Category: Disintermediation (page 17 of 43)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

What if somebody built a Realty.bot that seemed to make sense from Day 1? What kind of goof-ball strategy is that in the wacky world of Web 2.0?

I don’t know if Roost.com really has a business to bank on. The search.bot horizons are starting to look a little crowded. But unlike past entrants, the company is entering the field with two unprecedented features: They’re working from real MLS listings, via member-brokers’ IDX feeds, and they actually have a strategy for monetizing their efforts.

Yawn! YAMBS again? That’s Yet-Another-Map-Based-Search, a transition in the course of two years from the cool to the commonplace. I haven’t been able to play with Roost.com yet, but my guess would be that they’re behind the curve on cool-factors. The search tools seem to be more than adequate, but Roost is all about search, with none of the social-theater-of-the-mind games the older Realty.bots have been rolling out.

This is nothing but residential real estate search, with 13 major markets being served at today’s roll-out. Since the listings come from IDX feeds, Roost.com needs at least one broker relationship for every MLS system it wants to service.

There’s more. Roost.com plans to make money by delivering prospects back to member brokers on a Cost-Per-Click basis. In one scenario, as in the screen-shot above, the broker can have his own private-label Roost.com IDX system hosted on a third-level-domain — e.g., tarbell.roost.com. Every click originating on that site would go back to Tarbell.

Alternatively, brokers can participate directly on the Roost.com system, with the end-user click-throughs being distributed in a manner similar to Google’s Adwords program: Participating brokers would be selected at random based on their desired spending goals.

I’m eager to play with the system, because what I’ve seen of it so far seems cool. As an example, the image below shows a windolet of photos. You can have more than one of these open at one time, so you can compare photos from multiple properties.

Roost.com is essentially a free IDX system for brokers that they would only have to pay for when they are receiving benefits from it — this in the form Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
Net-borne buyers create new burdens for listing agents

“Eighty percent of buyers start their home search on the internet.”

You don’t have to dig too deeply in the real estate world to unearth that statistic. There are two problems that I can see with the claim.

First, it’s based on an outrageously unreliable mail survey of recent home-buyers. Fewer than five percent of recipients returned the survey. How did the other 95% manage their home search? We don’t know.

Moreover, while the long-term trend, surely, is that more people are using the internet to shop for homes, what matters is not how they started their search, but, rather, how did they finish?

There’s more to think about, though, because it seems reasonable to me that people who are starting their home search without professional representation — without a Realtor — are continuing their search unrepresented as well.

What’s the implication? Like it or not, the listing Realtor’s responsibilities are increasing.

Realtors like to say — to each other — “If you list, you last.” What that means is that a listing, at least in a normal market, is a pretty secure paycheck, where working with buyers can be a lot riskier. This is the reason that the buyer’s Realtor often gets 60% or even 75% of the gross commission. The listing Realtor presumes that the buyer’s Realtor is going to be doing most of the heavy lifting.

But this is not as much the case in the age of the internet. If an unrepresented buyer clicks through to the listing Realtor from an on-line Realty.bot — or if that buyer simply makes a sign call — the listing Realtor is obliged to show the home, even if the original intent was to have buyer’s Realtors doing all the work. Moreover, the open house, long derided by Realtors, is suddenly much more important.

All of this creates new opportunities for dual agency, whereby the listing Realtor gets paid more — and incurs huge risks — while giving the buyer almost nothing in the way of representation. It’s hard to Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Trulia.com is releasing a new product offering this morning — or at least a new product skin. It is called Trulia Publisher Platform, and what it amounts to is customized branded hosting of Trulia’s real estate content on third-party publishers’ sites.

For example, you can get your Trulia fix under the Village Voice brand, presumably at the web sites of the dozens of formerly-counter-culture newspapers owned by the Phoenix-based corporate behemoth. Even though the real estate content will be Trulia’s, and even though the Truliesque pages will be hosted by Trulia, the on-page branding will give the impression that you are still reading The Village Voice or The Phoenix New Times or whatever.

Okayfine. I myself am so much in love with with power of the long tail in horizontal search that I am, with each passing day, less and less sanguine about vertical search tools. Geeks Google. Proto-geeks search on Craigslist. When the whole world looks like a nail, I’m less than ecstatic about trying to figure out which of the 27 specialized search blades on a Swiss Army Vertical Search Knife works most like a hammer. It turns out none of them do, where the Hammer of Google always delivers.

But: Even so: The expectation seems to be that the webaholic who searches for homes he can’t afford in towns he doesn’t live in on PhoenixNewTimes.com is somehow not the same bleary-eyed gnome who would have quested after houses he won’t buy in places he’s never been on Trulia.com instead. Do you see? Why would anyone presume that spreading the Trulia love around comes to anything other than spreading it thinner?

No one actually does make that presumption, of course. Instead, the math of free content is a math of infinities. No one in America knows any other American who is not already maxed out in every possible respect, but the hypothetical user of our proposed free-content web site is miraculously endowed with infinitely elastic spare time. Lucky bastard. Imaginary people have it so easy!

In the long run, we will surely add new gnomes and gnomettes to the Web 2.0 world. But why Read more