The last few days have been pretty darn busy for Pat Kitano and myself ... OD'ing gorging on Turkey celebrating Thanksgiving and finalizing the curriculum for our next Social Media Webinar series, which starts on Friday, December 5, 2008, from 10:30am to 11:30am Pacific time, and runs for 12 weeks.
The first three have been sellouts, with over 50 attendees registered for each series, and we're expecting a full house again. We've been thrilled with the great reviews, which you can see for yourself here:
We're also excited because, working with ECRESystems.com, we're now able to showcase a pretty darn cool product: FeedFuze, which allows you to aggregate interesting social media content (via RSS) and display it nearly anywhere -- your Active Rain blog, your outside blog, your Wordpress blog, even your Aunt Thelma's old web site!
Translation: You know all that interesting content you've found and tagged on Delicious? And all those articles you've written on Active Rain about getting a home prepared for sale? And all those Tweets you've sent out about your market? FeedFuze enables you to take all that content, aggregate it, then display it in a "newsfeed" format. The future of social media marketing is all about you becoming the hub of real estate content for your local area, and FeedFuze makes it possible.
Apart from showing off FeedFuze and what it can do for you, we'll also be discussing social media in general: How do you use these tools to generate contacts, listings, closed transactions, and ultimately $$ in your bank account?
Because of the support of the Active Rain community, we're happy to be able to offer a 50% discount off the regular $299 price. By clicking on the orange registration button, you'll be able to get the Active Rain special price of only $149 for the 12 sessions -- about $12 each.
While many Active Rainer's were off partying participating in NAR's 2008 Orlando convention, Pat Kitano and I were putting the finishing touches on our next Social Media Marketingwebinar series, which started this morning (Monday, November 10, 2008).
For late registrants, and for those who missed the first session, we're offering make-up sessions later this week:
Thursday, November 13, 2008, at 10:30am Pacific time
Friday, November 14, 2008, at 10:30am Pacific time
Everybody's talking about social media, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, and a dozen other cool online tools to extend your marketing. How do you use these tools to generate contacts, listings, closed transactions, and ultimately $$$ in your bank account?
This 12-session webinar series answers that question, and much much more. What we're really exicted about is the "Social Media Broadcasting" system we're developing along with some of our partners, a system that expands your online presence significantly without necessarily blogging.
We've been thrilled with the response from the Active Rain community so far, with a sizeablebiglarge huge number of attendees in the first two series, both of which sold out.
Because of the support of the Active Rain community, we're happy to be able to offer a 50% discount off the regular $299 price. By clicking on the orange registration button, you'll be able to get the Active Rain special price of only $149 for the 12 sessions -- about $12 each.
For those who care about such things, the big recent news is, of course, the Move.com vs. Active Rain dustup. While much of the commentary amongst Active Rainers has been supportive of their fearless leaders, there is also an underlying angst about the notion that while the content of Active Rain is provided by its 50,000-odd members, the windfall from the prospective sale would have accrued not to those members, but to the owners of Active Rain. Were Messrs. Mardini, Heaton, and Washburn indeed going to enrich themselves with the fruits of others’ labor?
I thought some of my fellow Active Rain bloggers would find this entertaining...I'm sponsoring a"shady agent tricks" competition. Here's how it works: You submit an anecdote about something shady that a real estate agent or mortgage broker has done (without, of course, revealing the name of the agent in question). The writer of the best entry will get a $10 Starbucks card.
Some of you may be familiar with Google Base -- essentially a searchable database into which you can upload information about nearly anything -- homes, resumes, recipes, doctors, cars, proteins, reports -- and make it findable by Google's hundreds of millions of users.
One of the categories Google Base has is "Services", which I was playing with today. Imagine my surprise when I typed in "Palo Alto, CA"...and my own mug shot was staring out at me! When I clicked on the link, it forwarded to my Active Rain profile.
I imagine the good folks at Active Rain have simply built a little XML feed that automatically posts our profiles to Google Base as another way of promoting our services. Great job, and very creative!
In September, the New York times published (yet another) puff piece on Redfin, the innovative Seattle-based online brokerage. Following is my commentary on that article, which I posted originally on my home blog and I've re-posted here for the benefit of my fellow Active Rain'ers...
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Today's New York Times has a provocative article featuring Redfin, the Seattle-based broker with an innovative web site and business model. The thrust of the article is captured well by its headline: "The Last Stand of the 6-Percenters?"
Does Redfin's entry into the market indeed spell the end of the traditional compensation model, in which the seller pays a commission -- fully negotiable and often around 6 percent -- which then gets split -- often 50/50 -- between the seller's agent and the agent who brings the ultimate buyer? Redfin's approach is quite different: in exchange for doing a lot of the work involved in a real estate transaction yourself, you pay significantly less.
Judging by the paranoid, almost apoplectic, reaction of the traditional real estate industry to Redfin and other "discount brokerages," you would think armageddon is just around the corner. I beg to differ. While Redfin et. al will certainly help change the commission structure, I don't think they will end it. Rather, I think we'll see a split in the market, with some firms, like Redfin, concentrating on budget-minded, do-it-mostly-yourself clients, and other firms continuing to work with those who want the traditional "full-service" treatment.
One size does not fit all, and kudos to Redfin for recognizing that as a business opportunity. Perhaps there's an analogy between real estate and hair salons. Some people want the $45 "full service" haircut, which is an hour-long ritual that includes a shampoo, a soothing scalp massage, a high-quality haircut, a comfortable chair, stylish surroundings, and maybe even a glass of wine.
Others, however, prefer the $7 "discount" experience: it takes only 10 minutes, the chair's not that comfortable, the ambiance isn't much to brag about, and you'd better have done part of the work --shampooing your hair -- ahead of time. They're both haircuts, but they're distinctly different experiences, designed for distinctly different consumers. Likewise, Redfin's product and the traditional broker's product are both "real estate services," but they're distinctly different experiences, designed for distinctly different consumers. I'll have lots more to say about alternative real estate business models in other posts, but for now I'll close with a few other comments on the article...
It's a shame, though perhaps understandable, that technology-driven innovation in real estate is largely coming from outside the real estate industry: not only Redfin, but also Zillow, Trulia, Google (e.g. Google Base), and Yahoo (now allied with Prudential and Zillow), and smaller players like Altos Research (which provides market analysis).
The reluctance of listing agents to show properties to buyers being represented by Redfin is not necessarily "blacklisting." Part of the duties of a traditional buyer's agent -- for which he/she is compensated 3% -- is to show properties, often literally dozens of properties, to clients. Though it's understandable that Redfin, at $2000 per transaction, simply can't do that for its buyers, it's also understandable that the seller's agent would be reluctant to essentially do somebody else's job, for no additional compensation.
While Redfin's search technology is incredibly Web 2.0-cool, I have to wonder if it's defensible. Movoto created quite the buzz when they launched their also-cool Web site, but now that Redfin is also operating in the Bay Area, Movoto now has only the second-coolest site in town. If another startup with $1 million in funding comes along -- or, for that matter, a tech-savvy realtor figures out a neat Google Earth mashup -- maybe Redfin will also drop to second place. Ultimately, it has to be their business model, not their technology, that will determine Redfin's fate.
Finally, an admittedly nit-picky point on the article's use of the phrase "selling agent." In the industry, the person representing the seller is most commonly referred to as the "listing agent." The buyer's representative is, oddly and confusingly enough, most commonly referred to as the "selling agent." In a few instances, the article incorrectly referred to the seller's representative as the "selling agent."
Shortly after Zillow added their latest new functionality to their web site, I posted the following on my home blog. Thought it might be of interest to my fellow Active Rain'ers...
While you can continue to use Zillow as before without registering, you do need to get a Zillow account before you can use some of these new features. Once you’ve done so, you search for a property…
…and click on “See home details” which gives you, uh, the home details…
…and three options. “Save Favorite to My Zillow” is pretty tame. The other two options, however, have a lot of folks hot and bothered. Let’s see what the fuss is about…
“Owner Tools” gives you three further options:
Confirming ownership sounds a bit dubious at first, and indeed the first time you do it you only have to confirm the owner’s name:
Thankfully, to claim a second or subsequent property as your own, you have to enter your credit card information (which Zillow dutifully promises not to use for spurious purposes), enabling them to match their ownership records with the name associated with your credit card.On to the next feature…editing your home facts. They’ve made this ridulously easy to do. In my case, the basic features of the home were correct, but Zillow was missing information about the type of heating and cooling system, the roof type, and a few other items.
The third feature, “Create an Estimate and Make it Public” was also pretty straighforward. You start by editing basic home facts, if necessary……followed by adding home improvements……and other features… …and finally by specifying which comps make the most sense for your home:
When you’re all done, you get an updated personalized estimate, which is different from the public Zestimate.
Go ahead, give it a spin yourself! Warning — it is addictive.
Note: If this blog entry looks familiar, it's because this is the second time I'm posting it. The first time, some gremlins came and by the time they were done, this entry had disappeared. :( Here it is again...
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Realtor-haters and Internet-fearing-Realtors may not love each other, and they may not have much in common, but they do agree on one key thing: the Internet is the death knell of our profession, about to consign all of us to the same sad scrap heap of history on which travel agents were once summarily, and somewhat brutally, tossed.
It is therefore perhaps ironic that on this one issue, the only issue on which these two diametrically, almost pathologically, opposed groups agree, they are both wrong. Sorry, folks, the Internet ain’t gonna put us out of business, no matter how badly the first group wishes it would, and the second group hopes it won’t.
To both groups I say, in my best James Carville-inspired Clinton-esque campaign trail voice, “It’s the relationship, stupid!”
Before I explain, let me clarify what I don’t mean, in the interest of avoiding a winged-monkeys flame war.
First, I don’t mean that the Internet hasn’t had, isn’t having, and won’t have a large impact on the way real estate business is done. Quite the contrary, the Internet has changed and continues to change the industry in many ways, most of them good for the consumer.
Secondly, I don’t mean that an average Realtor, or a top-producing one for that matter, wouldn’t benefit from becoming more Internet-savvy. Quite the opposite — the rich efficiency-and-effectiveness-enhancing fruits of the Internet are there for all to feast.
So, what then do I mean by, “It’s the relationship, stupid!”
What I mean is this: the real estate business is not really about homes, and transactions, and escrows, and mortgages. It’s not about negotiation, and home inspections, and contracts, and deadlines. It is, instead, primarily a business of relationships, and of the dreams that such relationships can achieve.
When clients engage a Realtor to help them buy or sell a home, they are entrusting that person to guide them through what for most of them is the biggest financial transaction of their lives, a roller coaster of elation and disappointment, of happiness and sadness, of agreements and arguments, of satisfaction and stress. It is, in short, a relationship, and the success of the whole process depends to a large extent on how well that Realtor cultivates and manages that relationship.
Similar relationships are also found in other “intermediary” professions in which an agent acts on behalf of a principal. The extent and strength of that relationship is, I posit, directly correlated to the difficulty in disintermediating it.
Why has the Internet been so successful in driving the travel agent industry to near extinction? A big reason — not the only one, to be sure — is that most people never thought of their travel agent in the same way they did of their attorney, their Realtor, their accountant, or their private money manager. A travel agent was simply the person on the other end of the line who helped you buy a ticket from Peoria to Pretoria. The next time you called the 800 number, or dropped by the travel office, you would often deal with a completely different person. Consumers never really developed a deep relationship with travel agents, because the travel agent industry was not one in which relationships were key to being a successful intermediary, so when a cheaper, more efficient way came about to get tickets, consumers did so.
Back to the original question — will the Internet disintermediate Realtors? It might, for that relatively small percentage of folks for whom this relationship simply isn’t that important — the die-hard do-it-yourselfers, the inveterate Realtor-haters, or more benignly, investors who buy and sell frequently and simply don’t need the hand-holding.
For the rest of the population, those who appreciate the need for guidance, for counsel, for support — for the relationship — Realtors will always be around and needed.
Winged monkeys, go home, and please leave us alone.
Internet-fearing Realtors, take a deep breath. The Internet will not cut you out of the business, unless you deserve it, unless your client relationship skills are so bad that your clients prefer no relationship to one with you. If that’s the case, then you, my friend, have a much bigger problem than the Internet.
Disclaimer: ActiveRain Corp. does not necessarily endorse the real estate agents, loan officers and brokers listed on this site. These real estate profiles, blogs and blog entries are provided here as a courtesy to our visitors to help them make an informed decision when buying or selling a house. ActiveRain Corp. takes no responsibility for the content in these profiles, that are written by the members of this community.
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…and three options.
Confirming ownership sounds a bit dubious at first, and indeed the first time you do it you only have to confirm the owner’s name: 
On to the next feature…editing your home facts. They’ve made this ridulously easy to do. In my case, the basic features of the home were correct, but Zillow was missing information about the type of heating and cooling system, the roof type, and a few other items.
The third feature, “Create an Estimate and Make it Public” was also pretty straighforward. You start by editing basic home facts, if necessary…
…followed by adding home improvements…
…and other features…
…and finally by specifying which comps make the most sense for your home:
Go ahead, give it a spin yourself! Warning — it is addictive.
;)
;)
