social-networking tool that can help you reach and connect with more clients and potential prospects on the largest social media network in the world.”

The New Zillow Facebook Tabs Include:

• Listings Tab
• Local Information Tab
• Contact Form Tab
• Ratings and Reviews Tab

What I really like about these tabs is that it allows a real estate professional to integrate their listings into their Facebook page in a very non-aggressive (and non-annoying) way. Now, agents can promote to their clients that their listings will be featured on Facebook (along with other online marketing portals) but the agent won’t have to spam him or her news feed with listings! I also love the Ratings and Reviews tab – great testimonials from clients used to just live on Zillow, can now be featured right on your Facebook page.

All of these tabs are FREE!

Here are two examples of two of the tabs available:

Listing Tab

Ratings and Reviews Tab

How to Install:

To install the tabs, just go to http://Zillow.com/Webtools and click on Facebook Apps.  Select the tab(s) you wish to display on your page, then follow the simple installation instructions. Zillow’s Facebook Tabs will only work on business and community pages — they will not work on personal Facebook profile pages.

What do you think? Have you installed any of these yet or plan to? I’d love your feedback, post a comment below!

Written by: Katie Lance, Social Media Director, Inman News, @katielance

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Guest Blogger, Mike Bowler, Sr. has been in the real estate business (Lansing, MI) for the past 32 years. During that time he’s educated and consulted hundreds of REALTORS. Mike is a former owner; broker of Coldwell Banker Bowler Real Estate and is currently an Associate Broker for Coldwell Banker Hubbell Briarwood in Lansing Michigan, who bought his company in 2001. He also owns his own company PRETEC (Professional Resources, E-Business, Technology, Education, & Consulting) and is an avid fan of social media in the workplace. Mike was named in 2009’s Top 25 Most Connected Real Estate Professionals by PROXIO and selected by Inman News as one of the 50 Most Influential Online.

The real estate industry is in a constant state of evolution and changes every day with technology, regulation changes, and economic challenges, never experienced by most of us in the real estate business.  You can either bury your head in the sand or dig in and get on this exciting train ride. I choose to ride it out and continue becoming educated by some of the best resources I have witnessed over the past 32 years.

When our industry gets lax in education, it contributes to the lack of professionalism, our growth as REALTORS, and affects how competitive we as real estate agents will be in the coming years.  I really believe that adapting and learning new ways to do business will help brokers, managers, and agents stay ahead of the knowledge curve and strengthen our ability to survive this paradigm shift.

Who would have thought a few years back that:

• Move would be acquiring Threewide (ListHub) providing a huge syndication for Listings (See Inman News story)
• RPR – REALTORS Property Resources would be formed and providing 98% of the nations property data (For those who have it)
• That YouTube would be the number 2 search engine
  • That Facebook would have 500,000,000 members, the average user would have 130 friends and People would spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook
  • That approximately 2.5 million foreclosures would be in the process, and another 2.5 million mortgages would be 90-plus days delinquent.

Yes, we are in a whole new era of education for REALTORS, with short sale designations, foreclosure classes, green designations, new mortgage regulations, classes on how to work with your ancillary related businesses like appraisers, mold technicians, home inspectors, and of course loss mitigation.  The sampling of changes above are just a small portion of drastic game changing events that any REALTOR, who has an interest in being a player for the future of real estate, must be aware of.

So where do we begin?

Professional development, learning new trends, and adapting to a more complex industry are musts for brokers, sales managers, and real estate agents. This also includes ancillary businesses like appraisers, mortgage originators, and title companies that have experienced massive change. My point is that as professionals we must adapt to new business strategies that enhance our knowledge, give quality service, and meet the demands of the e-consumer. We Must Raise the Bar!

Here’s a Place to Begin at Zero or Little Cost:

Right Tools Right Now
Agent Reboot™
Real Estate BarCamps
REALTOR University
Your Local Association, Company and Professional Educators

Setup Google Reader and Subscribe to the following sites:

Future of Real Estate Marketing
Mashable
Inman News
RISMedia
Realty Times
My Tech Opinion
Trulia Blog
Zillow Blog

I could go on and list many other avenues to education, however this list will help you grow your own list of favorite places to learn. Developing an edge in today’s market requires that real estate practitioners be proficient in Blogging, social media, search engine marketing, and how to work with the e-consumer once they contact you.

It is imperative that those real estate professionals who have come through this challenging market be fully prepared to take advantage of new steady growth that will be forthcoming. My point is that our industry needs to step up to the plate and sharpen our competitive edge by using good old fashion service integrated with new technology. Consumers drive the industry and have always driven it, however today they are looking online first. Are they finding you when they go to Google, Yahoo or Bing? If not, you owe it to your family, company, and yourself to get on board and learn this business all over again. All this is part of your newfound professional development, learning new trends, and adapting to a more complex industry.

Please share your strategies for staying abreast of the current trends in real estate.

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Great news for those of you who are building your web sites in Wordpress. Zillow has announced the release of the new Local Market Explorer WP Plugin.

The LME plugin, which was built by Jonathan Mabe and Andrew Mattie, developers with Diverse Solutions, automatically creates rich pages on your blog that incorporate data from Zillow, Education.com, Flickr, Walk Score and Yelp.

Zillow has set up some test pages here:

• Los Angeles
• San Diego
• Seattle

You can download the plugin immediately from WordPress plugin directory.

A couple of key notes; you’ll need separate API keys for each of the data sources but you can turn on or off which sources you want to incorporate. Also, the plugin does not let create hyperlocal pages (at either a neighborhood or ZIP code level) so you must keep all of your pages at the city level, for now.

Zillow promises future versions that will address these issues. But regardless, this is an instant, dead simple way to instantly create compelling content that your web visitors are looking for. Organized correctly, you could create a powerfully relevant local resource.

wordpress, zillow, local market explorer, plugin

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Last week Zillow laid the smack down on the developer of the iZillow iphone-optimized webpage (see Zillow for iPhone), demanding that he pull down the site.

Sellsius blog has the low down.

A statement received by this blog this afternoon reads:

We reached an amicable agreement to purchase the URL. I don’t want to discuss the agreed price but it’s more than the $250 he 1st requested.

He can continue to run the site with different branding. Pity this got unnecessarily heated; other than this, Auston seems like a good guy.

Kudos to both parties for being able to come to a friendly agreement.

Now back to zestimating your neighbor’s house.

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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJfrdcbfXsc[/youtube]

Ever since Zillow evolved into.. well, whatever it is now (some sort of real estate search, AVM, mortgage rate and discussion forum Frankenstein Hydra, as far as I can tell), the controversy over Zestimates seems to have quieted down.

Maybe it’s that the novelty of seeing what your home is worth has worn off as housing prices crash.

Perhaps it’s that the PR pros at Zillow have done such a phenomenal job positioning the company in the media as a legitimate data source that the Zestimate has become an accepted statistic.

Or more likely, maybe it’s that the industry has been successfully wooed with the promises of easy, cheap marketing online tools (which are especially seductive in a down market) and any remaining resistance has slipped by the wayside.

In either case, Zestimates just don’t seem to be the point of contention they once were.

But today Zillow launched an iPhone app. One that, I suspect, promises to bring the debate over Zestimates (and their accuracy) back to the forefront.

Upfront – it’s a very slick app. The app’s location awareness (as demonstrated on the video embedded above) is truly a killer feature – fire it up, and the app immediately shows you where you are and then displays all the data on homes nearby. As you move around, the map and associated values update too. Freakin’ cool.

(That said, it was a little sluggish this morning however, not sure if was AT&T’s network or Zillow’s servers struggling to keep up).

Having had a chance to play with it a bit – I can vouch that as a potential buyer it is incredibly cool to be able to walk around my neighborhood and see what each home is worth and gauge what I could get for my money.

Sure, I know. A Zestimate is just a “starting point”. But here’s the thing, seeing that number while standing outside the home is a powerful physical association to price. One that as more and more people have access too (through other mobile platforms, see A House They Found on Zillow…) it’s going to start to have a greater impact; on negotiations and much more.

Having the power of the Zestimate in your hand is a mighty weapon to wield. Personally I can’t wait to walk into a home on a buying tour with my agent and being able to instantly call up how much Zillow says that home is worth and then compare it to the list price.

Given that scenario, I suspect the debate over Zestimates, long dormant – may just have woken up again.

The Zillow app is free and available in the App Store.

More: Read 1000Watt Consulting’s take on the app.

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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAsppG3f_c4[/youtube]

Mobile real estate poised to take off? Palm seems to think so.

On a side note, I’m kind of digging the Pre… but doubt I’m ready to give up the iPhone. Yet.

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It’s no secret newspapers are dying. Most are struggling to transition to a new digital environment. And let’s face it. Most newspaper web sites are pretty awful. Many are stuck in legacy platforms, saddled with expenses and without the resources necessary to bring their sites up to 2.0 snuff. (Sound familiar brokers?)

And since craigslist has already gutted their real estate advertising revenue, it seems many papers seem to be abandoning the space altogether. Leaving it as someone else’s problem.

Zillow.com announced today its plans to launch co-branded real estate Web sites with 180 newspapers across the US.

The Tampa Tribune and 100 other newspapers published by Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc. are amongst the first to take up the Zillow brand. For example, Homeseeker on TBO.com now just redirects all property searches to a cobranded Zillow page.

This is great news for Zillow who get all the SEO benefit of those inbound links, fantastic name brand awareness in each of these communities they go live in and tons more traffic to prop up their advertising CPMs.

And presumably, the newspapers get a cut on any ads sold in their Zillow space.

Of course, all of this isn’t particularly revolutionary, it builds on Trulia’s existing Publisher Platform and the granddaddy in the space, Classified Ventures’ Homefinder.

But it’s interesting to see the degree to which the newspapers don’t seem to care about monetizing real estate traffic on the ‘net. I’m not sure if its just not profitable (no advertisers) or they don’t have the capacity (or capability) to monetize it successfully and so are just willing to hand it off whole to a third party.

In any case, it seems a little short sighted.

A couple years ago I spoke to a group of newspaper advertising executives about what to do to save their real estate sections. I suggested that they look beyond banners and classifieds and build out a whole platform to support real estate agents and brokers taking their marketing messages to the web; a listing syndication engine, a blogging solution, an advertising platform, a video hosting tool.

The vision? Rather than simply preying on advertising dollars from the industry – build out the tools that the industry so desperately needs. Become a trusted service provider and build a bridge between the professionals and the community the paper serves. One that ultimately in fact could be leveraged by all verticals.

In today’s climate, that may be too ambitious, and too late. And it all hinges on whether the local newspaper brands are still even relevant in a few years. I’m not even sure about that anymore.

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Following up the conversation from last week on Zillow’s January traffic (see Bad Week for Trulia).

This from Property Portal Watch:

According to Zillow, traffic was 7.5 million unique in January. However, according to other sources such as compete.com, traffic is much lower. Irrespective of this, it appears that having lots of traffic doesn’t necessarily mean that you have lots of revenue. The rumour is that Zillow has revenues around the US$10m per annum mark.

No doubt the company has been phenomenally successful building their brand. But Simon wonders how best build a business around all that traffic?

Read more at Zillow Turns 3 – What Have We Learned?

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In a post over at CNet, Rafe Needleman tagged Zillow as one of “the next Kozmos” (for more on Kozmo check out Wikipedia). Needleman writes:

The real-estate site’s revenue model is advertising. Real estate and bank advertising. Unless the real-estate research site starts charging for foreclosure listings, I don’t see it doing too well in a hunkered-down economy, in which people are trying to hold on to their homes for dear life, not upgrade.

Similarly, Simon Baker at Property Portal Watch says today the portal is “in for tough times“.

Given all this speculation, I thought it would be interesting to revisit a couple posts I wrote last year; specifically one I wrote in September of last year.

I think much of it still holds true.

* * *

Storms Ahead for Real Estate Sites by Joel Burslem on Thursday, September 13, 2007

Tech pundit Om Malik writes that the slowdown in the housing sector, and the greater uncertainty in the U.S. economy as a whole, is likely going to have an impact on advertising spending. I’ve been saying the same thing for a while (see What the Subprime Mess Means for Real Estate 2.0) now.

Om quotes a recent report by TNS Media Intelligence that says:

Total advertising expenditures in the first half of 2007 slipped by 0.3 percent to $72.59 billion versus the same period in 2006…

Strangely, August’s Neilsen Netratings report (PDF) of the top 10 Web advertisers also came out this week and it actually shows that three of the four mortgage/financial advertisers on the list (including Countrywide Financial) have increased their spending over last month (PDF).

But does this mean the gloomy prognostications are off base? I don’t think so.

Rather, I suspect that online ad spends in real estate are reaching the top of the curve, with perhaps just a minor boost in spending to counter the bad news last month. According to Internet Outsider, the month-to-month growth in spending by Countrywide, for example, is slowing; from $30 million in June to $35 million in July to $35.4 million in August.

It’s really too early to tell how this trend will play out – but if there is to be any large scale slowdown in spending I’m guessing we’re only at the beginning.

There’s one more factor to consider in all of this.

Malik goes even further in his post to suggest that this impact will be felt most severely at the large portal destinations, whose margins may be being squeezed by growing inventory levels at other destinations.

Social networks and social media sites are creating inventory at a rapid clip, and are one of the main reasons why the CPMs (cost per 1000 impressions) have stalled.

Hypertargeted advertising is the holy grail of online advertising; and social networks and social media can deliver that more accurately than a portal or destination site. Social networks like Facebook deliver authentic consumers, rather than faceless “uniques” and can do so in specific niches. Likewise, blogs can deliver passionated readers rather than random “surfers” – just look at the passionate communities Blown Mortgage, SocketSite and Curbed have built. The final link in this chain are the vertical ad networks like Blogads or Federated Media that are making it easier for big brand advertisers to reach out to these readers.

Finally, as advertisers start to shop around, a glut of inventory means only one thing – lower prices and less profit. Sound familiar? This hardly news to anyone trying to sell a home right now.

So, in a way, the prospects of the big ad-driven Real Estate 2.0 plays (Zillow, Trulia, et al.) could very well mirror what’s happening in the housing market. Money’s coming off the table (buyers are holding back) and profits are getting pushed down (too much inventory on the market). Bad news all around.

I could be wrong in this assessment. Part of me hopes I am.

zillow, real estate 2.0, web 2.0

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photo by Marc Staiger

Zillow lays off 25 percent of workforce.

Technorati Tags: zillow, layoffs, web2.0, real estate 2.0

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