Author: John Rowles (page 1 of 4)

by John Rowles

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

This is in an article titled “The great realtor rip-off”.

The comparison to estate agents in the UK is especially interesting. They make half the commission and close 3 to 4x transactions.

The article mentions NAR by name and only refers to MLS in passing as ex-cartels:

The business used to operate like a series of local cartels. In a typical area, a handful of brokers controlled a shared database of available homes, and limited their cheaper rivals’ access to those listings. In 2008 in the United States and 2010 in Canada, regulators struck deals with realtors to open up these databases. Yet since then the average commission has actually risen, from 5.0% in 2005 to 5.4% in 2011, according to REAL Trends, a research firm.

“Used to”, huh?

by John Rowles

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

With Jeff’s post below still fresh in my mind, I read a story in the  Boston Globe Real Estate section over the weekend that attempted to sort of let buyers and sellers know that brokers and agents are adapting to social media:

Although it’s hard for Bourgeois to quantify just how many sales have come through social media, he believes that anecdotally it’s working.

If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Anecdotal ROI is worth about as much as having Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny create an account to use your IDX search.

“If everyone is hanging out at the donut shop, that’s where you would go to get business. That’s where people would meet in the old days,’’ said Haley Brooks.

by John Rowles

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

There are plenty of places to go if this is your first time hearing about “Panda”, but the general idea is that Google has set out to target what it considers to be “low quality” content of the sort generally propagated by link farms, scrapers, and the eHows of the Web.

Any time Google makes a major change to their algorithm there are winners and losers, and you can count on the losers to raise a fuss about Google goring their ox. This time, Google has come back and said, in effect, “If you don’t publish crap you have nothing to worry about”.

The problem for those of us who currently rely on IDX to power listing search on broker and agent Web sites is that IDX content is, by Google’s definition, crap — and the crap has come home to roost: Some of our sites are down 30% since Panda hit.

This, finally, should force some brokers to address the issue of content quality and strategy, because the alternative is to pay through the nose for inquiries that Google would send, for free, if brokers understood what Google wants.

Here are some of the questions Google suggests site owners ask themselves about their content. I’ve picked a few that speak directly to real estate listings and IDX (the whole list is here). Every place that Google had the words “article”, “content”, or “page” I’ve inserted the real estate specific terminology {in brackets}:

• Does the {listing detail page} provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
  Google is focused on sending its users to the creators of original content, because that is generally the best user experience. Since the listing agent is the only one who actually knows anything about the listing, that is doubly true for real estate.The irony is that all listing content — the text, the pictures, the video — is original content right up until the moment it goes into IDX and listing syndication. As soon as that happens, Google cannot distinguish the listing creator’s domain from the rest, and you have just given up the value of Read more

by John Rowles

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

“Sessions said they trusted their real estate agent, who, she claimed, told them the snake problem was “made up” by the previous owners so that they could leave their mortgage behind. He assured them that every precaution was made to keep the snakes away, she said.

The Sessions’ signed paperwork acknowledging the stories about snakes when they bought the house, based upon the assurances the stories were false, The Associated Press reported.”

http://abcnews.go.com/US/snake-house-family-home-idaho-turns-satans-lair/story?id=13851600&fb_ref=abc-fb-recs

by John Rowles

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

…a certain theme in Century 21’s latest attempt to make consumers care about a real estate brand?

Considering that the average age of a real estate agent is like 73, the women in these ads should look like this:

Blanche is even wearing a gold jacket!

Memo to Bev Thorne, CMO of C21: If you are going to cougar route, go full cougar. Why beat around the bush? :

by John Rowles

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

As the only member of the blogroll who regularly attends conferences like NAR and Inman Connect — or perhaps as the only one who is willing to admit it — it is my special privilege to glean some nugget from these events that I think will be of interest to the BHB readership.

As I was pondering the take away from this year’s Inman Connect in NYC — was it something the excellent David Carr said, or was it watching the 5 Realogy CEO’s get up on stage to talk for half an hour while saying precisely nothing?  — it turns out I got scooped by Bill Geist from CBS Sunday Morning.

Geist, unlike myself, got tickets to the Top 100 dinner…

by John Rowles

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

Hi John,
I am a realtor in El Paso TX.   i need a slogan that is new to our area for an inside cover of a local journal.  got any ideas? It will accompany my photo and the Coldwell banker logo.   I read that you are a contributor to Real estate slogan and marketing.   Please advise.  thank you, <name redacted>

Hi <name redacted>,

How about: “Your home lasso in El Paso”?

your Welcome,

John

by John Rowles

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

From the Daily Beast:

For 10 months, (a real estate agent) drove around with a corpse in her car. She never contacted police or tried to find the dead person’s relatives. Instead, as the body began to decompose, she spread baking soda on the floorboards to mask the smell.

Leaving aside for a second the pain this must be causing the dead woman’s family, as well as the real estate agent’s likely clinical insanity, there is something about this that strikes me as instructive.

It’s the bit about spreading baking soda to mask the smell.

It pains me to admit it, but I can identify with that impulse and recognize it in some of the organizations I’ve worked with: When faced with a big stinky problem, we don’t necessarily ignore it, we just sprinkle baking soda on it, and that allows us to keep going at least for a little while.

So, what have you been sprinkling baking soda on?  Maybe today is a good day to do something about it before the problem gets so bad someone else has to call for backup.

by John Rowles

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

I am at the Council of MLS’s meeting in Chicago on behalf of a client, and it is surreal. How is it possible, in the age of Craigslist, that it takes this many people to manage a relatively straightforward database?

I just watched Stefan Swanepoel tell the MLS people, to his credit, that it is in their best interest to advocate raising the bar of professionalism in real estate, a subject that has been prevalent on this blog for as long as I’ve been reading it.

Its hard to see the MLS and RE Assoc. people taking that message to heart, considering that raising the bar = fewer dues paying members, but if you are going to tilt and windmills, you might as well go for it and speak truthiness to power, I guess.

Still, the problem of standards is no joke — except that it is.

Good Morning America was on over breakfast at the hotel today, and they started a new “Where are they now?” segment with Lorena Bobbit — remember her?

At about 2:49 in the story, the reporter tells us that Lorena makes her living now “..as a part time hairdresser — and real estate agent.”

As John Bobbit once surely said — “Ouch.”

by John Rowles

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

Say hello to Google Instant, launched overnight.

Go to Google. Type the letter “R” and Realtor.com appears in the search result list.No button click required. Keep typing and the search results change on the fly.

My first impression as a user is positive.  It is just neat.  As a geek, I marvel at the engineering and infrastructure required to pull this off for millions of simultaneous users. As a guy who helps real estate companies with SEO and SEM — I’m still figuring it out.

What is clear is that Google has fundamentally changed search, and quite possibly has raised the bar for search user experience — unless the novelty wears off and it becomes annoying.

What is far less clear is what this means for SEO and SEM.

TechCrunch has one of the more level and least speculative write ups on that….

SearchEngineLand, on the other hand, seem to be trying  not to wet its pants…

by John Rowles

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

Google’s 2006 decision to enter the Chinese market on the Chinese government’s terms, which include censorship, is often held up as the symbolic moment when its mantra of “Don’t be evil” conflicted  with a hard business reality. In the end, pragmatic capitalism won out over principle, and Google.CN was launched.

Google’s rationalization that censored access to Google was better for the Chinese than no access to Google has always rung hollow to me. “Don’t be evil unless it is going to give competitors an edge in the world’s biggest market” still has “Don’t be evil” in it, but slippery slopes are paved with caveats. With that decision, Google merged off of the high road, joining the rest of the multinationals on the highway to the Chinese market.

Now, the Chinese government has turned its significant cyber warfare skills, honed by years of attacking US government and military networks, on Google in order to track dissidents and critics.

Google has,  surprisingly and righteously, reacted like Ralphie towards the end of A Christmas Story. The company wheeled around on the bully Chinese government and boldly defended itself by publicly stating that the Chinese governement is a hacker, and that censorship is wrong. It looks like they may well take the Google-logo colored exercise balls strewn across their Chinese operation and go home.

Cynics have pointed out that Chinese Internet users don’t engage in a lot of eCommerce so Google may be taking the opportunity to abandon a drain on its resources while repairing some of the PR damage its decision to go into China caused in the first place.

I doubt it. The lure of the sheer size of that market is still very strong. Last year Chinese consumers bought more cars than American consumers, and you don’t hear Microsoft (whose decision to grant the Chinese government access to Windows source code is the genesis of the Chinese cyber warfare program) talking about pulling out.

Chinese consumers are following the American consumer’s trajectory but with the huge booster of digital technology and our map:  Today, they are hooked on the freedom of the automobile the way we were in Read more

by John Rowles

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

A few of the comments on my last post about the moves Google seems to be making in the direction of a more robust National Real Estate search have focused on what this means for MLS.

The consensus (hope?) is that Google’s move in that direction, as well as RPR, are bad news for MLS.

Maybe. Probably. But not necessarily so: There is a case to be made for the value of the local MLS in terms of Quality Assurance.

Google wants to index information, not create or validate it (think automation vs manual processes), but if Google Real Estate were riddled with inaccurate listing data, if users were consistently finding listings that are no longer for sale or that have the wrong price, that would degrade the user experience, and that is probably more important to Google than anything else, which may explain why they haven’t, and might not, leverage their position as the conduit through which most real estate traffic flows by creating a Google MLS.

The way it works now, Google’s RE data, accurate or not, leads to sites where changes entered into MLS are quickly reflected. MLS also ensures that only its members contribute listings, so there is some vetting there, as well. As a source of QA that Google does not have to set up and manage itself, the local MLS serves a purpose.

The problem is that lots of MLSs are not going to be happy with going back to their original, limited role of organizing a local market among brokers. They will be loathe to give up on the idea of “adding value” (IOW justifying fees) with things like public-facing Web sites. They also, in many cases, see themselves as a bulwark against change that they don’t like, hence their role as the enforcers of rules meant to “protect” the traditional industry — to the detriment of consumers.

(Exhibit A: MIBOR’s attempt to use NAR IDX rules to label Google a “scraper”.)

As long as that is the case, we are stuck with the balkanized, inefficient and anti-consumer “system” we have now, and that is what makes it ripe for Google Read more