Welcome to the 54th Carnival of Real Estate. There were a number of really good entries this week, so thanks for submitting. I decided to pare the number down to the 6 that I found the most interesting and entertaining.

Jonathan Dalton reflects on the state of the industry. In What Have We Taught Our Clients?, he covers the sins of perception that real estate agents are propagating across the country.

We have taught our clients that agents are driving the buying process. We’re not. Yes, an agent will send properties to his or her buyers. But they’ll likely receive as many or more in return. Why? Because there’s little need for the middleman when it comes to searching for homes. Our role as agents has changed – finding the home is the easy part. Negotiating the contract all the way through to the closing is where our expertise comes into play.

Lani Anglin writes a fun rant titled, Obsession With Youth? I Think Not!, where she berates a letter writer to REALTOR magazine.

I object to the letter because those who have been successful in the corporate world that haven’t hit their 30th birthday SHOULD be celebrated. As a member of that group, I will tell you that my biggest professional obstacle is NOT my sex, my background or my vocabulary level- it is my age.

Patrick Kapowich, of Silicon Valley Broker, discusses How Can Brokers Protect Themselves From Agent Promotion?

My concern was the same then as it is now: Will agents and/or brokers answer online questions outside their areas of expertise? (As many do off-line) – They did. Which, by the way, is strictly prohibited.

Benn Rosales reminds us about self-fulfilling prophecies in Mortgage Drama, Real Estate Bubble, Tech Crash, Dotcom Disaster.

As some (including myself) try to remain positive around the blog-o-whatever about the mortgage industry, there are already those who cannot stop warning and passing along their own fears. It is already preordained that we will have a mortgage meltdown because the virus of words is already spreading.

Craig Schiller, of Home Staging, talks about the values of staging a home in Are Vacant Homes Black Holes That Suck the Life Out of their Own Sales?

…a vacant house will be more difficult to sell then a furnished home. A buyers market will only make it even more difficult for a seller to sell for there are more than enough homes to choose from.

Kevin Boer on The Innovator’s Dilemma In Real Estate: Beware Of That Redfin Swimming Just Below You, where he applies lessons from Harvard’s Clayton Christensen on how low-cost competitors move up the value chain to real estate brokerage.

If the new entrant succeeds, it starts to take market share from the incumbents, who finally wake up — often too late — and discover that the “cheap, undesirable” part of the market is much larger than they previously thought.

[Preface: All the normal disclaimers about using sites like compete.com, Alexa or Quantcast to get trending data…]

Regardless, it’s still enjoyable to watch the trending continue upwards for eppraisal.com. We’ve had a lot more room to grow than the others, true, but we’re starting to catch up. The great part is that our burn rate is much lower than everyone else. In fact, our company is entirely profitable on it’s own, thereby allowing us to continue to grow eppraisal.com at a slower pace knowing that we’ll be here for the long haul.

Most real estate markets are soft right now, some are down, and a few are up. Of course, this means that it’s a perfect time to be a buyer. With that thought in mind, here are some tools that real estate investors can use to determine whether or not to buy a property, what to do with it and where to find a good deal.

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.

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]

I just read the Bloomberg report on how Realogy is planning on shifting the majority of their marketing budget from offline to online. At this level, we’re talking tens of millions of dollars being put into different media vehicles and platforms. With newspapers dying, the online advertising funnels for real estate are starting to get bigger.

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.

In our quest to provide true value-added services for consumers, eppraisal.com has launched a home inspector network. We have partnered with the country’s oldest and most respected home inspector organization, the American Society of Home Inspectors (ASHI) to provide this service.

Anyone can enter in their zip code and get back a list of home inspectors in their area.

Through this partnership eppraisal.com has launched its National Home Inspector Network where consumers gain immediate access to more than 6,000 home inspectors across North America. With the new ASHI partnership consumers can quickly locate a professional home inspector to provide an evaluation of a home’s physical structure and accessible components of a home, including central air conditioning systems; interior plumbing and electrical systems; the roof, attic and much more.

This is in line with our other offerings for professional services. Now on eppraisal.com you can take advantage of our Appraisal Network and our Home Inspector Network.

Since 1976, ASHI has worked to build consumer awareness of home inspection and to enhance the professionalism of its membership. The ASHI Standards of Practice and Code of Ethics serves as a performance guideline for home inspectors, and is universally recognized and accepted by many professional and governmental bodies.

I had a great morning at the Orlando Regional Realtor’s Association offices giving a session on blogging. This was a second-tier type of class for those who had been to the intro to blogging that I did in May. There were just over a dozen of us, and the focus was on how to actually get a blog up and going.

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.

[UPDATE: the videos have gone live, it's Carrie Chiang, SVP Corcoran. We were fortunate enough to be able to sponsor it too.]

I met Eric Carlsen, co-founder of Online WalkThru, at Inman’s Real Estate Connect conference in New York this January. Naturally, I couldn’t help but proselytize blogging and shortly thereafter the Voxury Populi blog was started, which focuses on the luxury real estate market.

What’s been really interesting to watch is how the team at Online WalkThru has put their own twist on blogging within real estate. They have invited a few guest bloggers, and this month they will launch a new weekly videocast called Vox One. The show is going to be the new anchor-point for their blog, and will feature interviews and insights into the lives of top producers in the luxury real estate market.

The new luxury real estate show starts on June 27th. Bookmark their blog now.

Some interesting links for real estate:

Bloodhound Blogs “Real Estate Weblogging 101” Book –

Simple Spark – Search for web applications that fit your needs. Here’s a search for “real estate” applications. Pretty good results actually.

RentYield – A rental property management tool for landlords and real estate investors. I’ve been playing around with it and it seems like it’s got some really good features.

Rent Me a Vacation – Vacation rentals, cabin rentals, apartments, Luxury villas and holiday rentals direct from the owners.

I’ve been out on the road for a couple weeks – much of that time without a web connection and no phone at all. That’s given me a lot of time to think, and one of those thoughts was on the general real estate market online.

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.