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.

Smith, president of Realogy Corp., the largest residential real estate broker in the U.S., said the portion of his Coldwell Banker and Century 21 branding budget devoted to newspapers will shrink by as much as two-thirds next year from 2006 as spending moves online. Newspapers will receive 70 percent of Realogy’s home-sale advertising by 2010, down from 84 percent this year.

A change is coming, who is ready?
I opined a couple months ago about the need for a real estate ad network that would allow marketers to easily place their ads on both real estate specific sites (such as Homegain, Move.com, eppraisal.com, Trulia, etc…) and on the ever growing social scene found via social networks an blogs.

For companies like Realogy and HomeServices to take it seriously, the network needs to be both simple and far-reaching. It needs to harness the types of media that are working today – think video and interactivity, not banner ads. Above all, it needs to be flexible and work for everyone from bloggers to big business.

However, in order to be successful it will need to make the marketer’s job easier. At the end of the day, it is the stressed out/strung out media buyer that will make a lot of the decisions. Put yourself in their shoes. You have $20 million worth of ads to place this quarter, where do you start?

This is a huge opportunity.

(me with the Sellsius guys, and my daughter, in Orlando)

Rudy’s Birthday and the Inaugural Signing
It’s Rudy’s birthday today, so I was happy I had an eppraisal.com shirt to give him. In return I got to be the inaugural signer of their “blogger board” and a Trulia t-shirt (one of their sponsors).

Fun moments included:

• Being told we can’t take any pictures outside since it is private property (news to me, and I live here…)
• Being told by Office Max that we couldn’t take pictures in their entry way while signing the Blogger Board, and being kicked out
• Watching Rudy act as videographer and Joe as interviewer – they’re a pretty solid team at this too, you can tell they’ve had some practice.

(Rudy interviews Marcus of CondoMetropolis.com)

(More pictures on Flickr)

Keep up with their travels on BlogTourUSA.com!

Honestly, my most difficult time was trying to put a lot of the technology terms and knowledge into language that everyone can understand. I remember how it was when I was first learning the ropes, and it’s not that easy to pick up the first time. How do you explain registering a domain, getting a shared hosting account setup and the value of FTP clients to someone new to the field?

This group was the most dedicated of the individuals who wanted to get into blogging for real estate, and it showed. Though the content had a rather steep learning curve, they stuck with it and asked some very good questions. I learned a lot too, this type of class is much different than an intro class. Here you get your hands dirty and do things live – so be ready for things to fail in front of everyone.

Hopefully I’ll be updating this blog with a list of new real estate bloggers from the Orlando area soon.

Since I’ve been back I see that Hitwise has released it’s report, and that a few people have weighed in on the findings. My question in particular is, how much total traffic is there, and are we reaching a cap? Or, are we all starting to dip into the same pool?

Matt, from Hitwise, was kind enough to give me some historical real estate numbers comparing the first 5 months of 2007 to the first 5 months of 2006. Their numbers tell us that there has been a decrease in percentage of activity in the real estate sector. Here are the numbers:

DATE —– Market Share
January, 2007 —– 0.46%
February, 2007 —– 0.44%
March, 2007 —– 0.45%
April, 2007 —– 0.47%
May, 2007 —– 0.45%
Average Market Share % —– 2.27%

DATE Market Share
January, 2006 —– 0.48%
February, 2006 —– 0.48%
March, 2006 —– 0.50%
April, 2006 —– 0.49%
May, 2006 —– 0.49%
Average Market Share % 2.44%

2007 vs 2006 -7%

More Numbers
I did a quick run through of the numbers on 3 real estate 1.0 companies (Realtor.com, RealtyTrac.com and Homegain.com), and 2 of the new real estate 2.0 companies with big numbers (Zillow.com and Trulia.com). None of the stat tracking services are very accurate, but as an aggregate they can tell you something interesting.

The results from Alexa, Compete and Google Trends all show a plateauing or decrease in the amount of traffic to these top real estate websites.

Alexa 1-year results:

Compete.com results:

Google Trends results (Google gives no way to do 1-year, so this is just 2006):

However, if we look at each individually on Quantcast, we see a different story. There seems to be an upwards trend on traffic for all but

Quantcast results:
(in the following order: Realtor.com, Zillow.com, RealtyTrac.com, Homegain.com, Trulia.com)

Final Thoughts
A lower percentage in total market share, as given by hitwise, doesn’t necessarily mean that there are fewer visitors to real estate web sites – we could all be getting less of the overall pie. Trending data from Alexa and Compete both tend to trend down or to have flattened out, yet Quantcast shows us some upward trending for specific properties.

The only conclusion that I can reach is that there is no major growth. At the moment, it looks like we’re all fighting over the same people, but I think that could be misleading. In the end, internet growth as a whole in the US continues. So, though we might be plateaued at the moment, the numbers will grow again. Market conditions play a role here as well, and there might very well be a correlation between the offline market and online traffic.

Posh’d is a project of Shaun McClane, another Orlando resident who is also a Realtor and has a great site at Every Kid Deserves a Yard (www.ekday.com).

I really find that they’re doing some interesting things with new technology on their website and blog. In fact, the plugins and widgets in their sidebar are all very helpful. Shortly after seeing our site up there, I started chatting with him directly through their website’s chat widget. It worked great!

EKDAY is a good model for Realtors looking to use new media tools to reach a different demographic.

The Problem
Let me lay it out from the advertisers point of view. You have a service, property or product that you want to advertise and get the word out on. You’d love to advertise on sites that are relevant to your demographic or geographic region.

It would be nice if you could get a package to advertise on sites like Trulia, Hotpads, Homegain, Zillow, and eppraisal.com, etc… In fact, you’d like to advertise on blogs of people within a specific area too, so being able to tap into independent real estate bloggers and geographically target the Active Rain network would also be nice.

Well, you can. The only thing you have to do is contact each one of these parties and work out a deal, cut 15 different checks and create advertising creative in 15 different sizes and formats. Hmmm, it’s not so easy to manage, and it’s no wonder that advertisers balk at the idea. It’s just not efficient.

The Solution
Let’s say an independent (meaning not part of any existing technology solution or company) party creates an ad network targeted at real estate. It’s a tool designed to harness what is possible with technology online, use the power of segmentation by demographics and geographic targeting to provide real value.

Why it works:

• Advertisers can finally reach the long-tail of real estate online
• The network’s size allows it to specialize and give proper attention to publishers and advertisers
• Publishers (blogs, web sites and social networks) can be pre-vetted for quality
• It’s a simple to use tool that makes it a one-stop-shop for buying ad space
• The payout can be larger than what other “meta-networks” (think Google) can provide

Challenges
In a competitive space like real estate, publishers tend to think that they can handle their own advertising platform just fine. That, and no one likes giving up control. What happens is marketing dollars only go towards the “big players” and each dollar spent is not as effective as it could be. The large sites will continue to protect their own monopoly on ad dollars, but it’s not in the best interest of marketers to let this happen.

Some will say, “why don’t you just use Google, it’s an ad platform designed to reach the long tail?” Simply put, the big meta-networks can’t give either the advertiser or the publisher the attention that they need. Secondarily, the payout for the publisher is not near what it should be for the space that they’re providing.

What about trust? Why should bloggers and big publishers place their trust in an outside entity to manage their revenue stream or their marketing budget? Besides creating a simple and powerful tool, the second hardest part would be building trust. However, if it works, that’s all the proof that both publishers and advertisers need to make it a viable platform. So, testing, adding value and relationship building are the only ways to counter this argument.

Summary
In the end, it’s a tool for advertisers that makes their lives easier. When you provide a tool that allows people who spend money for a living to do it easier and see a greater return, you’re bound to create a winning situation for both parties.

(Why not something as simple as what Federated Media does, except for the real estate vertical?)

• 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.

I decided to test that out by putting my non-tech savvy mom onto it. She’s a home decorator and is always surfing the web for “just the right” thing for clients. She loves it. It turns out that it’s just the type of things she was looking for, instead of having 500 bookmarks all across the web, she has a visual bookmarking tool in MyDesignIn.

So, what can you do with it? From their website:

• Collect: Use bookmarking tools to clip home improvement products from any Website. Capture a visual bookmark complete with a product image, name, an abbreviated description, sizing information and price.
• Create: Draw an interactive, floor plan with just a few clicks. Drag and drop bookmarked products into the blueprint for visualization of a complete design.
• Collaborate: Share your designs with friends, family, design professionals and other community members before making final design and purchasing decisions. Leverage the work of the works of the community to get your product research and remodeling project designs done quickly and easily.

Will MyDesignIn catch on with the home decorators and designers of the world? I don’t know enough about the industry to make a call on that. I think what could really make it work though is a partnership (or buyout) by one of the large home improvement companies (idea via CenterNetworks).

• Inman Connect Highlights by Joel at FoREM
• Check out the Sellsius blog for pictures and video
• Glen at Redfin about the fireworks between him and Alan Dalton

Okay, on to my thoughts about the conference. Because it was in New York, there was a great deal of NY-centric commentary and sessions. For instance, one of my favorite sessions was on blogging, and it had a great panel of bloggers. However, I left wishing that there had been a few non-NY bloggers on the panel.

New York was the focus, as well as technological shifts as they relate to social media and user generated content. Why then was Streeteasy not present on any of the panels as speakers for their product and what they’re doing in New York real estate? They are the epitome of what a niche company can do to embrace real estate professionals, generate user comments and track data within a metro area.

Video was highlighted by Brad Inman as being one of the big things that will have a major impact on the industry this year. Companies like Brad’s Turn Here, Online WalkThru (high-end real estate video) and WellcomeMat (the YouTube of real estate) are poised to make a big difference. Each of these products are going to make a splash this year, and each serve a different demographic. I would have loved to see a panel where they all squared off against each other.

Overall, Inman pulled off an incredible conference, as they always do. The topics were interesting, the panelists were top-notch and the networking phenomenal. That’s what Inman conferences are for, and they do it better than anyone else. I’m already looking forward to the one in San Francisco this summer.