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Category: Disintermediation (page 10 of 43)

July 14, 2008

Realty dreams: Moving wisely ever cloud-wise, we approach the day when we can do anything from anywhere without lugging anything

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Attend, if you please: OmniFocus for the iPhone. It will not only help you Get Things Done, it will tell you when to do them. No kidding. If one of your tasks is to ship a parcel at the post office, OmniFocus will sound an alarm when you are near one. Approaching the supermarket? Here’s your shopping list.

That much is just the idea of a PDA coupled with a GPS system. Still, it’s cool. But my dream for a hand-held computer is much larger than that.

Consider: I carry my digital still camera and my Flip video camera with me wherever I go. I have LowePro belt-mounted camera cases, so they’re easy to carry, never in the way. I keep those two cameras with my car keys, along with everything else I take with me when I put my car keys in my pocket: My wallet, my business cards, my watch, my phone, my Bluetooth headset and my MLS key. All of these things are small and portable, either pocketable or belt-mounted, so I have almost all of the tools of my trade upon my person when I leave the house. I look like a freakin’ cop — which is not always a bad thing — but I have my stuff with me so that I can work when I need to.

This is what I want for the iPhone — and for later iterations of the idea of a hand-held computer. A laptop or a notebook computer is luggable, not portable. Even the Canon and HP rechargeable printers are luggable, not portable. You might have a laptop and printer in your trunk — absorbing damage from every bump in the road and cooking in the summer heat — but you don’t have that computing power on your person.

My dream is simple: Everything that I might do on a desktop or laptop computer, I want to be able to do from a hand-held computer. I want to be able to carry my entire real estate business with me, every time I leave the house. This implies cloud computing, of course, since I will Read more

July 11, 2008

I don’t need to show you any stinking badges! I’m a Zillow All Star!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

About a month ago, Zillow started showing the number of contributions you have made to their data base in your profile. Up at the top you see the total number of contributions, and down below you get a running total of recent contributions.

It was obvious where they were headed, a de facto ranking system based on user contributions. In the co-branding information released earlier this week, Zillow made mention of “badges,” and one of the pix they released showed a badge in the co-branding area.

But… I didn’t actually dare to think that I would qualify as a Zillow All Star…

There’s a point at which it’s kind of funny — does it come with a secret decoder ring? But even so, I don’t hate the idea. Active Rain built something that might someday be a business on a completely brain-dead points system. There is no way to make a brain-dead contribution to Zillow. Everything matters.

And thrusting everything associated with the sale of real estate to the side, I love the idea of Zillow becoming fully-populated with data. There may come a day when the Zillow data base is the de facto museum of residential real estate. Hundreds of biz school PhD theses could emerge from that vast store of information.

In the mean time, your Zillow All Star badge is another co-branding trinket you can put on your weblog.

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July 10, 2008

Estately.com is now the San Francisco treat

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Map-based web search start-up Estately.com has uncanny timing for launching new cities and services. No matter what dates they pick, it seems that either Zillow or Redfin will have news on those days.

Here’s the news, which I sat on to get Estately out of Zillow’s glare:

Estately.com is expanding into a new market. Beginning on Thursday, July 10th, over 40,000 San Francisco homes and condos from four Bay Area MLSes will be added to Estately.com’s 115,000+ properties for sale. The Bay Area marks our fourth major market – Seattle, Portland, and San Diego are all live on Estately right now – and the third major market we have entered this summer.

As always, Estately will provide the richest kind of map-based search experience: All MLS listings plus neighborhood-based searches, local schools mapped with the homes, search by transit availability, etc.

Disclosure: Estately.com co-founder Galen Ward writes for BloodhoundBlog.

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July 9, 2008

As good as a link: How would you like to “co-brand” with Zillow?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Do you want to see something huge in the guise of something that might seem quite small at first?

Click here.

This is new software from Zillow.com. It’s supposed to go live at 9 pm PST, but it’s already working for me.

What’s different?

Look up in the upper left hand corner.

C’est moi! A photo of Odysseus. A link to my Zillow profile. A link to my email. My phone number. And a link to our brokerage’s weblog.

Even cooler is that button in the upper right hand corner:

A quick-click button to take you back to BloodhoundRealty.com.

So what’s going on here?

As of tonight, Zillow.com is “co-branding” with anyone who links to it. “Co-branding” is the kind of wine-and-cheese-PR-event deal big companies make with other big companies, but Zillow is extending the idea down to the lowliest of grunts-in-the-trenches.

(We can take a moment to snicker behind our hands. Trulia.com is building its reputation on being niggardly and hostile toward ordinary working real estate agents, so what better way to throw the whole issue into the starkest possible contrast? I don’t think Zillow approaches things this way, but the irony can’t be lost on them.)

Why does this matter? Because it’s a very reasonable response to an objection. If someone says, “Providing or promoting content on Zillow.com improves their garden but not your own,” Zillow can offer up the perfect counter: If you shed attention to us, we will make you our partner for that entire visit, and we will entreat your guest to return to you with every page that person views.

This is brilliant every way you think about it, and, of the wannabe Web 2.0 players in the real estate industry, Zillow seems to me to be the only one who really gets the whole bundle of Web 2.0 concepts: You give to get, wealth is abundant, the expectation of good behavior yields good behavior, etc.

There’s more. Zillow.com is about to introduce a ton of new widgets and gadgets, each one of which will be co-branded to the end-user. You’ll be able to post real-time mortgage quotes, for instance, and anything built with the Zillow API will Read more

July 9, 2008

Content is king: The future of internet search is heuristic

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I worked this out in email this afternoon. It’s stone obvious, once you think about it, so I think it might be on the horizon now — if it’s not already happening.

What the hell are you talking about, Greg?

I think the next level of search engine algorithms is going to be based in an heuristic observation of end-user behavior to correlate keyword relevance to actual relevance.

Do you see? Google and other search engines identify patterns of keywords in static HTML documents to try to identify keyword-relevant content. They do this because it’s cheap. Before that, they used gunk like meta tags because that was even cheaper — because that had too little hardware and software and too many documents to index.

The hardware and software problems are gone, plus Google has a huge and growing database of user behavior that is has harvested from the many bits of Google software people load on their systems. Moreover, Google has learned to draw sophisticated inferences from user behavior.

So consider two web pages. One is very strong on relevant keywords, but weak on useful content. The other is not as strong on keywords, but it delivers an ocean of very useful data. When users click into the first page, they tend to click out right away — high bounce rate, short time on site, few pageviews per visit. Users of the other site stay for hours and read everything twice — low bounce rate, long time on site, many pageviews per visit.

Assuming Google or another search engine can measure all of this end-user behavior, which site is actually more relevant to real people?

This is so obvious that it has to happen. If Google doesn’t do it, its successor as the number one search engine will.

What does it portend for you? For one thing, dumbstunt SEO plays like Localism are doomed. But more importantly: Now and forever, content is king. A highly-passionate, well-written, deeply-informative weblog is going to kick the ass of any site trying to get by on money and high-gloss lipstick.

If you deliver the goods, the search engines are going to find a way Read more

July 9, 2008

An introduction from the banking “Pup”

by

Mortgage Officer

Author website

Hi,

First I want to thank all of you for making me feel so welcomed as one of the newest members of the Bloodhounds.   I’ve felt very welcomed and I appreciate that.   I’ve also learned a lot.

As Greg said when we kicked off Project Bloodhound, he’d let all of the pups take the opportunity to properly introduce themselves.  I’m going to attempt to do that.

First the basics: My name is Tom Vanderwell, I’ve been married to my high school sweetheart and best friend for 23 years (well it will be 23 years in 11 days).   We have 5 children.  The oldest (21) is living and working in Ohio as a call center rep.   My 18 year old will be attending Calvin College in the fall to pursue a nursing career.  She plans on going into third world nursing, specifically at this point in Haiti.  Our 16 year old will be a junior in high school.   Four years ago we adopted two more kids from Haiti (www.glahaiti.org).  They are currently 6 and 7 (the 7 year is the only boy besides for me in the whole family!)   Let’s just say life is never boring at our house!

One of the questions that I enjoy asking others in the real estate world is “How did you get into the real estate business?”   So here’s my story.  In 1988, I was running the showroom of a local furniture rental store (not a rent to own, but a temporary leasing store) and got let go because I refused to lie to the customers (go figure?).   One of my customers was a Realtor and she made a comment to me, “You should think about selling real estate.”   Well, after a couple of months looking for a job, I decided to pursue the idea.   I ended up selling real estate for 3 1/2 years.  I don’t know how many of you were around during the first Persian Gulf War, but I didn’t sell a house for 6 months during that.   Needless to say, it was time to look for something else.

In 1991, I made the switch to mortgage lending Read more

July 8, 2008

BloodhoundBlog Unchained DVDs shipping; watch your mailbox

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The DVDs for BloodhoundBlog Unchained will ship tomorrow, at long last. I guess that’s only six weeks, but it seems much longer. If you live in Phoenix, you should have a package by Friday. Further out, you could be looking at next Monday or Tuesday. If you haven’t received yours by then, let me know.

As it happens, I have a few spare packages made up. Brian Brady has plans to take care of real estate webloggers shortly, but, if you don’t have a real estate weblog, you might slip over to BloodhoundBlogUnchained.com and snag a set for yourself. You’ll get more than ten hours of hard-headed, practical real estate content, much of it unavailable anywhere else at any price.

The more I think about this, the more stark the contrast becomes. Monday May 19th at Unchained, in particular, is like nothing you have ever seen at any real estate event. Monday is represented on Discs One and Two, and, while I don’t want to take anything away from Tuesday’s presentations, the work Brian and I did on Monday is a year’s worth of homework by itself.

We want a lot more than that in Orlando — and Brian hasn’t cut off the early-bird price so it’s still available as I write this — and last night we started trading emails to talk about how to offer an exponentially greater product next May in Phoenix. I don’t know if we can afford it, and I don’t know if we can pull it off, but we’d like to put together a fully-realized scenius scene next year, a concentrated boot camp for the first generation of fully-wired real estate professionals.

My ambitions are unchained, unbounded. I want for the people working with us to become so much better than their competition — so much more in demand — that they put themselves beyond competition. As a secondary consequence, I want for that level of excellent performance to supplant everything else in the marketplace. I want for all of us working together to be the catalyst that makes real estate a profession at last.

BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix was Read more

July 6, 2008

Head in the cloud: This week’s new iPhone is the first strike at a universal remote control for cloud computing

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

As part of our breathtakingly romantic anniversary weekend, Cathy and I were talking today about all of the various types of digital storage devices we have actually used in our lives. I thought it would be a fun exercise at a conference, simply as a way of illustrating how rapidly technology changes while we’re not paying attention.

But stop for a moment and think: Right now, you’re probably using hard disks, CD- or DVR-ROMs and thumb drives for storage. You used to have Zip drives and streaming tape drives and flexi- and floppy-disks, but we are within a year or two of being rid of magnetic media altogether. Solid state hard disks will be hugely capacious, hugely fast, very secure and wicked cheap.

And then: What next?

It’s plausible to me that the next level of off-line digital storage will be the cloud itself — multiple, multiply-redundant, self-replicating, self-maintaining copies of your data, instantly accessible and virtually indestructible. I’m presuming the advent of Web 3.0, as well, but we are there already anyway.

I rank on Windows because it’s funny, but it doesn’t mean anything. In the cloud, Windows is a dead letter, and Apple only matters as a model of how to build elegant, functional software. The cloud is beyond operating systems, because, just as Web 2.0 is ideally browser-independent, Web 3.0 is operating system-independent. It will not matter how you address the cloud, since every way you have of doing that is simply a user interface — browser-, operating system- and device-independent.

This is why it is worthwhile for everyone — not just people in the real estate business — to think about the iPhone. It’s not a Mac OS computer, it’s the first strike at a universal remote control for cloud computing.

The ideal way to do forms on an iPhone (or any mobile device) is not by filling in the blanks on a PDF file, but, rather, filling in the blanks on a multi-page HTML form. The complete contract language could be there, in readable HTML, and the Realtor or lender could let the client type their own text fields and click their Read more

July 6, 2008

Friday is iPhone day: Do you know of anyone who is building a paperless real estate contracts-processing application for the iPhone?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The headline asks the question. In Arizona, forms software is a monopoly controlled by the Arizona Association of Realtors, which simply means that the solution available to us is satisfactory to no one.

That much is very sad, since filling in the blanks on PDF files is about as easy as you can get in the world of dedicated applications. It’s built into the Acrobat API. Even so, ZipForms is an amazingly buggy, amazingly Window-centric piece of crap.

Do you know of anyone out there who is pushing the envelope? I suspect the AAR is planning to make a change, but I know it will just be another half-assed Windows kludge. Is there anyone, anywhere doing better work?

The iPhone is the perfect platform for writing contracts, since, with electronic signing, you could transmit an executed copy to your client, to the other agent, to title, to the lender, to the inspectors — to anyone, just like that. If paperless doesn’t also mean deskless, it doesn’t mean enough to suit me.

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July 2, 2008

Video from the BloodhoundBlog Unchained DVDs: Introduction to The Way of the Farmer

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We got the manufactured BloodhoundBlog Unchained DVDs on Monday. I’ve been watching them as I work at my desk in order to approve the manufacturing job. Believe it or not, this is first I have seen of this video. It was shot to tape at the event, we had it mastered into DVDs in Scottsdale, then I immediately shipped it off to Texas for manufacturing. All along, I was expecting it to be kindasorta disappointing, and, so far, I’ve been pleasantly surprised. For a one-camera video shoot, it’s coming off okay.

There are tragedies, alas. In my convocation, I introduced all of the Bloodhounds who had come to Phoenix. For some reason, the videographer cut this off, so only Teri gets introduced. I’m sorry for everyone, but especially for Geno Petro, because I had pointed out for all posterity what an exceptionally fine writer the man is.

Appended below is about thirteen minutes from The Way of the Farmer, a presentation on hi-tech geographic farming.

If you’ve paid for DVDs, they’ll be shipping this week. If you have a real estate weblog, Brian Brady has a special offer coming up for you, but, if you don’t, you might want to click the button in the sidebar to get your own set of Unchained DVDs.

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June 28, 2008

No static at all: Can Big Brother at the radio station foretell the future of the real estate industry?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[This is a multi-stop time-travel journey. I’m writing this text, here within these brackets, on June 28th, 2008. I’m reprising a BloodhoundBlog post from September 15th, 2006, that in its turn reprises a PresenceOfMind.net post from September 14th, 2004, which in its turn is unearthing a rant I wrote in 1996. It will all make sense if you let it. This is more birthday celebration — the subject is disintermediation — but I happened to think of this because we latched onto Radio Paradise, today, an amazingly excellent Triple-A internet radio station in Paradise, CA. All of this fits together, I promise, and the argument about media from 1996 is still right on point. One of the things that I, personally, love about BloodhoundBlog, is that our audience has always been so outrageously bright. It’s very liberating for me to be able to be my whole self at work. Never doubt my gratitude. –GSS]

 
No static at all: Can Big Brother at the radio station foretell the future of the real estate industry?

I got XM Radio two years ago to the day, yesterday. Two years from now, the whole deal may be done: Between the iPod, streaming internet radio and Wi-Max, the eternal footman may already be snickering for satellite radio. Sic transit gloria mundi — and orbits nearby.

That’s a disintermediation story by itself, and we’re about to nest ourselves two layers deeper in order to talk about massive, earth-shaking cases of media disintermediation. The argument made here parallels the one made earlier this week by Jim Cronin at The Real Estate Tomato: The exponential growth of bandwidth increases the power of individuals at the expense of elites.

But: I could just as easily argue the contrary: Feeding Dan Rather to the lions is exactly what a Roman Emperor would do to sustain his power while seeming to placate the mob.

That’s a larger question than I’m prepared to settle on a Friday night. Instead, we can think about the future of real estate while we revisit the history of radio. There’s quite a lot here that relates to weblogging, as well — which Read more

June 28, 2008

In the battle of the baseball cards, the biggest shoe-box wins — but Realtors who master the art of marketing homes will be fine

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[This post appeared on BloodhoundBlog on June 30, 2006, our second day. I’m reprising it now as a part of our birthday celebration. It’s fun for me to see how much of what I talk about here was with us on our very first days. –GSS]

 
Cathleen and I live pretty much continuously in a fairly intense business conference. We’re both paying very close attention to everything, and we are in nearly-constant contact. On the ground, we’re aware of what we like in the work product of our competitors, what we don’t like, what we think might be worth improving upon and what we know from rigorous testing is a complete waste of time and money. We pay even closer attention to the net.world, because that’s where our own bread is buttered, and because the internet will someday be the entire bakery. We’re about to skip away to Las Vegas to celebrate our wedding anniversary, but we’re taking three books on marketing — not real estate marketing, just marketing — with us.

That brings me to this, an argument that representation of sellers trumps home marketing. I don’t absolutely hate the premise. I have made a similar argument myself. What’s interesting to me — fascinating to me, a full-time obsession for me — is the idea that real estate marketing is somehow imperiled by internet-based disintermediation.

First, what is being done on the internet, so far at least, is not marketing. It’s listing, at best, the compilation of baseball-card-like stats, and if Realtors conflate the two, it’s because they have never understood marketing to begin with. “The houses sell themselves,” we say to ourselves, and there is a truth to this. If you take buyers where they want to be, they’ll pay to stay there. In crucial respects, buyer representation is the easiest sale in the history of sales. In other respects, it’s impossibly hard, of course, which is why the failure rate among Realtors is so high. But, unlike virtually every other type of sales, you do not have to convince the client to want your product before you can attempt to sell Read more

June 26, 2008

Estately.com in San Diego: Map-based search in a land without rain

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Estately.com starts operations in San Diego today, the third city to be served by the Seattle-based map-based real estate search start-up. Considering that the company has so-far only raked in a modest six-figures in venture capital, this would seem to argue that Estately’s software scales easily. No news on finances, but, seriously, there must be some boot-strapping money to permit this rapid growth.

This is from an email from Estately.com co-founder and BloodhoundBlog contributor Galen Ward:

Estately.com is expanding into a new market. Beginning on Thursday, June 26th, over 19,000 San Diego homes and condos will be added to Estately.com’s 105,000+ properties for sale. Given the rapid changes in San Diego’s market, we are especially excited to give consumers the ability to track price changes on individual homes and across searches and areas.
Here are some example searches Estately makes into a snap:

  • Homes in La Jolla priced between $500,000 and $1,000,000 and sorted from cheapest to most expensive
  • Homes between $350,000 and $450,000 in Chula Vista
  • Homes including the words “motivated” (as in “motivated seller”) in the San Diego area

Additionally, we have revamped our “nearby information” information, plotted local schools and school scores, parks and transit stops on a map, and integrated it into the listing page.

I tried to run a search on “smug, slow-talking beachbums bragging about all the money they scam off of Arizona tourists with trained fish acts” — but that turns out to be everybody in San Diego.

Next stop: I’m betting on Oakland, but that’s only because I peeked. What’s not next: Phoenix — more’s the pity.

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June 23, 2008

BHB and Real Estate’s OODA Loop.

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

The reason that I became a part of BHB was because BHB wants to matter most.  I don’t agree with everything Greg says or does (and he doesn’t always agree with me), but the core ethos at BHB is peerless.  It’s the same reason why I dug the Smashing Pumpkins so much.  Like him or not, Billy wanted to be the best rock band that rock and roll has ever seen.  He took title shot after title shot.  He didn’t make it, but we are all enriched for his efforts.   BHB is full of people that want to raise the bar so high that everyone benefits.  BHB wants to be the best RE blog ever, and we’re doing it, and I get to be part of it.  Oh, the fun.

But why to we have a head start?  It’s about the ideas, and it’s about the ethos of being independent, fierce, smart and fast.  Getting ideas out here quickly, with no rules, no committee is the best thing we do here.  And so, for those (few) of you that aren’t familiar with the OODA loop, I had to call it to your attention.

This is what BHB is doing doing, and it comes from a famous fighter pilot.

Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.  Repeat.

From wikipedia:

By observing and reacting to events more quickly than an opponent, you can ‘get inside,’ their decision cycle and gain advantage.

An image:

Zillow was the most obvious example. 

When you’re inside the loop, you’re disrupting others and forcing them to react to you.  Zillow got inside the NAR’s loop with the Zestimate, and changed the industry.  The NAR reacted, but now has to consider Zillow (and all transparency implications that come with free data) in everything they do.  Everyone benefits when we crash the loop of a bad actor, and we’re all in Zillow’s debt because the NAR has to get better–or else they risk being irrelevant.

We benefit when we crash anyone’s loop because once we can do that once, we can repeat the process ad infinitum, and Read more

June 10, 2008

How are you gonna keep ’em up in your vertical real estate search portal when the future of home search is horizontal — and Google’s?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Do this: Go to Google and search for Phoenix, AZ real estate. We don’t compete for that term — we’re coming in like 34th place — but a lot of people do — like 3.5 million hits for the keyword without quotes.

Here’s what’s interesting:

Out of those 3.5 million search results, Google Base’s Housing Search comes first. That would be true for any other City, ST real estate search you might want to run. You don’t need the state if the search is unambiguous.

Yes, Google Base doesn’t have a lot of listings so far — only about 4.7 million. That’s twice as many as Zillow.com has right now, but it’s still not very many. The data sources are many and disparate, so it’s plausible that there are some duplicates in there, too.

And, yes, the search interface is horrible. It hasn’t changed much, if at all, in the past year. But who is willing to bet it won’t change in the next year?

For plain vanilla horizontal search — of practically anything — Google is god — omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent. If you need more than plain vanilla horizontal search, you have to go vertical — but google wants your vertical real estate search to go vertical with them, too.

There’s more. The upshot of the DOJ/NAR settlement is that the IDX level of real estate search is likely to become ubiquitous. Right now, Google Base is limping along like Trulia.com and Zillow.com — partnering relationships with a few MLS systems, a few big brokerage chains, a few listings remarkers like flyer and virtual tour vendors, and direct entry by home-sellers and their real estate agents. That’s about to change as MLS systems, either directly or through IDX vendors or VOWs, make every MLS listing available to all takers.

If you’re Realtor.com, how are you going to hang onto an audience that can get essentially the same results from the same place they get all their other results — from Google.com?

If you’re Trulia.com — Realtor.com in pastels — what do you have to offer end-users that will be so much more valuable — a year from now Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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