Tremendous Networking at REbarcamp Seattle.

February 13, 2009

Hosted at Zillow - Seattle

I was privileged to attend a recent meet up with other Real Estate, Mortgage and Tech industry professionals at REbarcamp Seattle. Until this event I had only come across the term “barcamp” in some blogs and a few tweets on twitter. I really didn’t know enough to explain the camp or how it would be organized. I did know that the REbarcamp was a group of like minded professionals interested in networking, offering solutions about technology and tools to expand the social networking environment. So, when I received an invitation to attend I jumped at the opportunity.

Rich Jacobson stated best what REbarcamp was in the opening remarks. He said REbarcamp was

“A spontaneous growing enterprise of passionate people who are willing to share their knowledge.”

My wife, Kelly Hopper, is also a real estate professional and we attended together. We were greeted by volunteers on the 41^st floor of the Wells Fargo Building in downtown occupied by Zillow. The greeters immediately pointed us to the agenda white board. A grid of times and room locations had been drawn on the board with only a few breakout sessions labeled. It was explained that it was encouraged that attendees fill in any topic into available time slots if we would like to lead the topic. After the first hour or so the board was nearly filled. Because there was as many 5 or 6 simultaneous sessions, I could not attend but a fraction of the breakouts.

All the sessions were one hour and there was lively discussion and valuable insight into each topic. In addition to the raw information, the connection with other folks in attendance was invaluable. I was very impressed with the level of passion and expertise all the attendees offered. Many traveled from out of state to be a part of REbarcamp in Seattle.

The first session was introduced for everyone and lead by Jim Marks from Virtual Results. His topic was creating an effective web site. The other sessions I attended were “Tracking Neighborhoods”, “Group Blogs”, “Why Data Matters”, “ActiveRain.com”, “7 Habits of a Highly Effective Blogger”, and “Twitter”.

Following is a summary of each session, maybe a helpful tip or two, and some unabashed name dropping.

Effective Web Sites:

Jim Marks lead the first event and explained that there are really only two major focuses with any web site. Traffic and Conversion. Jim described a great web site as Simple, Useful, Understandable, Authoritative, and Rewarding. He described examples of these values. And as a website is being designed the answer to the question “why?” should precede using any feature, design, layout, or widget. The answer should be that it creates traffic and helps the conversion.

Jim discussed Traffic drivers, paid and organic. Organic has a growing return on investment and some examples are blogging, social book marking, and social networking. Next Jim discussed Conversion. He briefly made a point that there is a difference between receiving an e-mail or contact information and a bona fide lead, and a client. The client test was “a car ride”. He said if I have a person in my car for 30 minutes they will become a client. Other than that they are a lead today or in the future

Tracking Neighborhoods:

The Second break out I attended was “Tracking Neighborhoods”. This was not a professionally lead discussion and a bit smaller group. Maybe 15 people were in the group, but as we introduced ourselves it became apparent that there was a ton of experience in this group. Representatives from Redfin, Zillow, WalkScore, plus other local and out of state brokerages were all interested in this topic. I had to think that the more selective the group the more important the topic. And the big boys were in this group.

                The General discussion hovered around the idea that the neighborhoods around property were very important to the consumer buyers. The large online firms all have decided that offering this information is an important aspect of their web sites and that they can leverage their technology to provide more information than the competitor. They acknowledge however that local individuals living in a neighborhood will have infinitely better detail and personalization about neighborhoods than they can furnish. It was mentioned that both Zillow.com and Trulia.com encouraged participation from the brokerage community to blog and comment about neighborhoods on their sites. And Redfin.com has long focused on neighborhood information. They describe more than 2,500 neighborhoods on their site. WalkScore.com has a really cool way of rating a neighborhood by the service that you can walk to from a given address.

One idea for the individual agents to act on was to focus on their neighborhoods, or small towns with their online presence and work to gain traffic for their sites based upon this information. One of the agents in attendance, Josh Murphy, said his Windermere Belfair office had linked with the chamber of commerce online and supports the descriptions of the town and event that they held. In turn the chamber of commerce provides a link to their company web site as a valuable resource to the town. This added a lot of traffic to their site and made their office the “unofficial real estate representative” of the town.

A husband and wife agent team that specializes on out of town buyers coming to the Seattle area had a question about what they might do with posting online neighborhood information. They are having success attracting out of towners, and wanted to know how to include many neighborhoods in their marketing without specializing in just one. So one group idea was to blog about the neighborhoods as they visited them with clients. Their blog would be from a viewpoint of a fresh set of eyes and therefore would have a “new” impression of neighborhoods that was unbiased by living directly in the area. This idea would perhaps appeal to the out of towner who is looking to compare neighborhoods. And by reading these reviews that are written with a fresh set of eyes, like newcomers, it might result in new customers and increased links to the website.

Matt Lerner creator of WalkScore.com was also introduced. This is a fascinating site that allows you to place a property address in their site and receive a score from 0 to 100 on the Walk ability of this location. In other words a high score means there are lots of stores, services, transportation, and amenities in walking distance to the address. Matt mentioned that there seems to be a correlation to the Score and value of property. He said they can show those properties across the country that has suffered the most in this recession are those with the most “car time”. WalkScore has a widget for websites to load as part of their sites that is really fun.

Another website that was excitedly talked about was Active Rain’s “Localism”. This channel of ActiveRain.com is soon to be turned on to the public. It has been under a land grab assault by real estate agents to become the area professional in neighborhoods. Localism has only been available for post from registered members of ActiveRain.com until now but will soon be available to the public. Active Rain has a great track record of attracting consumers to real estate agents and once Localism goes live it promises to drive lots of traffic.

Group Blog:

The Third session I attended was titled “Group Blog” and was lead by Greg Swann of BloodhoundBlog.com an extremely established multi author blog site. Also in attendance were Ronda Porter and Ardell DellaLoggia contributing authors with RainCityGuide.com another multi author blog that began in Seattle by Dustin Luther.

                Discussed were many questions about setting up an multi author blogs, handling comments both good and bad, placing the authors list in the page, creating a rotation to post articles, deciding on themes which author talks about, having a group of industry experts verses all real estate sales agents in your team, and so on. In the case of RainCityGuide.com it is a requirement that any new author would need to demonstrate their commitment and ability by “commenting” on other authors’ articles first for a period of time. In all cases, the speakers encouraged everyone to comment on blogs as a great way to get started with their blogging.

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At this point it was noon and we broke for lunch. Thank you Zillow for the sandwiches they were great!

Why Market Data Matters:

                Altos Research made a presentation after lunch that addressed the reason that their company’s product fills in the questions about the market that often gets overlooked by real estate agents. They said there were 3 Questions that consumers ask before buying. 1) What’s for sale, 2) What’s the Value and 3) How’s the Market.

                Altos Research provides real time market data about “How’s the Market”. Based on current and historical active listings they provide widgets, and reports that agents can use to back up the buyers need to know “is this a good time to buy?”

ActiveRain.com

                Rich Jacobson led the discussion. Rich is an agent in the Kitsap County area and a super spokesperson for Active Rain. He explained that ActiveRain.com began as a lead generation tool for a real estate company in 2006 and grew to be a leading industry member site for agents and mortgage professionals. The site now has over 140,000 members and has a public reputation as a great place to find a real estate professional.

                As Rich said, ActiveRain.com has become lots of things to lots of people. Agents can find a referral system resource and is a member blog site that gives great page rank in the search engines, and a way for the public to locate a local professional. Active Rain has also added to their site with “Localism” and “Listing Router”. These two additions are intended to add new reasons for the general public to become interested in visiting Active Rain as well as real estate professionals to contribute content and receive a reward for doing so.

7 Habits of Effective Bloggers:

                Rich Jacobson also led a large group discussion about blogging. His 7 Habits are as follows:

1.Consistency

2.Tantalizing Titles

3.Funky Formatting feeds failure

4.Short isn’t necessarily sweet

5.Content is King

6.People like Pictures

7.One Size Doesn’t fit all.

Rich did a great job leading this group and offered to send his written notes to anyone who wanted them. As in the Active Rain Group, everyone encourages blogging without fear. Be yourself, place content, don’t worry, and be happy. Ha Ha. We did have a lot of laughs during the sessions.

Twitter:

                Damon Pace, self proclaimed “Internet Adventurer” and David Gibbons from Zillow lead the group about Twitter. Easily the most non-understood web tool talked about at the event was Twitter. We all know that twitter has taken off this year. They just received another round of funding, $35 Million, for a non profit web site. Amazing. Anyway, the big question, why twitter?

                Damon and David did not have a script for the event, but knew many members would enjoy talking about it. They suggested everyone get a free account and try it for themselves. One of the attendees replied “I started an account and then sat staring at a blank screen”. It’s true. The first thing that doesn’t happen is anything. I had the same experience when I first logged on. So I started stalking a few names that I knew were on twitter (stalking is very OK on twitter because David said so), and found it fascinating to get mass conversation that I only heard one side of the message. However some of the tweets had links to interesting web sites of someone’s favorite song so I pushed on. There was a little ah ha when Damon said that this was his first reaction as well. He suggested downloading an application called twhirl or tweetdeck. That it made it easier to follow conversation and see what is going on.

                Twitter is real time news. Pointing to the airplane that landed in the Hudson River, the breaking news happened because a ferry passenger tweeted the event and the news services picked them up immediately. The rescue ferry passenger took photos of the wing of the downed plane and posted the picture to twitter using another app called twitpic.

                Another great way to keep up to date on current events is to use twitter hash tags. By using a hash tagged word in the tweet, users can search (click search at the bottom of the page) the hash tag and follow all the events. I wish I had used the #rebcsea hash tag and followed on my cell phone the REbarcamp Seattle because later in the day when the Active Rain party moved locations, Kelly and I ended up eating dinner together wondering where everyone was. Apparently if you are in the know these things don’t happen and if you don’t know then there is no excuse for you. But I digress. If you want to see some of the conversations about the Seattle bar camp try searching #rebcsea at twitter. Ok, now all I need is a barcamp that tells me what the perfect mobile device is to track all of you. Ha Ha.

REbarcamp is a growing social event happening all over the country. I highly encourage participation and meet up with great folks just like you that are committed to moving the social experience forward.

-Duane Hopper