We’re listing Thursday, and it’s been long enough since we’ve done one of these Grand Opera listings that I have a lot of new stuff to invent from scratch. Ideas are easy, it’s execution that’s hard. The sign and the collateral cards are built and being printed. We’re playing with a card that plays off of the sign to emphasize the differences you get by listing with us.
If you’re a glutton for punishment, you can monitor the changes in the web site/weblog named in the sign over the next 48 hours or so. The template is one I’ve been playing with for our brokerage web site (itself to be a weblog), but this version of it will be unique to this house.
I’ve got other balls in the air, too, so I might be thin on the ground for a little while.
James Hsu asked me to define Realty.bot, so here’s an on-stilts explication:
A Realty.bot is an internet start-up that plans to undertake some part of the residential real estate transaction, usually as an adjunct to selling advertising.
Trulia.com and PropSmart.com are listings.bots, acquiring listings by scraping, direct entry and XML feeds.
Zillow.com and several others are AVMs, Automated Valuation Methods, and Zillow is graduating to a direct-entry-only listings.bot, but they don’t like that designation.
Redfin.com can seem like a Realty.bot, but, as with many other new entrants, it’s really a brokerage with a higher-tech front-end.
Arguably, a true Realty.bot is strictly a media/advertising play, but that’s something that could change in time. ShackPrices.com, for example, plans to become a leads vendor, and it is not unreasonable to argue that this may be the ultimate business model for most/all Realty.bots.
A better bright-line dividing point might be face-to-face end-user contact. We may come to a point where a Realty.bot is distinguished from other vendors by being untouched-by-human-hands, a completely automated real estate product offering.
By then I will have made up different words.
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David G from Zillow.com says:
Hi Greg,
To clarify, the designation I contested was “listings bot” because there is nothing robotic about listings on Zillow; they are all posted by our site’s users. Likewise, much of the data and some of the estimates on Zillow are now posted by owners and their agents.
Zillow’s goal is to facilitate, not compete for the face-to-face contact you talk about. Advertising is a big part of that and as you know, we’re preparing to roll out a locally focused advertising product for real estate professionals.
March 7, 2007 — 8:45 am