Carnival of Real Estate

This week’s Carnival of Real Estate is hosted at Real Central VA — check it out!

Are agents in trouble?

Real Estate Professionals occasionally approach me with concerns about the increasing amount of free information being made available online. Things like:

• If consumers find all the real estate information online, why would they need me? Or why would they pay a “full” commission?
• Why do you display crime rates for cities and neighborhoods? That does no good for my marketing efforts!
• If buyers see the average home price for a given region, what do they think of the home I’m selling that is above/below average? It can’t be good for sales.
• Why should I display the complete address of my listing? Consumers will find the home by themselves and have no reason to contact me, the listing agent.
• Consumers can now go and list their home on Craigslist, for free! How can I justify my service fees?

These concerns are all legitimate. Part of the agent value proposition to a buyer in the past included access to (otherwise unavailable) information, like a weekly print out of the latest for sale listings. For those selling their home, the agent could do his/her marketing magic and list the home with the ultimate marketing tool (at least in a seller’s market): the MLS.

Now, with the ability to view hundreds of thousands of web sites with IDX listing search capabilities, the Internet has practically commoditized “access to listings” as part of the real estate equation. Now you can search price comparables from numerous broker sites (e,g., check out www.johnlscott.com for fresh comps directly from the MLS) and information ranging from past sales transactions to schools to crime rates can be found on thousands of Web sites.

Also factor in the mindset of the latest group of home buyers, the Gen Xers (30-41 years) and their Gen Y (12-29 years) followers, who are hungry for information online. They are called a “fiercely independent” group that thinks they can learn to fly a space shuttle over a weekend given access to Google and enough coffee. Maybe.

So there are two trends developing: free access to information and a generation that wants to do it themselves. Are doctors in trouble because you can find information about any disease or drug online? No. Are agents in trouble? Not at all.

The dissemination of information doesn’t devalue the “traditional” agent; rather, it’s about acknowledging that the agent value proposition is evolving. Online sites with listings search and market data allow agents to focus on what they do best—to be the neighborhood expert who understands the market, provides advice and handles all legal and backend aspects—with more time to get more customers.

When agents think about winning value propositions for information-hungry consumers, particularly us do-it-ourselves Gen Xers, it’s now about: “Let me show you the best tools and information you can use to familiarize yourself about the market, and I will use my sophisticated marketing, pricing and negotiating skills to maximize the value you get from your home sale/purchase.”

Yes, the value proposition is changing, but this is great news for the industry. A well educated, hard-working real estate professional will come out as the winner in the middle of all this change – and be more productive than ever.

Trick or Trulia

Halloween’s always been one of my favorite holidays. None of the distracting religious overtones associated with holidays like Christmas or Yom Kippur; none of the inevitable pangs of inadequacy inspired by Valentine’s Day; none of the blatant corporate consumerism behind travesties such as Grandparents Day (first Sunday after Labor Day) and National Answer Your Cat’s Question Day (January 22). Just candy, costumery, jack-’o'-lanterns and petty vandalism.

Now, I’m too old to go out trick-or-treating — not too old in spirit but, to make a long story short, too old according to my neighbors and the San Francisco Court of Appeals. But I wish I was a kid again, because I realized the other day that Trulia could be a great tool for the enterprising trick-or-treater who wants to maximize his haul. Ideally our site would have “sweet maps” indicating the candy quality for each neighborhood — red for king-size Butterfingers, gray for apples with razor blades inside, and so on — but the Census Bureau refuses to release that data. The next best thing is our heat maps, which can serve as a decent proxy for this type of information.

Check out a heat map page like this one of San Francisco. The default map, showing average listing price, is a great starting point. Now, the key to a successful Halloween is to target neighborhoods with a lot of rich people living close together. Your eye may be drawn to the cluster of reddish neighborhoods in the middle-west of the city, but these neighborhoods are probably full of private drives and sprawling estates that take forever to walk between.

Instead, try the hot spot on the northern end: the Marina, Pac Heights, Russian Hill and Cow Hollow. Here we have listing prices comfortably in the seven figures and neatly gridded streets. Plus, the number of properties for sale and traffic rankings tell us that these are active markets — full of households looking to liquidate their sweets assets. Trust me, it’ll be like taking candy from a baby. A very wealthy baby.

How about Denver? I’ve never actually been to the city, but if I found myself there on Halloween night I would probably start my mission in Cherry Creek, which is surrounded on all sides by similarly ritzy areas. Even if I go dizzy from a sugar overdose and stumble into some other neighborhood, I’m almost guaranteed to remain in Denver’s sweet spot.

And then there’s Philly. The area around Center City looks promising, but if you click on some of these neighborhoods you’ll discover that most of the properties are condos and apartments. If my mom taught me one thing, it’s that condos and apartments give out crappy Halloween candy. Trick-or-treating here would be like going to Outback and ordering a salad — no one’s going to stop you, but… why? Better to head north and pillage the homes of Chestnut Hill.

By the way, no one has claimed the marker man costumes for Halloween night yet. If last Halloween left you craving a costume with a little more of that Silicon Valley je ne sais quoi, send us an email and maybe we’ll let you borrow it.

Google the gorilla: The good, the bad and the ugly. What’s your take?

Venturebeat.com had an interesting post recently about Google taking over the online ad space, and how this was impacting small advertisers because they can no longer afford the high price to acquire face time (more formally known as impressions) with prospective clickers. Is the company that made advertising egalitarian now inaccessible to the mom and pops that they formerly empowered?

The statement sounds believable and, if true, gives me the impression that a large window is being left open for a venture that can serve the neglected demand of advertisers who can no longer afford the cost per click on Google’s platform.

Given my entrepreneurial roots I can’t help but wonder, who will fill the need and what will the product solution look like?

Will the unsatisfied demands of local players be filled by vertical search engines, such as Trulia, or by others such as localized social network platforms that provide ad space for (mostly) smaller players? Or will it come in an entirely different form, one we have not yet imagined?

Personally, I’m a little skeptical about a local or regional social network platform being a solution in and of itself–mostly due to limited traffic opportunities and the challenges of attracting and retaining local readers. No doubt, I could be wrong.

Vertical search engines seem to have a good chance if they are able to align the interests of traffic and businesses to generate high relevancy leads. It sounds self-serving, but Trulia just might be uniquely positioned to pull this off: we have the breadth of national traffic but depth of locally relevant information to generate quantity and quality leads to local players.

What do you think-is it more difficult for agents to advertise on Google? And if so, what will the new 800-pound gorilla look like?

Carnival of Real Estate

Hotpads.com hosted this week’s carnival and picked “winning” posts in seven categories – The Week’s Best, Technology, Marketing, Humor, Law, Lending & Economics. Worth a read; check it out here!

Taking care of your biggest office

Seems like everyone is talking about 77 – 25 – 69 – the magic code. Combination for your padlock? OR… three of the most-quoted statistics about online real estate from the past 12 months:

• 77% of home buyers are searching on the Internet (NAR)
• 24% of home buyers located the home online that they ended up purchasing (NAR)
• 69% of Internet consumers interviewed only one agent in their home purchase process (CAR)

Pretty compelling data to support the case for beefing up your online presence. In fact, your office ending in the address “.com” has already become the most-visited of all your offices, open seven days a week, 24 hours a day, with tens of thousands—if not millions—of page views each month.

So are you staffing your biggest office with your very best people and ensuring it receives your full attention and resources?

Attracting customers to your online office is just the beginning. Considering that the average home sales cycle ranges from 6-18 months, you need to create an online community of visitors who return to you again and again for the latest home information, tips and market statistics.

Embrace technology as your partner. Make sure that you are effectively capturing leads on your landing pages. Think listings syndication to other sites. Think content syndication on your site. Get creative. Do your research. Test, measure and try out new tools.

Most importantly, read the new Trulia white paper – Strategies for Effectively Operating Your Largest Real Estate Office: Your Web Site. We’ve pulled out best practices and key strategies to effectively operate your largest real estate office–online.

As one of our most successful broker partners puts it: “Technology will never replace brokers and agents but – believe it – brokers and agents with technology will replace brokers and agents!”

Truli-a Partnership with Brokers (Part II)

We talk a lot about the value that we bring to consumers, but did you know that Trulia is delivering close to a million clicks to agent/broker web sites across the US every month? Some broker partners receive more than 10% of their traffic from Trulia and climbing!

Trulia is all about creating value for consumers, agents and brokers. For consumers, we provide a very easy to use search engine for finding homes for sale, and a number of tools to help them understand trends at the hyper-local level. For agents/brokers, we provide free listing services and an advertising platform that delivers highly targeted home buyer traffic, directly to their web sites.

In our view, the listings belong to the agents and brokers – period. Trulia serves as a search site for consumers and sends traffic directly to listing detail pages on broker/agent sites for free.

We make money by charging for premium advertising products. Here is an example of premium advertising. Brokers/agents can brand listings with a logo or get featured listings in our search results (which are only shown if they meet consumer search criteria).

So, if you are an agent or broker who wants to get your listings on Trulia (for free), here’s how to do it:

1) Submit a feed. This page shows you how to create a feed and also lets you submit it. Use the example XML for 1 listing to create your own XML file that contains all your listings. Put that XML file up on a web server. Then submit a link to that file by visiting our submit feed page. We will integrate your feed into our system and have it live within a week. Most of the time, the best way to do this is to ask your web vendor or tech guy to create the feed file for you.

2) Submit your site for indexing. This second way isn’t ideal for several reasons:
- your site might not be indexable
- the listings on your site might not have all the information we need
- it will take longer to index your site and get your listings live

If you can’t create a feed, this is your second choice. Once you submit your site, we’ll evaluate whether we can index it. If we can, we’ll get your listings live within 3-4 weeks.

We also offer Trulia Maps to all agents/brokers whose listings are on Trulia. Its a free, innovative way to showcase your listings on a map on your site – and it’s simple, done by cutting and pasting a small HTML snippet.

That’s it for now – we are constantly trying to refine our offering to brokers and agents. If you have ideas for work that we should be doing, please let us know!

Carnival of Real Estate

The carnival is on at Inman Blog – go check it out!

Moving Beyond Real Estate

Trulia is mentioned in blogs all over the place, and that obviously makes us feel good. As you know, our goal is delightfully smart real estate search.

But why can’t we make other things delightfully smart? Why shouldn’t pens be delightfully smart and include superb pen and highlighter functionality? We didn’t see why not, so we made it happen. Thanks to foundpens.com for recognizing our hard work in this area, which may very well represent the coolest pen innovation since those sweet write-upside down pens that the astronauts use. 3.3 isn’t a bad score for first time pen development. Next up? Delightfully smart EVERYTHING.

But, I digress. Let’s get back to real estate — if you have a delightfully smart product idea for us, let us know. As a reward, we’ll send you a magical Trulia Pen.*

*Offer only good until the current supply of pens is depleted. No return policy. For really good ideas, we’ll send you two pens.

Better Broker Blogging

What a difference a few years can make in the world of online real estate! Just over two years ago, blogging in real estate was the source of some discussion, but little adoption. Industry innovators including Brad Inman led the way to mass adoption with the Inman Blog for industry insiders, covering just about every provocative topic on residential real estate you could think of. Lockhart Steele helped define real estate blogging by neighborhood with the launch of Curbed, now boasting an audience of “200,000 real-estate obsessed New Yorkers” plus readers across the country who talk and read about sales and rental prices, celebrity deals, new developments, neighborhood gossip and more. Agents and industry commentators followed with the introduction of regional blogs where people sound off ideas and observations on what’s happening at a local level in real estate.

And today, a quick search for “real estate blogs” on Google Blog generates roughly 815,800 results. Not bad when Blogging Systems Vice President of Marketing Paul Chaney reported to me that his most-asked question by agents last Fall at the 2005 REALTORS® Conference and Expo was: ‘What IS a blog?”

Now, the world of blogging gets super interesting when you have a top U.S. broker launch an internal blog to create a sense of community among its agent base. Enter Sherry Chris, COO of Prudential CA/NV/TX. Chris was an early adopter of Trulia.com to help promote her agent’s listings online. Word has it this long-time advocate of technology has just launched an internal blog to talk about strategic developments at Prudential, offer her more than 3,000 agents a companywide forum to discuss real estate issues and challenges, share success stories and get a pulse on what’s happening “on the street.”

We all know the challenge of avoiding one-sided communication when you’re interacting with a widespread network or team. Sounds like Chris is taking the idea of “neighborhood” to heart.