Twitter turns out to be a great source of crowd sourced information too, it’s the main reason I ‘put up’ with the enterprise class texting application.  I follow a group of smart people and ‘ask Twitter’ when I have a question that I feel members of my little society are likely to know.

For example:

I was in the market for a new portable camera and so Twitter’d as much.  @ResPres , The Dude when it comes photography utensils, clued me in to the Lumix TZ5 and posted pictures on Flickr using the camera.  Sold, bought one 2 days later and love it.  @respres and I never exchanged an email or phone call, all done via Twitter.

@tyr  needed a new passport fast.  I told him about a service I successfully used in the recent past, and believe he engaged them too, solving his dilemma.

@Morganb  was looking for suggestions on a new site template, I recommended @tcar (serial blog-site creator with mortgage experience) and a few other @’s quickly joined in with their suggestions.

@Alex_Stenbeck twits daily mortgage rate pricing and related trends, very useful and cool.  Many mortgage brokers pay Barry Habib a good buck for similar info.

@bnix had a question about configuring Twitter with Google Talk, he got his answers from the community.

The side effect to what’s becoming a pretty useful little tool is the ‘noise’ of consistent text messages that goes with following 60+ people like I do.  Trust me following 60 people is peanuts, some follow 600.  Twitter offers designations for ‘twiting’ a certain number of times.  One can achieve ‘E-Twit’ status by sending 1000 ‘Twits’, and many aspire to be.  This causes the mix of emotions many have toward Twitter; many curse it but more use it.  I find most of the noise to be a tolerable level of comedy, many twits make me laugh thruought the day.

Many talk about ‘Web 3.0′ or a semantic, smarter web…Twitter is pretty close to that on a primitive, granular level but its evolving quick.  3rd party applications like twhirl integrate Twitter to ones desktop.   Sites like Friend Feed aggregate content from multiple user feeds in classic Mash-Up fashion and Alert Thingy (great name) is to Friend Feed as twhirl is to Twitter.

So if you can tolerate a little conversation, Twitter is a pretty dang useful tool if you’ve got a question neither Google nor Wikipedia may answer particularly well.  I’m far more likely to buy a camera that a trusted professional in my social community recommends than Google…

This was a completely random post, it was supposed to be about Innovation vs Imitation and being ‘just a little bit better’…maybe next time

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Crowd Sourcing Applications Social Networking on a Granular Level

Redfin uses technology to address the inefficiencies of the traditional real estate model and works the industry like a business, using proven business strategies, better than any other major brokerage I know of.  Maybe there are brokerages out there who focus on (and reward) customer satisfaction while implementing technology to improve efficiency, but none get as naked as Redfin. As far as I can see everyone else is playing catch up, attending the swelling sea of industry conferences and seminars trying to wrap their heads around (or sell) what players like Redfin are doing.  Say it ain’t so, but it is.Real estate professionals on all levels ought to pay attention to what is a well funded experimentation in Web 2.0 real estate business strategy.  Granted, they’re VC funded so they can afford to experiment with their ‘ideas’.  Redfin -The Business Plan must have been pretty compelling or people smarter than you or me wouldn’t have thrown Other Peoples Millions behind it

Regardless, they are blazing a path to redefine the brokerage level business and commission model the way Zillow and Trulia have blazed the mucho-million dollar path toward ‘open-listing distribution’.  There will be many people who try to dismiss and mitigate the numbers and statistics into irrelevance but the writing is on the wall, two years running now.  A computer doesn’t beat an agent nearly as much as it augments their abilities to the point where they can afford to charge a fee more in tune with practical economics.

I’m purposely not getting into the specific statistics in their report, since they will be analyzed and interpreted on many levels and called everything from self-serving to Arringtons tongue in cheek suggestion that a Computer can replace an Agent.  However, you cannot ignore what is the most comprehensive work of it’s kind.  IMO Redfin obviously uses these reports to self-serve, but they are what they are, I don’t think they’re lying.  If the numbers weren’t so good, you may have had to ‘request a copy’ (based on their promise to deliver the annual report).

In todays soft market Redfin posseses what most real estate professionals do not, good positioning.  Redfin may be serving a niche market today but I don’t think it’s too much longer before that niche grows out of being called so.  Consumers, especially ‘new’ ones, definitively like what Redfin has to offer.

Their model isn’t perfect nor is it meant for everyone (one size does not fit all) but I have to believe that aspects can be gleaned from this body of work and implemented for the betterment of the individual agent as well as the consumer on a broader scale.   It’s only a matter of time before the defection from tradition becomes highly sought after.  Many agents are already walking down this road using media rich blogs, highly augmented blog-sites (Incredible Agent, Realivent and Blueroof360) and a host of other social networking strategies.  Will you have the tools to satisfy the ever discerning, enlightened consumer? How long is it before your business looks more and more like Redfins?  How long is it before retaining a client requires you to do so?

Also See:

FoREM

BHB

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Redfin Isn’t Going Away, They Are Shaping The Business of Tomorrows Real Estate Brokerage

Although there were no shameless plugs for votes this week, you may expect a plethora of such lobbying in the coming days.

If TXB wins the whole shebang, I’m starting a seminar circuit on how to win blogging competitions.  All voters for TXB shall receive free admission.

San Mateo Real Estate and The Wilkas’ must go down, Lenore and Alex are good people (I appreciate the drink at Inman NYC 08) but this is competition…Cinderella I may not be, but the shoe fits…

**Update.  It’s National Championship time folks.  TXB is in the finals, taking on FosterCityBlog for ultimate bragging rights. 

Show your love for TXB, voting ends Sunday at 11:59 est.   Time to pull out all the stops and leave it all on the cyber-court.  I’m going deep for votes, no-holds barred…

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The XBroker Has Made It To The VARBuzz Finals!!

One of the many…

Also See:

DarWidgetry. The Evolution of Web Applications

2008 Mortgage and Real Estate Predictions…

New Social Networking Strategies

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Joel Burslem Likes Widgets

Very few will argue that we are in the midst of an historical era of change, largely leaving the Industrial Age heading steadfast and firmly into The Age of Information.

Transitions between era’s have traditionally taken anywhere from 100,000,000,000 to 100 years, with each succeeding ‘period’, ‘time, or ‘age’ shrinking rapidly compared to the prior by a factor of ~10.

If the above is true then it’s not contrived to think that we may be passing through multiple periods of relative historical significance during our own life, whereas prior such ‘times’ have lasted for >10 generations.   This is a remarkable reflection if you really consider it. Change is happening at a far faster pace than any of us are used to because it can.

‘The Times’ change so fast they now call it Real Time (as in the time before real time was fake time, or something like that).

Change is also something that does not feel natural thus most don’t adapt to it well, especially over very short periods of time.  Over 10,000 years?  Sure.  Over 5 years?  Maybe.  6 Months?  What just happened..?

People within a society affected by change can be generally classified as:

•    Innovators
•    Adapters
•    Adopters
•    Laggards
•    Haters

The Moral:  Business is moving, evolving, changing faster than ever.  Real estate and mortgage used to resist such rapid change, today embracement is necessary for survival.

It’s pretty well accepted that in the Information Age, withholding information for money has diminishing value.
It took real estate and mortgage (to a greater degree) longer to understand this, which is evidenced by the initial industry aversion to sites like Zillow et al (Innovators).  Many agents understand that wider distribution of their inventory is in fact a good thing (Adapters and Adopters); placing ones product in a place where there are a lot of potential buyers is likely to increases the chances of selling that product.  Other agents are just now realizing and acting on the same (Laggards).

New technologies start big then get smaller and better.
Zillow launched in February of 2006 offering tools and services that draw in consumers and feed participating professionals using intuitive user interfaces (UI’s).  Trulia evokes similar qualities; single site with all the tools (and the list goes on).  To one extent or another Zillow, Trulia et al have exponentially improved the real estate Search experience over the past two years.  They’ve blazed a wonderful path.

They’ve also raised and spent capital that exceeds some Nations GDP to foster a technological paradigm shift towards information transparency coupled with uber-intuitive UI’s with regards to real estate listings, a map and other relevant local data (also called a mash-up).

Today the same tech driven mash-up UI’s that drive gobs of traffic to the Zillows and Trulias of the world are available and affordable to individual real estate professionals (rePros) at pennies on the dollar.

Different Agenda’s
Zillow and Trulia are advertising/media websites.  Their business models depend primarily on traffic so advertising may be sold for a premium and each have numerous vehicles for an agent to spend their money on.

They’re kind enough to offer tools (widgets) that add a coolness factor to an agents individual site and create social conversation forums to leverage participating agents experience/knowledge for the community as a whole.  But make no mistake; they depend on the traffic a rePros personal knowledge and information draws to embolden their respective brands.  Every tool provided is inherently designed to increase their traffic first, yours second.

Other real estate Search sites like Roost will re-skin, redisplay and replace your current ugly IDX then charge you for the privilege of the traffic they direct back to your site. This is certainly a better alternative to what’s been available in the IDX market and more importantly another step towards blending technology seamlessly with an individual rePro’s Brand…yet not quite ‘there’.

In most every case, a top level domain real estate Search portal seeks to profit from advertising and by building their Brand first, yours second.
Roost claims that they ‘Support Your Brand’:

1. Your brand is prominently displayed at the top of the search results
2. You receive a virtual card with your contact information and links to your listings
3. You receive your own URL on Roost

Claim #3, receiving your own URL on Roost, isn’t the highest and best way to support your brand.  This also leads to a similar experience outlined above where a consumer is bedazzled with one slick UI, only to eventually fall into a foreign place called your website.

Roosts business model message:

• Performance-based and transparent
• Pay only for the clicks you receive to your own site
• Target people in specific geography (town, zip code, etc)
• Buy only as much traffic as you want in any given month.
• Your Roost dashboard will make it easy to manage your spend and track performance.

Very Googleicious…carefull, if you don’t keep the traffic tank monetized, it’s possible to be the Star one minute and invisible the next.

Where is there?
When consumers begin their quest for a home, they’re after one thing: listings—all of them.  Trulia, Zillow, Roost et al face a perpetual problem with the ‘available to in-house listings ratio’.  Big players in this space like Realogy and Prudential are picking sides, contributing listings to one site or another.   Some agents choose to contribute their listings while the vast majority do not.  This leaves consumers with a choice between bad and worse: Try and search all the listings with inferior tools, or perform cutting-edge searches on ~20-30% of the listings available in a given area.  Thats not an acceptable ratio in my book.  Pretty soon we’ll have an aggregator of the aggregators, and so on.

From Joel at FoREM:

It seems ironic though, with all these brokers now lining up in different camps to feed their listings to the big consumer search destinations on the Internet, that it’s ultimately the consumer that suffers from these alliances being formed.

If I’m trying to search for a house in Portland, I still have to have to go to multiple destinations (Frontdoor has X, Zillow has Y, Trulia has X & Y but no Z) just to get an accurate picture of the complete inventory available on the market.

and Dustin:

Either way and any way, this would be another big win for Trulia, but as Joel notes, Michael agrees, (and I’ve said before), it is note self-evident that at the end of the day, the consumer wins with broker-fed listing sites.

While penning and researching this post, I came across the above snippets and couldn’t agree more:  A viable solution could be a website that hosts robust Search UI’s and engages social networking as well as SEO strategies under a rePros personally owned and controlled domain.

BlueRoof360.com is about as close to ‘there’ as I’ve seen.  The only aspect that I question (and this is being very nit-picky) is the platform that they are using…is it proprietary or open source?  In other words, can I snap pieces in and out?  If I don’t like the property search UI, can I swap it out with a better one?  Can I add plug-ins and other features vis-à-vis Wordpress?  Realivent and Incredible Agent deserve mentions here as well.  

As a rePro on the Listing side of the relationship, if you are going to ‘give’ your listings to the Zillows of the world, your personal website had better be on par with the site that the link came from, otherwise that ‘link’ will likely leave your site and go back to more beautiful and userfriendly pastures.

As a rePro on the Buyers side of a potential relationship, a website with real time information and a solid property Search UI is mandatory for future survival.

RePro’s can offer consumers via their personal websites a vital claim that the big players will always chase:  100% of the information located within a local MLS’ database.  Days on market, sold data, and a glut of other valuable information to consumers that currently is not available on the big players sites can be displayed on a licensed pro’s site.  Regardless if one person (consumer or professional) thinks that such info is important or not is irrelevant.  Someone does, it’s the long tail consumerism that dominates the current and future markets terrain.  In any case, the more information you make accessible the larger your potential audience.  Redfin gets this, they offer their agents and consumers best of breed technology and information.

In case it’s not evident i’ll point out that consumers are getting smarter about how the real estate industry internally works due to this new real time access to information phenomenon thingy.  Better to be deemed transparent and open rather than a shifty salesperson.

To keep in line with change in real time, the best strategy is a likely mash-up of all of the above, sprinkled with a little bit of this and that.

1. License great looking, highly functional, scalable technology to display your products through, and seamlessly build your brand.  Keep in mind that you get what you pay for, don’t go for the cheapest solution by any means.
2. Push and maintain your listings with the big aggregators: Trulia, Zillow, Google Base etc for the exposure.
3. Blog incessantly about topics that are local to your listings.  Need a blog and the proper education to go along with one? Check out The Tomato.
4. Participate in Social Networks, optimize your Social Networking Optimization.  Participate in conversations on ActiveRain, update your professional profile on LinkedIn, create a group on Facebook.
5. Seek to learn: Knowledge speaks, wisdom listens…Attend some of the current seminars like 4RealzED, BHBU, and if you’ve got some extra coin, Inman Connect.  I’ve personally been to three Connects, registered for Dustins preso in Orange County on April 17th, and plan to attend BHBU schedule permitting.
6. Prepare to change, upgrade and sharpen your tools often.  Today’s rage is tomorrow’s fizzle, stay razor while you shine.

Also See:

DarWidgetry…

New Marketing Strategies…

The Effect of Transparency…

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Real Time Paradigm Shifting in The Real Estate and Mortgage Industries

For anyone who finds themselves struggling to generate new content (bloggers block), this is a great way to push through the plateau–taking a comment into a new post.

My comment/question:

Hey Todd…

Question:

Can you explain what Page Rank means in tangible terms? As in, what are the demonstrated differences and/or advantages between a site that is a PR4 and one thats a PR5 (and 6 or 7 for that matter).

In your experience, are proper SEO tactics (whatever they are) and Page Rank closely affiliated?

Then I got to thinking (although I’d still like to hear Todd’s answer)…It doesn’t seem that PR has much to do w/ SEO.

I don’t follow status-quo SEOnomics advice but my site is a PR5, has been for the past few Google PR shuffles. A PR5 supposedly requires some hard core, intense SEO-Fu to achieve…except I don’t practice SEO-Fu. The one time I did, I got the beat down.

Wrote a post titled ‘The Best Mortgage Blog‘ in September 2007. 72 hours later I searched Google and Yahoo! for ‘The Best Mortgage Blog’ and *bang* #1 on page 1 of the organic results on all three SERP’s. This post resided in top position for this term for quite sometime (I stopped looking in December).

Today, if you type in The Best Mortgage Blog on Google, you cannot find the post, even if you extend the Search to ‘The Best Mortgage Blog xbroker’. Can’t find it via their Blog Search page either (the post is still #1 on Yahoo). So it appears The Google hath punished me. How they flesh this out is beyond me.

I don’t know how they do it, but I believe that Google pays very close attention to how you ‘build your blog’. If you try to implement crafty SEO tactics based on what pundits say will increase your PR, you’re more likely to be penalized (or marginalized) than rewarded. I’m not talking about black hat stuff (sure way to get penalized and even banned from the SERP’s), but rather any strategy thats designed to try and manipulate Google’s mysterious omnipotent algorithmic brain.

From Googles site regarding Page Rank:

Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

Google’s complex automated methods make human tampering with our search results extremely difficult.

In other words, don’t even try to figure this out.

My lone SEO practice resides in a plug-in for WordPress: The All-In-One SEO pack, which prods me for keywords, a short description and a title. Thats it. The only time I’m even remotely ‘SEO conscious’ is when choosing a title, trying to pen the verbiage as to how a human may search for the content within a particular post, which may be a back asswards technique for all I know.

Other ‘SEO sins’ committed here, deemed counter intuitive to achieving a higher PR:

• A big blogroll and too many links on my home page (so they claim…)
• I submit some duplicate content to ActiveRain (because I enjoy the feedback from inter-industry professionals) and many Splogs scrape my content, increasing the apparent damaging duplicity.

Just write relevant, compelling articles about real estate and/or mortgage and you won’t have to worry about Page Rank and SEO

So that’s my $.02… improving Page Rank and ‘SEO Strategies’ are often disjointed and other times damaging to one another. But I’m still interested in what anyone else (especially an SEO-Fu artist or Page Rank guru) has to say, cause I’m no expert…

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Just Write Relevant, Compelling Articles About Real Estate and/or Mortgage and You Won’t Have to Worry About Page Rank and SEO

One would think that Housevalues recent $2.75M investment in AR must have come with a high degree of comfort considering this pending lawsuit. I don’t know of many investors who put money into a company that is facing potentially expensive litigation. Then again my insight is near-sighted.

In what has to be one of the oddest couplings in recent memory, The Bloodhound crew has announced that Zillow will be the primary sponsor for the Bloodhound Unchained conference in Phoenix May 18th-20th…Nearly spit up my coffee when I read this, I don’t get it, I mean I get it, it is about breaking Benjamins…and Zillow has them to break.

BHB is unapologetically the most in your face, tell you where you can stick it blog community in the re.net space (thanks mainly to it’s proprietor) Greg makes no bones about it. Zillow on the other hand is about as nice and cordial as anyone in this space. They have more customer relations people than I do fingers. I guess I personally expected BHBU to ride the independent route in lieu of going with a corporate sponsorship. Will Zillow take any heat for Gregs public undressings of other influencer’s in the space? In any case, BHBU should be worth the price of admission, if only for pure entertainment value. *Envisioning hecklers and taser guns*  ‘Don’t tase me dude!’

Speaking of the conference circuit, it’s really been heating up recently. 4RealzED, Domus Consulting, as well as BHBU have pushed into a crowding arena. I’ve experienced Domus’ enlightenment (which is top notch) and have attended the past three Inman Connects, which are filled with the who’s who of Real Estate 2.0. I’m looking forward to seeing what the 4Realz and BHB workshops have to offer…can I get a press pass guys? If any of these groups come to a town near you, drop the coin and attend. All parties are brilliantly in tune with whats going on in the future of real estate. Just noticed Zillow is also sponsoring Dustin’s 4RealzED events…hmmm, David G. is a pimp…and his Facebook picture is about 10 years old j/k David…

Moving on to Inman’s Beta site.

I’m a contributor to their blog network, so they get automatically get props for this brilliant move (Joel is no dummy). Otherwise, they’ve really evolved the look and feel of their 1998 website, it’s taken on a nice (and BLUE) look and feel…very ‘Web2.0′ My understanding is it’s still a work in progress (hence the beta tag), which explains some of the minor bugginess and slightly cluttered look. I’ve tried to post suggestions to the designated Wiki page, but it won’t save my changes

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Active Rain and Move.com, Bloodhound Unchained and Zillow, Inman News and…

Not because he asked,  but because I admire him and his work.

If you’re a real estate or mortgage professional and looking for top internet marketing advice in a ‘Web 2.0′ world, one may now receive it from one of its founding fathers.

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Dustin Luther, Social Internet Marketing Guru, Hits The Road

Tim O’Reily writes about the future of Social Networking Optimization (SNO) and an ‘Internet Operating System’.   Googles effective proselytization continues forward as Microsoft and Yahoo! dance in a circle.  

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Open Social Evolves with Social Graph API

I penned this post on another site back in November, alas I want to continue the thread of this conversation here on The XBroker.  Hopefully the big G doesnt penalize me too bad for duplicate content…

Google, the core driver behind SEO strategies, looks to become the King of Social Networking Optimization (SNO) as well.

“The web is more interesting when you can build apps that easily interact with your friends and colleagues. But with the trend towards more social applications also comes a growing list of site-specific APIs that developers must learn.

OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.”

-Google on OpenSocial

‘Learn Once, Write Everywhere’ is the core message of this ‘new’ architecture proposed and fostered by Google. Using the most general of statements, Googles latest release will have broad reaching effects regarding how the web ‘works’.

According to Google, OpenSocial is a set of three types of API’s that allow programmers to access core functions and information that are common to ’social networks’:

1. Profile Information. Info about you.
2. Friends Information. Info about your friends.
3. Activities. Whats everyone doing, reading, buying, looking at, playing with..?

Although the three API’s above look pretty ‘So What-ish…’, thats really the beauty of it all, they’re blatantly vanilla yet almost infinitely scaleable considering the amount, quality, and how information can be shared. There are little to no restrictions from a programmers standpoint, it’s a wide open and flat playing field to develop under.In the real estate and mortgage verticals, today the question is:

‘Whats the big deal?’ since there are no succinct applications or service providers amongst the initial group of partners that clearly look to benefit ‘Real Estate’ or ‘Mortgage’. I’ll reserve specific examples for the next posting, but I do have some general broad canvas thoughts…

In a past post, I spoke of the evolution of Widgetry (or Gadgetry) or, shareable applications designed to increase the functionality and share-ability of a web-site via SNO. I’ve also touched on the importance of SNO.

Google has kept things ‘Really Simple Stupid’, allowing the collective brain power of programmers with almost any skill level to develop an application or widget using OpenSocials API’s. With just a few tweaks as to how applications/widgets are developed, programmers who choose to integrate OpenSocials API’s won’t need to learn or develop new (mark-up) languages to make their shareable wares work on…pick your web-platform…

As stated above, OpenSocial isn’t ‘just another social network’, it creates a common platform that allows independently produced applications/widgets to work on and connect with multiple platforms.

This should allow for very rapid development cycles as well as much faster adoption rates for popular (and useful) applications. If you’ve used FaceBook you have seen the dynamic of rapid application development in action, which is also why Facebook is the rage in IT (and VC) land. OpenSocial one ups Facebook by not restricting such application development to only their platform. Just think, you could soon be able to throw sheep at your peers outside of FaceBook! (OK, bad joke.)

What becomes possible using OpenSocial relevant to Real Estate service providers? Ponder for a second the richness of information that could be called upon, seamed together, and shared between ‘network hubs’, or like groups of professional peers, running relevant applications (widgets et.al.) using OpenSocial’s framework. Listings, potential consumers, existing clients, vendors, mortgage rates, broad demographic data, hyper-local opinions and information…

Today, real estate agents, mortgage professionals, brokerages et. al. are powerful and robust information network hubs, however, they still remain fractured and relatively disparate from each other….Applications designed to seam these hubs together for the benefit of the professional end-user as well as the ever discerning long tail driven consumer are already in the works, OpenSocial looks to have shortened the learning and adoption curve of such applications substantially.

Also See:

Social Networking Maintenance Made Easier

What Does OpenSocial Mean to Real Estate?

Why Google Turned into a Social Butterfly

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Google, The Core Driver Behind SEO Strategies, Looks to Become the King of Social Networking Optimization (SNO) Too.