Bigger Pockets
The oldest, and most extensive of the sites mentioned here, Bigger Pockets is an educational resource for real estate investors. They have an outstanding blog, and seem to stay well clear of the sleaze that is so much a part of this industry online.
BiggerPockets® was created to help beginner and advanced investors network, make deals, and learn to invest in real estate. Learn about wholesaling, purchasing foreclosures, landlording, rehabbing, tax strategies, creative financing, land investing, commercial and residential real estate investing, and much more.
Rent Yield
If you’re planning to rent one, or many, of your properties I’d encourage you to take a good look at Rent Yield. It allows you to easily add and manage properties, tenants and vendors. It used to be a subscription based product, but now you can access it for free – something that I appreciate. It’s a simple tool, yet packs a lot of punch. It’s definitely worth trying to see whether it meets your particular needs.
Flipping Pad
The Flipping Pad is a community built around real estate investing. I wrote about them when they launched a few months ago, and though they’re still growing, they’re on the right track. Here you can network with other real estate investors, showcase your “pads” and take part in their discussion boards.
Again, you can use any of these images for anything that you would like – free and open.
(50 more pictures at Todd’s blog)
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Interesting tidbits:
- NAR wants to play directly with the consumer
- Raising NAR dues gives them $100 million to play with
- NAR wants to be the consumer advocate to Washington DC
Is it just me, or does anyone really think that an organization that moves as ponderously slowly as NAR, and needs 900 people to reach consensus for any decision, really has a chance to play in the fast-moving and dynamic consumer market?
How many large organizations have been able to make a web-play that actually works? If tech giants like Microsoft can’t even buy their way into the consumer market, how realistic is it for NAR?
I might be being overly pessimistic on this. Dale did mention that they wanted to be the consumer’s advocate lobbying in DC. Okay, I can buy that. How though? How are you going to get consumers to pay attention to you online?
Dale mentioned that Realtor.com has fallen behind, but that when they catch up, they won’t fall behind again. Technically, that’s possible, I just don’t believe they can do it. There’s a lot of catch-up that will have to be done, as the Trulia’s, eppraisal.com’s and Zillow’s of the world keep innovating and winning the attention of the average American.
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]]>Every dot on the map is a search on Trulia.com across the US and each line denotes the likelihood that consumers who search here are also likely to search there. It’s sort of like Amazon Recommends for real estate.
For example, in the first city featured in the video we see that people who search in San Francisco are also likely to search in Hawaii, Miami, New York as well as within the state.
Congrats to Mary Pope-Handy of Live in Los Gatos and her mentor, Frances Flynn Thorsen, theRealtyGram! $5000 will be donated to a charity from this competition.
“Facebook is the white pages,
Your blog is the yellow pages.”
There were more thoughts on why it’s important to be a part of the online conversation. With those of us who blog, that tends to be the central node of our informal social network. We do still tend to take part in the “real” social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Active Rain though.
Dustin Luther, of Move.com, brought up the point that anytime you link to someone, you “vote” for them. This is the foundation of the informal network.
Anil Dash spoke about the reality that human behavior hasn’t changed – we’re still the same. Social networking is what humans are born to do. The sites are just revealing the types of things that we do anyway. These same behaviors are just manifesting in a new medium.
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(more images on Flickr)
“It takes a while to find your voice, you have to write a little bit first before it really clicks.”
– Philip Ferrato, Editor, Curbed SF
“When someone asks a question, send them a link to a blog post that you wrote answering the question. When the next person asks the same question, the link is already there – send it to them.”
– Ardell DellaLoggia, Associate Broker, Sound Realty
“Write about what you’re passionate about and throw in your opinion. Without your opinion, your voice, I’m not interested in reading it.”
– Drew Meyers, Community Relations Specialist, Zillow
“I don’t want the same people reading me all the time, I’m an agent, I want new people calling me.”
– Ardell DellaLoggia, Associate Broker, Sound Realty
“When you’re writing about things you’re passionate about, you’re bound to offend someone sometime.”
– Marlow Harris, Realtor, Coldwell Banker Bain Associates
Monetizing Your Blog Panel
Can advertising hurt your credibility?
“Yes, in the beginning, you should be focused on growing your brand and credibility first.”
– Paul Chaney, Vice President Marketing, Blogging Systems
“No. We’re not writing for fun here, you should try and get a return on that time investment from the beginning. Especially when it’s leveraging the local connections and non-competitive partners you have (plumbers, home inspectors, etc…)”
– Rudolph Bachraty III, Co-Founder, Sellsius°
What about Banner ads?
“The most successful source of revenue we’ve had is from TLA. Google AdSense only works for a select few.”
– Rudolph Bachraty III, Co-Founder, Sellsius°
“I’ve personally cached a $65,000 check from Google, but that’s when I managed over 400 sites. It’s about volume.”
– Ted Murphy, Founder/CEO, PayPerPost
“Sponsorship might be a better avenue – where someone will pay $x/month to have the link on your site regardless of how many people come to the site or click through the link. This really works well for niche sites.”
– Ted Murphy, Founder/CEO, PayPerPost
Should you get paid to write a post?
“I don’t think that you should get paid to post anything in the real estate industry. Our industry has a hard enough time building credibility, so it has to be authentic.”
– Rudolph Bachraty III, Co-Founder, Sellsius°
It’s to easy for us technologists to get caught up in our technology, our blogs or our social networks. When we do, we often fail to remember that these are tools that are there to facilitate communication and build towards offline interaction, business and partnerships.
A bunch of us are converging on San Francisco in our annual pilgrimage to Real Estate Tech Mecca. It’s a fun event, where we realize the culmination of our online work throughout the year in the connections made face-to-face. Many of us will go away with partnerships and new business opportunities because of the time spent online blogging or connecting through social networking vehicles like Active Rain and Facebook.
This same lesson applies to real estate agents online. Again, it’s easy to get lost in the myriad tools and possibilities open to you online. You could spend a lot of time making sure you’ve got a couple hundred friends on Facebook, answering questions on Trulia Voices or blogging. The most important thing to remember is that you should be driving towards offline (face-to-face) meetings.
The websites and tools available online are just facilitators for your offline interaction.
Chances are, the next real estate deal you make might be instigated by something you did online. However, it will likely be finalized only after meeting face-to-face. The truth is that offline interaction is far more powerful than online.
Take the opportunity, whenever it arises to use tools that help raise your visibility online – grow your brand. But, also take the opportunity to leverage that into meetings and events that actually result in business.
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I was able to get an advanced copy of Inman’s State of Real Estate Marketing 2007 report, which just became available on their website. It’s 50 page document on real estate marketing, based on a survey of 770 real estate professionals via their website. This means that it has a bent towards technology-focused real estate pros, but the findings are interesting none-the-less.
On Newbies vs Old Hands
Respondents who had fewer than five years’ experience in real estate were most likely to say they planned to spend more on marketing in the next year. A full 58% of these relative newbies planned to increase their marketing spend while an additional 25% planned to spend the same amount. At the other end of the spectrum, respondents who had more than 15 years’ experience in real estate were slightly less likely to say they planned to increase or hold steady on marketing expenditures. That may be because these veterans rely on low-cost referrals for new business or because they’d already increased their annual advertising budgets earlier in their careers.
On Print vs Online Advertising
I found it interesting that they had no real solid finding on what way marketers were planning to go on print vs online advertising. Having just covered the fact that Realogy and HomeServices are both downsizing their print spend, it seems that the trend should be moving towards online and away from print.
On Blogging
As mentioned earlier, the people who took this questionnaire likely have a tendency towards being first-movers in new technology for real estate. When we look at the numbers of bloggers, this becomes pretty clear, as there is no way that they match up to what the true numbers are for real estate bloggers in the country:
On Social Networking
30.9% of the agents are getting involved with social networking websites – that’s a fairly large percentage too. Of course, that means there are over 60% who are not, but at this point in the cycle of new online media those are pretty solid numbers. When asked which sites they use, it was no surprise that Active Rain came out on top.
What I would like to see is a break down of which sites they go to for industry purposes compared to the ones they are a part of to actually market themselves and sell property.
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New York Times writer Robert Frank recently wrote a book about America’s wealthy class, Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich. Two new websites have sprung up to service just that crowd, specifically catering to individuals looking for second homes.
Like many real estate web companies, the company behind these two new products (SecondSpace ) is based out of Washington state. They have raised over $6 million in funding and have hired from many of the local web companies to fill their ranks.
LandWatch
If your idea of a second home is in a rural setting, then LandWatch is a good place to start. I would compare it most closely with Lands of America, but with a more affluent clientèle in mind. It has an interesting mix of rural homesteads, retreats and hunting land.
ResortScape
Billed as the place to “explore the world of vacation homes and lifestyle communities and discover the place of your dreams”, ResortScape offers a variety of luxury condos, lifestyle communities and vacation homes for those looking to spend their disposable income. They’ve done a nice job of layout and integration of Microsoft mapping into each listing.
Honestly, I didn’t realize that there was a need for this type of service. Perhaps wrongly, I assumed that you could search for condos, homes and communities on the current real estate search verticals already. Since their plan is to make money via advertising, they are dependent upon reaching a lot of potential eyeballs – specifically ones that end in a sale. Time will tell if a centralized second home portal is truly needed. With a CEO who has successes like Classmates.com and Verisign under his belt, I won’t argue.
Last Thoughts
Both sites are pretty well done. I like the niche-focus and the attraction that it can give to the specific demographic that they’re catering to. There are a few things that I think could make it better, especially since sales will be dependent upon the site attracting and feeding the imagination of potential property buyers:
- Bigger images – if you’re trying to sell property based on it’s visual appeal, make the pictures bigger.
- Video – why not partner with service providers like Online Walkthru or WellcomeMat for this?
- Plot overlays on the map – this is a simple addition to the current map view that shows the plot outlines. It would work especially well for LandWatch.
- Blogs – here is a great opportunity to harness blogging into niche content areas, own this space with dynamic content not just a portal.
- Basically, I want to dig deeper into a specific property online – help me do that.
(Via the New York Times)
[More insight at Transparent RE]
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