iPad observation #5: Linking frees slaves, sometimes, but the future of mobile real estate is unknown to attorneys from New York City.

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s a true fact: I’m pretty much disgusted with the RE.net — which denomination I quarried with my own hands, back in my early days on the apellation trail. By now, just about everything looks to me like hoke, smoke, hustle and jive — smirking vendorsluts and the clueless suckers who can’t stop themselves from pridefully posturing about having procured their own plundering. I know that’s not fair — or not entirely fair — but it often seems to me, lately, that everything I have ever hated about the real estate business is successfully infesting the on-line world.

This will fail, all of it, in the end, and I’ll say why in detail when I get time. But for now I persevere by holding my nose and holding my ground. Whether it is the seemingly harmless simian chatter of net.monkeys desperate to prove their ape-titude to all the other net.monkeys or the craven schemes of hack vendors looking for just one more gullible fool to make their month, I’m well sick of it all. I haven’t looked at a feed-reader in many months, and my Twitterverse consists of my Best Beloved, Cathleen, and Teri Lussier.

The rest of the net, however, is a different thing. I’ve been following Apple tablet posts for months, and The Unofficial Apple Weblog is the only blog other than BloodhoundBlog whose client I have on my iPhone. On and off last week, and in greater earnest today, I’ve been looking for decent iPad posts from the RE.net.

Not hard to foresee, but Agent Shortbus doesn’t get it. Typically insipid kibitzing with no real understanding of the revolution the iPad will bring to the entire universe of commerce.

But, alas, the Shortbus set doesn’t have the vision to come up with a truly idiotic argument against using mobile devices to market real estate. This honor was earned by Rob Hahn, an attorney in New York City who doubles as a vendorslut consultant or a consultant to vendorsluts or some bizarre combination of the two. Realtors follow his musings religiously, apparently because they confuse being an attorney with being a Realtor, and living in New York City with living in a normal real estate market.

In any case, “The Inglorious R.O.B.” insists that smartphones won’t work for real estate marketing, first, because the cops might not like it, and, second, because he bought a lame-ass smartphone. As a matter of courtesy, in case you are laboring under the false impression that these arguments are not totally absurd, let’s dispense with them:

First, people obey anti-texting laws just about as religiously as they obey speeding laws. And, on the off chance that a cop is not tied up with a real crime or a bloody traffic accident, it seems likely that the uniformly-disobeyed law he is most likely to enforce — if he’s already topped off on donuts for the day, that is — would be the speed laws. If you’re not getting pulled over for speeding all the time, text away. Nobody cares — except for “The Ignominious R.O.B.”

Second, good smartphones have good batteries — and the iPad will have a great battery. I think trying to use a smartphone to shop for real estate in New York City would be beyond stupid, but, as it turns out, people in the rest of America not only have cars from which to illegally use their smartphones, they also have a smartphone charger plugged into the cigar lighter. As I have mentioned, my car has three cigar lighters, but I use two of them for 330 watt 120 volt power inverters, thus to power my own laptop and my clients’. The horror! Not just smartphone use on wheels, but actual flagrantly criminal laptoppery! There oughta be a law, dammit!

And surely I am being unfair to “The Ignorable R.O.B.,” but it’s sane to argue that “mobile won’t matter in 2010” for one reason only: Because 2009 was the most important year for mobile real estate marketing. This is why we talked about it so much here last year. Even so, I’m prepared to argue that the iPad could still win the year — but with a more interesting kind of mobile real estate marketing.

And: To hell with all that. Let’s talk about people who are getting things right.

Here is a wonderful post from TechCruch, speculating about the iPad the day before it was announced. The author manages in a few paragraphs to document everything the Vook could have been if Brad Inman had the kind of respect for his customers that Apple has.

The online buying model for newspapers and magazines isn’t going to save the publishers, any more than iTunes Music and TV downloads have been saviors for their respective content owners. Will consumers benefit? Absolutely. But they won’t be willing to pay a premium for content they can access on the web for free. And if old media shifts to a pay-only model, consumers will just switch to free online alternatives. There will be exceptions — publishers with high quality, exclusive content (say, the New York Times) will likely benefit. But the majority of newspapers and magazines? Not so much.

But what about this promised land of revolutionary hybridized content — won’t people be willing to pay for that? Thing is, that’s going to be time consuming and expensive to make. A handful of very large publishers, like the NYT, may be able to scrap together some compelling content on a regular basis. But it’s going to be difficult to quickly integrate additional supplementary material in a way that doesn’t feel tacked on.

So Who Will Benefit?

Textbooks. Guides. Biographies. Novels. Pretty much anything that has previously been offered in book form, but has been handicapped because it was restricted to paper. Few of these have ever been ported to the web in a rich media form, because they’re lengthy and it just isn’t fun to read a book on your computer screen. And even when textbooks have been digitized (like for the Kindle DX), they didn’t bring anything new to the table. But there’s so much room for improvement.

Imagine a biography of Abraham Lincoln that allowed you to pull up photos of every person and place mentioned with a single finger swipe.  Flicking the top of the screen would bring down an interactive timeline of Lincoln’s life, making it easy to get your bearings. The hybrid book could include comprehensive references for each person mentioned in the book. Not just a Wikipedia article, mind you, but information that is contextually relevant to the moment you’re currently reading about. The experience wouldn’t simply be one of jumping from hyperlink to hyperlink. All of this supplementary material would naturally flow into the reading experience, while you never left your place in the primary text.

There are plenty of other potential applications. Picture a chemistry textbook where you could freely rotate any molecule, tapping on a chemical bond to learn more about why it behaves the way it does. Or a Shakespeare play (in text form) where you could tap a piece of dialog to hear it spoken aloud, or perhaps even played in a video. Tapping a sidebar at any time would bring up a roster of characters and their allegiances, lest a love triangle leave you confused.

There are infinitely more possibilities ready to be unlocked.  Many of these things could be done were this content converted to a rich webpage, but up until now there hasn’t been much benefit to doing so because there was no way to comfortably consume it.

Read it all. That’s your Deep Think homework for the day. Here are some lighter bits:

The PC officially died Wednesday. So says The New Republic, and of course I agree with this evaluation. It will take a few years, and the die-hards will surely die hard. But the die is cast.

Mashable insists that the great eBook war aas already begun. I’d say it’s already over, but, as the article hints, dinosaur forces could be brought to bear. More from me on the latter later.

The Photography for Real Estate blog raises an interesting point: If your real estate marketing is Flash-dependent (that would be in your virtual tours, etc.), you’ve got some thinking to do. Your photos already aren’t making it to the iPhone, and soon they won’t be making it to the iPad, either. (Just in passing: engenu uses Javascript, for two reasons: Flash don’t travel and Flash don’t search. Lo-tech don’t mean no-tech.)

And Geek Estate has a nice post on the iPad as a Realtor’s electronic amanuensis. I talked about some of this stuff on Wednesday, but Michael LaPeter came up with some ideas I missed. Like this:

Build a fun, interactive signup sheet for visitors. You could let them choose to subscribe to various value add lists right there, and depending on what you use it could put their info right in your list/ database, no tedious transcribing later.

That’s brilliant, as is this:

Take notes directly into your online CRM/ organization software, with no risk of losing them and no tedious transcribing later.

Ignoring “The Inexplicable R.O.B’s” inability to understand the immense and accumulating power of mobile technology as a real estate marketing tool, the iPad is the perfect replacement for the Realtor’s portfolio, that classy-looking notebook you’ve been carrying around so you can pretend to take notes. Now you can take notes — and keep them forever in your CRM database.

There’s more out there, I’m sure, but I haven’t seen it. If you’ve spotted a particularly valuable iPad post, weigh in with the link. As much as I enjoy spanking idiots, I’d much rather see people working hard to improve their understanding of the world.

Linking frees slaves — I love that joke — but only if the slaves want to be free. I do. How about you?

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