After attending this year’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, I’ve decided to catalog a couple of thoughts on what Web 2.0 has meant to the real estate industry (Real Estate 2.0?). First off, I define this whole Web 2.0 marketing term as a concept that represents a couple of things:
- Increased social interaction between individuals online
- Mashing up different databases of information
- Bandwidth changes that create greater opportunity for engaging media
To me, Web 2.0 is only interesting in that it shows a pattern shift in usage of the internet. It’s taken time to get here, primarily because people had to grow used to using the medium, and businesses needed to understand better how to use it in a value-added way.
Increased social interaction
In real estate, we’ve seen services like the Active Rain network tap into the idea that a network of real estate professionals around the country can learn from each other and provide a valuable service to their customers through starting conversations. These conversations aren’t only on one platform though, real estate bloggers are coming out of the woodwork and making an impact every day. Bloodhound, Sellsius and FoREM all hit hard and make businesses and consumers take notice.
Mashing up different databases of information
We’ve seen an increasing use of available data, but we’ve also seen companies come out with ways to make it more accessible and easier for people to use. We like to think eppraisal.com does a good job of that with historical housing data and maps. This is also true of companies like Trulia with home sales data and Hotpads with apartment data.
Bandwidth changes that create greater opportunity for engaging media
More people throughout the country are operating off of cable or DSL connections. This opens up the opportunity for greater use of video and images. Companies like WellcomeMat and Online Walkthru have created highly useful tools specifically for the real estate industry. Companies like vFlyer allow real estate professionals to create visually stunning print and virtual flyers using high resolution images and video.
In Summary
Web use has changed for the a lot of Americans, and I’m not talking about design trends like pink, glossy and rounded corners. This has caused a new breed of websites, platforms and services to become available for everyone in the field. This is not a trend, though not all companies will be around next year, the concepts and tools that they create are here to stay. I’m completely optimistic that things will continue to improve and real estate professionals will keep benefiting from this innovation.
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The biggest hurdle for real estate is that the leap to web 2.0 is much greater than other industries because real estate technology is well behind the curve to begin with.
Curious as to see who the major players will be by the time next year rolls around.
[...] Earlier this week I spoke on a panel on Media 2.0 at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. The panel focused on how Web 2.0 was transforming media companies was moderated by Forrester Research’ s Charlene Li. I was only there for the day but Realty Thoughts’ Erik Hersman, who always has great insight, summarized some of his thoughts on the conference in his blog post “Web 2.0 in Real Estate”. [...]
Danilo makes a solid point. While it should be quite the opposite, most real estate professionals do not fit the early adopter mold. I am interested to see if that trend changes anytime in the near future.
Nice write-up Erik. Realtors are getting on the blogger bandwagon faster, thanks to networking sites like Active Rain. Blogger/website hybrids are growing in popularity thanks to blog builders like John and Mary at rss pieces. We hope to push the envelope a little further ourselves and take blogging 2.0 to a place it hasn’t gone before.
I love the changes. I think we’ll start seeing a tremendous demand from our clients as they become increasingly aware of the tools available to help them buy or sell a house, and it’s up to us to find ways to use them to our (and their) advantage.
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So far the new breed of real estate sites have been form tech guys who are getting into real estate (Zillow, Redfin) or from smaller real estate start-ups (BlueRoof.com, Movato), but there hasn’t been a large real estate company that has embraced transparency and the consumer-driven model.
That may be what Move is doing now, but we’ll see how they play it out- will it truly be a consumer-driven model or will it be their idea of a consumer-driven model (realtor.com)…
Greg, good point. I think the big companies will be forced to move that direction or become irrelevant.
[...] There have been a couple other posts around these services, here, TransparentRE and at FoREM. [...]
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[...] week with thoughts on how Web 2.0 is contributing to change in the real estate industry. His post Web 2.0 in real estate highlights its different elements–mashups, blogs, social networks, wikis and video–that [...]