Estately gets ‘Mobetta’ with local school information.

The Seattle area based Washington State property listing portal has long been my favorite mapping UI. Easy and intuitive to navigate, it’s just so fresh and so clean. Galen Ward announced on the company blog yesterday that the site would now include local school data, adding more value to an already solid array of information.

Joel at FoREM thinks someone should buy Estately to leverage spreading the love to other parts of the country. I think Joel needs to keep those comments to himself for a little while longer

Homescopes rolls the Uber-Blog.

Realivent and Domus Consulting Group have collaborated to create the Uber-Blog. From Pat Kitano’s Transparent Real Estate Blog:

Homescopes.com is a new website developed by a group of Coldwell Banker real estate agents in the San Francisco Bay Area and Sonoma County. Its mission is to draw in consumers who are interested in hyperlocal news – market conditions, neighborhood details – supplied by agent bloggers covering different regions around the Bay (and later Northern California).

Homescopes.com’s local “blog network” site architecture (code named “uber-blog” for those who have been working with us) was developed to bring immediate traffic to its individual bloggers. The layman metaphor is Homescopes acts as the “newspaper front page” to aggregate and distribute the published content of their blogging agent “editors”. As a content repository, Homescopes is positioned as a search engine magnet, and the resulting traffic flows through directly to the participating agents’ blogs. Think magnifying lens. Homescopes will initially receive greater traffic than the blogs due to its portal position, but in the long run, both the “uber blog” and the individual blogs will mutually benefit from the augmented traffic.

This looks like a solid strategy that can help overcome the biggest hurdle individual agents face when they decide to enter the strange world of blogging:

Professional, fresh, engaging, consistent, relevant Content.

Penning 5 or so posts per week (a ‘Google Juice’ maximizer according to many SEO pundits) of interesting hyper-local (and other) material will usually tap a real estate professionals bank of knowledge within about < 3 months…not to mention the time it takes to make 5 posts per week is often prohibitive to a busy agent and/or a novice blogger.

On the flip side, if you have 5 agents contributing content to the tune of 2-3 posts per week, thats 10-15 pieces of fresh content, with a less likely burn-out factor.
The uber-blog approach could be deemed as a hybrid model to the increasingly popular Community Blogsites. See: Bloodhound, GeekEstate, Phoenix Real Estate Technology Blog, 3 Oceans, Rain City Guide…

The main difference between the two is method of aggregation of content/information and subsequent redistribution. Each individual agent has their own blog-site which feeds up to the uber-blog, a method that stands to benefit both individual and parent sites in a number of ways.

The Uber-Blog concept looks to be a scaleable and potent mash-up of of current RE web strategies: SEO friendly fresh content delivery plus social networking/community traits, as well as the hyper-local info that has become a prerequisite to successful agent web sites. This seems to only be a partial of what should be a growing list of potential benefits once other creative types wrap their brains around the concept.

Community blogsites offer a weighted benefit to the proprietor/host of the site while offering some, however diminished, value to the individual contributors. Community sites also usually require additional unique content from it’s members that is in line with what the sites theme/genre is…a barrier for many already busy Blogauthors.

Personally, I see room for both strategies as they each satisfy a need and offer unique marketing plays.

It’s interesting to watch how quickly new ideas, strategies, and models splinter and evolve in this space. Technology in relation to sharing information related to real estate has evolved more over the past 18 months than it has in the past 10 years…It’s moving at such a torrid pace with new products, services, and solutions popping up weekly, the challenge has become trying to keep up with it all…