ActiveRain is a social network and blogging platform for real estate professionals. They started up last summer, and have cranked their way up to almost 45,000 registered users. That’s A LOT of traction… and fast!

Well, Matt Heaton and Jonathan Washburn have rolled out an advertising platform for their system. For a minimum of $10/per campaign you can start putting up impression-based ads on the ActiveRain network. Your campaign can be targeted at specific pages on our site, specific user groups, members or non-members, regional areas (state, county, city), or all users on all pages.

Other items of note:

1. The minimum campaign budget is $10
2. Ads have SEO value – Search engines walking the site they will see your ad as normal content.
3. You can choose to have your ad displayed only 5 times to a particular user session or choose to have it be unlimited
4. You can stop/start your ad at anytime and update your bids whenever you wish

The SEO Link Problem

[Update: this has since been changed/fixed on ActiveRain]

I would like to bring up one little point – bullet number 2 in particular. I’d be careful of claiming that at this point in time. You see, I follow some of the conversations on SEO, and I know that Matt Cutts has stated Google’s position on any type of sponsored links to be expressly tagged or mentioned as “sponsored” somehow.

Now Google doesn’t own the internet, nor have they been anointed as the “high priests of what you’re allowed to do online”. However, they do control a lot of SEO traffic – the lion’s share, so that allows them to be the big bully if they so choose. Basically, I’d be cautious of making that SEO claim, since all it takes is one little algorithm adustment to add make ActiveRain links be devalued as much as PayPerPost and Text Link Ads (which they’ve done).

In Summary
Okay, besides all that, I still think it’s a great platform for advertisers who have something to sell to real estate professionals. Smart marketers will do more than just advertising here, they will get in on their conversations and prove their value.

Incredibly cool video from Trulia showing how and where people search for homes.

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.

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.

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.

vFlyer, the home listing tool, jumped onto the scene last year and it’s been non-stop quality features ever since. Today is no different, they’ve just released a new feature that allows anyone to edit their images in a way that helps real estate agents brand their product better and make it look more enticing to the end buyer.

They’re calling it “Watermark Plus“, and with it you can add some flair, logo or watermark to any image you use online. If you want to do full image editing online, use something like Snipshot, that’s probably a little to much for most real estate agents though.

Where it really shines, and where I haven’t seen any other tool do something similar, is when you’re embellishing the photo. It’s simple and it works great. It’s free too, so make sure you give it a try.

Features and benefits:

• Ability to protect by adding visible watermarks and logos
• Ability to enhance images and attract interest from buyers by adding sales, product and pricing information (”For Sale”,”Just Listed”, “Only $20”)
• Ability to brand images and include contact information by adding company logos, personal photographs or contact information

We’re proud to announce that eppraisal.com has partnered with Yahoo! Real Estate in their completely revamped home valuations section.

Michael Yang, GM of Yahoo! Real Estate:

Yahoo! Real Estate is dedicated to delivering comprehensive real estate resources and information on the Web. For our Home Values Center we brought together the top home valuation data from across the Web, including eppraisal.com, so that our users can have immediate access to key home valuation information.

When you search for a property on Yahoo! Real Estate, you will now get back 3 results. One from eppraisal.com, Reply, and Zillow. You can click through any of these results to get the detailed property, neighborhood and valuation information directly on one of the websites.

I had a chance to chat with Steve Schultz, Director of of Products for Yahoo! Real Estate, about why they have redone their Home Valuations section, and what they hope to achieve with it. He gave me three reasons for this move, all revolving around end users:

1. A more complete picture in one convenient space.
2. Enhanced content for buyers and sellers on why to sell/buy a home. This was done through folding in Yahoo! Answers.
3. Provide more local connections. Integration of Yahoo! Local into the system for better business connections and appraisals.

We’re excited about the partnership, and welcome all of the new Yahoo! users to eppraisal.com.

WellcomeMat, the video site specifically tailored for real estate, has hit the big time with a new contract with ForSaleByOwner.com. Though WellcomeMat has been around for a couple years, they only started to get real national attention after showing up at Inman’s Real Estate Connect conference in New York earlier this year.

I couldn’t be happier for Phil and Christian, the guys who have spent years developing this service (and their wives for putting up with it). Anyone who sees what WellcomeMat does, and compares it to even the non-real estate online video market, realizes that it’s better than 90% of the other options available.

Read their blog post on the deal, or take a look at the press release.

Trulia launched a BIG feature called Trulia Voices this morning and a redesign of their website. This is a full blown web application now too – no more beta tag. I’ve always been a fan of using Trulia to find available properties for sale, so it’s great to see them release some really interactive and social connectivity features.

I was able to get an early peak at what was coming out, so here it is:

Old Look vs New Look
Home Page:
VS

Search Results:
VS

Trulia Voices

• A community feature that helps users get a better understanding of an area, and helps highlight real estate professionals who really know their neigborhoods
• A national property search feature that will let you keep an eye on any home and alert you when it comes on the market, is sold or has a price drop
• The ability for real estate agents to create profiles that link back to their own websites

These types of features allow connectivity between real estate agents and potential clients, which is a winning situation for all parties.

Smart Filters
Trulia has applied filters to their neighborhood search. They know that most people who search for a certain type of neighborhood in a city also search for similar type neighborhoods in that same area. Those other choices will show up automatically for viewers to scan through.

HousingWidgets.com
They’ve created a non-branded widget review site at HousingWidgets.com. Anyone who has a good widget, that is useful for real estate professionals, can upload it to the site. It makes a one-stop-shop for people in the industry to go, instead of having to peruse through countless blogs and review sites for widgets that would work for them. Not a bad idea at all, we’ll have to get our eppraisal.com widget up there!

I just got back from putting on a 2 hour real estate blogging workshop with the Orlando Regional Realtor Association (ORRA). Even with the size of the room (100 people) the RSVP list for the event got so big that we had to turn some people away. To those who couldn’t attend this event, we’ll let you know when we put on another one.

I covered the basics behind blogging and social media, the reasons why it’s important to know about and start participating in the conversations, and how to get started. The attendees had some great questions that told me they were not only interested in the topic, but were going to be taking part in it soon.

So, thanks to everyone who attended, I hope to see your blog online soon (or at least see you begin commenting). A special thanks to ORRA for telling everyone about the event and supporting it through the use of their facility.

[UPDATE: I'm excited to announce the first new blogger from our session. 2 days after, Debra Horowitz has started Orlando's Avalon Real Estate blog - Congrats Debra!]

Congrats to Rudy and Joe on the launch of Sellsius! It looks really (REALLY) good so far, and I know it’ll only get better. They now join those of us who have moved from pure real estate blogger to product and blogger.

I really like how diversified their classified are – they cover residential, commercial, business, even time shares. It costs $30 for an annual membership, and it’ll be well worth the money spent as the site grows.

Go check it out!