April 1, 1999.

After signing up to “receive my newsletter” on countless agent Websites throughout March, my inbox was filled to the brim on April 1st.

Each email contained a Realty Times Newsletter.

Each included the same exact content.

The content was irrelevant. Not location-specific. And completely impersonal. All the things great marketing isn’t.

But the agents who bought this newsletter product weren’t told this. They were sold on the idea that…

Touching people with anything is better than nothing

You won’t find that verse in any marketing bible. Yet it rolls off the tongues of people pitching agents as if it were inarguably true.

Marketing isn’t just the act of communicating. Marketing is research that precedes the message. It’s the act of discerning what is relevant to a specific audience or person.

Marketing divines needs. Unearths desires. Aligns interests. And stimulates action.

Facebook tickles our need for self-expression. Google responds to our intent. Amazon matches the desires of others with our own. These companies are mind-bogglingly smart about how and what they present to us.

But in real estate, smart is rare. Easy is preferred. Blast the newsletter, drop the postcard, tweet your lunch.

This is nuts.

The result: before, during and after a most sacred transaction, people are carpet-bombed with crazy shit that pertains to nothing.

90% of consumers say they love their agent at the close of the transaction.

Only 11% use the same agent again.

Ever wonder if maybe agents “market” themselves right out of their next transaction?

I do.

Marketing stink bombs

Had any one of those agents from whom I received a newsletter on April 1, 1999 followed up after dropping their stink bomb, they would have learned a few things about brand perception.

But no one followed up.

If an agent can’t take a few minutes out of their entire month to write something personal, something demonstrative of expertise, something useful to me, how much do they really want my business?

Amidst the grand menagerie of real estate marketing products, this question is seldom asked.

That wasn’t OK with me when I entered this industry in 1998. And it’s not OK with me now. Agents deserve better. And so do their customers.

Real estate’s marketing emperor has “new” clothes?

Read this sample email from a “new generation” real estate marketing product built for agents.

The pitch for this product describes it as an “easy and effective way to stay top-of-mind with clients, grow your referral business – and more important – get results,” because “old clichéd marketing messages fail with today’s tech-savvy, information overloaded clientele.”

Those are some bold claims.

And while they might be true, can messages containing bizarro factoids written by people you don’t know, for people they don’t know (your clients and prospects) be better?

It’s not.

It’s just here. In real estate. Preying off agent vanity and laziness.

Imagine receiving messages like the one above from your Obstetrician. Or your Pastor. Or your Lawyer.

If you can’t, then why are they OK coming from you?

He’s wearing nothing at all

The Emperor cringes.

Suspecting the assertion is true.

But he holds himself up proudly and continues the procession.

You need not follow.

Buyfolio is part of growing cadre of applications that leverage the sharing behaviors that web users have gotten used to in the large social networks to create smaller, more focused “micro networks”. Launched initially for New York City home buyers, Buyfolio is currently mulling over a national expansion of the service. Matt and Susan Daimler, co-founders, recently took some time out of their busy schedules to talk to me.

JB: So tell me, what is Buyfolio? 

SD: Buyfolio provides buy-side agent technology and a homebuyer experience in a dual facing platform via both the web and mobile apps. Buyfolio streamlines the search, organization, and communication of a home search into an unparalleled collaborative experience for real estate agents and their buy-side customers.

JB: Where did the idea come from?

SD: After selling our Seattle apartment in 2007 via Zillow’s Make Me Move (true story!), we moved to NYC and started looking for an apartment to buy. We immediately found it difficult to communicate about our home search, with each other and with our agent. To make it easier, we used an Excel spreadsheet to organize the properties we wanted “To See,” the ones we “Saw and Liked,” and the ones we “Didn’t Like” and emailed it back and forth. The idea for Buyfolio was born.

JB: But isn’t this just saving properties on a site and sharing them with my agent? Lots of sites do that.

SD: The first version we launched in 2010 was exactly that, a simple save and share interface. But we soon realized that to get agents and homebuyers to truly engage and collaborate with one another, we had to provide a fuller experience – a platform – not just a repository. We gave both agents and homebuyers the ability to search while keeping the option to add listings they found outside our system.

For agents, we also focused on client management tools, branding, and workflow. We wanted to give them all the opportunities to add value, interpret data and the market, and share their knowledge with their buyers – whether those buyers were prospects or longer term relationships – at all the right times and in one central hub.

For homebuyers, the important aspects were an attractive UI, organizational tools, and the ability for each person involved in the search (spouse, family member, etc.) to have their own account to share and comment under their own name. Everyone having their own accounts is critical to the concept of collaboration, but it’s something that even the biggest consumer sites and brokerages haven’t tackled.

JB: What’s the revenue model?

SD: We probably aren’t done figuring this out. Our last web venture had over 5 million page views a month monetized via Google AdSense and direct ads, but we’re doing something different with this business. Today we offer a freemium model and a $24.95/month Pro version of our product. It’s going well, but getting agents to commit to yet-another-monthly-fee on their credit card is no small task.

JB: Right now Buyfolio only works in New York City — which is a totally different market from the rest of the country, lots of rentals, no MLS, etc. — are you intending on scaling Buyfolio out of NYC? 

SD: Having no major NYC MLS has its pros and cons. On one hand, access to data wasn’t an issue, but on the other hand, it took us over 6 months to build a system that scrubs and digests the data we do have access to.

We are already in the planning stages for expansion outside NYC. As they say, if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. We hope that adage remains true as we grow.

JB: How do you even begin to tackle a challenge like that? What are the brick walls you’re hitting? 

SD: We’re talking to a lot of industry people – data providers, service providers, MLSs, brokerages, etc. The real estate landscape is like no other and we want to be best prepared to navigate it. At the same time, we’re passionate about collaboration and the much-needed bridging effect it can have on the unsettled landscape. We’re excited to be in the mix and help move the conversation past data and towards all the potential that lies on the other side.

We’ll certainly run into more data hurdles, but so far the reception has been warm and new innovations like the Spark Platform could accelerate our entrance into new markets.

We have been surprised to see the friction between large brokers and MLSs. While they would both claim their goal is to strengthen the tools and performance of their agents, they have different ideas of how to do that while maintaining their own influence on the marketplace.

JB: You built SeatGuru and sold it to Expedia in 2007. How is the travel industry different from real estate in your experience?

SD: In Online Travel, good content brings users and a good service leads to conversions and transactions. The content and transactions aren’t typically happening on the same website, but the conversion bridge is established and works well.

In real estate, generally the people who’ve built the best content experiences are struggling to connect their visitors to someone who can convert them into buyers/sellers. The percentages are low because the bridge is weak, both in the structure and value added.

If you looked at airline tickets on United.com, would you want a United rep calling you 5 minutes later – to ask you again, where and when you wanted to go? Yet, that’s the first instinct of a real estate agent who gets an online lead: I’ve got to call him/her. The industry needs to embrace that great customer service can be delivered in the online domain and that is actually what many homebuyers want. And no, we’re not talking about emails.

JB: If you could go back and change one thing you did at the beginning when launching Buyfolio, what would it be?

SD: In the beginning we didn’t require users to create an account because we were worried it would be a barrier to use. But we quickly realized that not having an account actually prevented real collaboration – people would forget to add their initials before their comment, they would erase someone’s comment before all parties had a chance to read it, etc. True buyers haven’t been deterred by the required sign-in and we wish we started that way.

JB: How is your product going to be different in two years time? What trends are you keeping an eye on?

SD: Currently our iPhone and Android Apps complement our web/ desktop experience, and that strategy will likely carry us for the near term. But as mobile app usage grows, we’ll be required to rethink entire parts of the industry. Photos are a good example. The trend is for them to increase in quality, resolution, and size, but what happens when that collides with the mobile trend and the majority of them are viewed from 4″ screens? Soon there could even be a demand for life-size photos as we virtually walk through an open house with our Google Goggles from our couch.

JB: Any other advice for other real estate technology entrepreneurs?

SD: This industry is stubborn, but it’s also filled with some very smart people, it’s full of potential, and it’s ripe for change. Because it’s stubborn, it takes longer for ideas and concepts to flesh out. Don’t pivot too early!

Also, don’t be afraid to introduce new behaviors. We’re showing agents that most prospects and buyers do not like getting listing links over email and they don’t want to “discuss” properties via email or on the phone – it’s cumbersome, difficult to track, and not time efficient. It’s a new concept for agents, but moving forward, we see it as critical to their success. And to this day we still don’t have an option to Print from our product. Sure, we’re saving trees, but we’re also taking away the agent crutch of show sheets. Most buyers don’t want paper clutter with stale data. It’s taken time, but agents are starting to think more about what today’s buyer wants and needs.

JB: Thanks!

You can sign up for a free Buyfolio account here. You can also follow them on Twitter (@buyfolio). Finally, if you’re an MLS or brokerage that is interested in bringing Buyfolio to your market they’d love to chat: email Susan at susan at buyfolio dot com.

Many more of these to come.

…

The public online real estate players reported Q1 results this week.

Here are some quick impressions:

Market Leader (Details)

• Revenue is up and losses are down. The company has stabilized. I wonder, through, how much of the revenue increase was bought through the acquisition of Sharper Agent and Realestate.com and how much was organic?

• The company’s strategy is to sell through big franchise channels, and they’re doing well there – lining up Keller Williams, Century 21 and Better Homes and Gardens in the past year. But while the KW deal came with some nice up-front cash, it will be interesting to see if the brand channel has the sales power it used to have.

Zillow (Details)

• Wow, pretty bitchin’ all the way around. $90M run rate, solid EBITDA, and direct customer relationships with 18,616 agents.

• Spending roughly half your cash to buy a company like Rent Juice signals maximum confidence in future operating and stock performance (which, incidentally, at the moment of this writing, has cracked $40 for the first time since the IPO spike and fall).

• The company is positioning the Rent Juice acquisition as a strategic play into the rentals market, which surely it is. But this also strikes me as a move towards more customer share with Realtors, many of whom are trying to expand their practice to rentals in light of market changes. Rent Juice is also a great piece of software – one that could be bent toward more Realtor-focused purposes.

Move (Details)

• They’re still hanging at that $180M rate, though company projections for the year have it approaching the $200M mark again.

• The company is seeing growth in new products, and the Top Producer business is stabilizing as new features are released (including a mobile HTML 5 version).

• It’s hard for a company that has been public for almost 15 years to match the sizzle of the Zillow story, but let’s not forget that Move has many more agent customers than any of their online competitors, far fewer data vulnerabilities, and $95 million in cash.

…

The GoodLife Team, a small brokerage in Austin, pulled its listings from Trulia.

This company gets the web and is anything but retrograde in its thinking about online advertising. So this move is instructive.

They acted because Trulia placed ads from competing agents on GoodLife Team listings even though The GoodLife Team was a paying Trulia advertiser. That violates my “everyone be cool” approach to syndication, but the Good Life Team’s reasoning was still more principled.

It seems they have a brand standard that requires listing agents to respond to inquiries within five minutes. An agent buying ads on their listings is bound by no such requirement, therefore undermining the standard from the sellers’ point of view. Trulia wasn’t willing to pull the other agents’ ads, so pulling the listings was the only play for the Good Life Team to make.

Straw men and red herrings litter the syndication debate, but I buy the Good Life Team’s position here. Good for them.

…

In related news, Trulia launched a mobile ad program this week. Makes a lot of sense, and it looks great. But if you thought the tension over ads on the big screen was bad…

…

This is interesting: 42 Floors, a new commercial real estate search site, released something they’re calling Showroom.

The headline reads, “So you’ve found a great office, we know you’ll need ________”

It’s a small directory, really. But the positioning here is compelling.

A home purchase triggers so much other commerce, yet most real estate sites – including some broker sites – simply throw display ads at this opportunity. What 42 Floors did here suggests more interesting possibilities.

Enjoy the weekend!

[Disclosure: Move, Inc. is a 1000watt client]

First up…

Andrew Machado, Founder, Open Home Pro

Open Home Pro first caught my eye a couple of years ago. I thought it was a real clear signal of things to come. The company had eschewed traditional platforms like the desktop and the web and, instead, focused its development efforts on a new device, the iPad.

A few months later, the iPad 2 shipped and the tablet rapidly began transforming from a “content consumption” device to a real productivity tool. I figured there was real opportunity for someone to start building real estate software for this emerging platform.

Andrew and his team did just that.

JB: Describe your company/product – give me your your elevator pitch.

AM: Open Home Pro empowers real estate agents to collect and convert more leads at open houses. We do this by telling agents which leads are hot, giving potential buyers a beautiful way to sign in to an open house and automate the followup without the agent having to lift a finger.

JB: I’m still not sure I understand what the product does exactly. 

What it does is allow a real estate agent to replace the pen and paper or laptop they currently use when they ask walk-ins at an open house to sign in.

I always tell people this, the next time you walk by a Whole Foods Market and the people outside hit you up to support cancer research or a 5k run, notice that they are using clipboards with pens. Imagine if they were showing videos, or big beautiful numbers on a screen to draw your attention instead.  That would immediately change your perception of them.

JB: Got it. But why would anyone sign up for anything at an open house?

Great question. I ask myself the same thing every day. I hear reasons that vary from “my seller requires I have everyone sign-in” to “so we can send them a market report on their current home” as reasons to convince a home visitor to sign up. We try to help the agent with that by giving them other reasons that aren’t verbal, and more visual. With Open Home Pro we take photos of the property, and then cross dissolve them and add a big ‘Touch to Begin’ button that hopefully communicates to the walk-in that this is cool.

JB: When did you start your company? How many people (who) were involved?

AM: The idea came in April of 2010. I was chicken: I registered the url, LLC’d the company but didn’t really start development till August of 2010. It started as two of us – Angelo Dinardi (who is now at Google) and myself. Now we’re a bit bigger.

JB: What was the motivation or inspiration behind your idea/product?

AM: The inspiration behind Open Home Pro falls into a few buckets. So stick with me. First off, my girlfriend had been a real estate agent for only 4 months and where they start you is [running] open houses. Sadly, she’d come home with incomplete or blank sign-in sheets every weekend. We’d sit on the floor sifting through them and at that point I figured we could improve this dramatically.

Another reason is the challenge is enormous. See, people just see it as a sign-in form, but when you think about what’s going on it’s much bigger than that. The interface has to require zero learning. The person typing in their information may have never used an iPad. They don’t know how to retract the keyboard. The user may have an internet connection or may not.

All of these things add up to an entirely different experience than what the obvious answer is….a bunch of questions on a single screen.

JB: How many users/customers do you have today?

AM: I think our last public number was on Inman at 17,000

JB: What feature are you most excited about now, or coming on the horizon?

AM: We get asked a lot about this. We’re quietly (and maybe not so quietly now) launching user pages for every agent this week. This allows agents to see how they might be doing from leads collected to number of homes sold against their peers. We think this is impactful because using Facebook Connect keeps people accountable, but at the same time we allow agents to show off not only all of their listings, but the ability to celebrate their achievements.

For us it’s a delicate balance. We want to be very simple, yet very powerful when you need it. We do things like sync data dynamically down from our website to the iPad quietly in the background, and let you modify and collect data without an internet connection. We support unlimited photos which a lot of services don’t…and we do it for free.

JB: How is your product going to be different in two years time? What trends are you keeping an eye on?

AM: I ask myself that constantly. We’ll have some stuff over the next few months that hopefully sets the stage for the next year or two of our business. I think the big buckets right now to watch are how mobile, social and location intersect – how to build a new type of experience for your customer that lets them experience something new quickly and away from their desktop computer.

JB: What was one thing that surprised you about developing software for real estate?

AM: I think a lot of people lose sight of their customer. Most of our customers are not twenty years old, so you make design and functionality decisions with that in mind. Touch to edit is something we’re really proud of. It was born from the idea that our customer isn’t going to quite understand edit buttons and the screen changing states to modify information. So we thought “what if you could touch anything to change it?”

JB: If you could go back and change one thing you did at the beginning, what would it be?

AM: Rely less on server side features. They take a long time to develop, test and can lead to lots of problems. The upside of doing things like this is they really do delight your customers, but it’s so much work and the cost is very high.

JB: Any other advice for other real estate technology entrepreneurs?

AM: I think any entrepreneur needs to wake up every morning living, sleeping and breathing their product. If you aren’t then it’s probably not for you. You need to be able to realize you are going to be on top of the world one day and the next you feel like life is over. We’ve messed up hundreds of times along the way. But you dust yourself off and claw for that next inch up the hill.

JB: Thanks!

For more on Open Home Pro, check it out in the iTunes App Store. You can also follow Andrew on Twitter (@machado) and find Open Home Pro on Facebook.

Turns out that while I was talking about it, the team at FBS, a leading MLS software provider, we’re planning to build it.

And today, they’ve announced its alpha release. It’s called the Spark Platform, and it’s a very big deal.

To bottom-line it, this platform has the potential to:

• Produce an explosion of better software for brokers and agents

• Make innovating within the boundaries of MLS rules dramatically easier

• Create significant new revenue for MLSs

There are three pieces to this puzzle:

The Spark API

This is a single API for standardized MLS data. This alone is huge, because right now anyone wanting to release software tied to MLS data (an IDX solution, say) has to machete their way through 850 MLS systems one-by-one.

This stifles innovation in a big way. Brokers and agents are left with too few software options; developers put more time into navigating the MLS maze than improving their products; millions are wasted on cocktail receptions and steak dinners.

In the meantime, those outside the industry, who secure data without going through the MLS system, have more latitude to innovate than those who own the data.

Crazy.

The Spark API means a developer can light up hundreds of markets at once. At launch (this September) FBS will have 120 MLSs representing 200,000 agents on board. I suspect more will follow.

MLSs will be able to impose their own terms of use. They’ll be reflected in the API and presented to the end user. FBS can do this because they power many MLSs and know how to pull this off. It suffices to say that this is no small task.

The Spark Store

The platform will make building real estate software easier, but it also includes a compelling distribution channel for developers – the Spark Store.

As my headline states, this will be real estate’s first true app store. Developers – whether they use the Spark API or not – can place their app in the store, which can be integrated with MLS systems and brokerage intranets. Developers give up 30% off the top, which is split between FBS and the MLS (I’d like to see the brokerage cut into this as well).

Ordering, payment and fulfillment are handled through the store. This is no ersatz app store that functions like a simple directory – it’s the real deal.

The Spark Bar

The Spark Bar extends the reach of this app store. It can be added to any MLS system or brokerage intranet by copying and pasting a bit of javascript. It looks like a lighter option for those that don’t want to host the full store.

Users can purchase new apps through the bar, login to those they’ve already bought using single sign-on, and receive app notifications from developers.

Questions

As you can tell by now, I like what the FBS team has done. But there are questions:

Will the developers come out of the woodwork?

Will MLSs not running Flex MLS, FBS’s core MLS software product, participate?

Will brokers be on board without getting a piece of the action?

Will local variations in data rules, even if baked into a single API, still prove too knotty?

We’ll see. But right now I’m optimistic.

Kudos to Mike Wurzer and team for making a big, needed, and very important move.

If we can mine our social graphs to find a pet sitter, surely we can transport an ingrained offline behavior – getting referred to an agent by a friend – to the online world. It’s just a matter of time.

Trulia has stuck a toe in this water with Social Search, but it’s positioned as an agent tool and limited to the Trulia agent directory. Realtor.com has gone deeper with its Hyper Social initiative but it, too, is an agent focused play.

A couple of promising, if flawed, data-driven attempts to solve this problem have been smothered in the cradle, launching and disappearing within days.

So the problem remains. It would be good to see brokers and MLSs jump on it now, not respond to and recriminate over an outside entity’s innovation later.

…

ListHub, the listings syndicator owned by Move, released a new dashboard that gives brokers more information about the publishers to which they can distribute listings.

Brokers (ListHub does not allow agents to syndicate listings directly) can now sort publishers by filters like “Does not re-syndicate” or “Displays listing broker name.”

It might be simpler just to offer a “Does not mess with my data or business model” filter.

But seriously, I think brokers now have a better basis upon which to make informed syndication decisions. Perhaps less obviously but more importantly, they now have a platform from which they might collectively bargain with publishers.

The brokers’ responsibility? Pay attention!

The sooner the broker/publisher relationship settles into a place where everybody’s cool, the better. There are more important things to focus on.

…

Since I mentioned re-syndication, I’ll give you an example:

When you visit this page on Curbed, the real estate media site active in about a dozen markets, you see a “House of the Day:”

This is a property listed by Houlihan Lawrence, a large brokerage north of New York City (and a 1000watt client). Curbed attracts consumer attention with this content and then sells that attention to advertisers. Curbed got this listing from Zillow (that’s the re-syndication part) and links to the listing as it appears there.

Curbed gets content. Zillow gets link love and distribution and Houlihan Lawrence exposes its listing to a very large audience.

Win-win-win? Or shall we get out the pitchforks and torches?

The answer, either way, should be based on analysis, not impulse.

…

This Silicon Alley Insider interview of Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff is worth reading. Spencer lays out the market opportunity they’re after very clearly.

The salient quote:

‘We’re trying to move to a world where agents wake up, roll out of bed, and pull out their tablet or PC and manage their day and their workflow based on the tools that Zillow provides to them.”

He also reiterates what Zillow will not go after:

“We have been very clear with the industry that our grand vision is to be a media company, and not to be a brokerage. They want to make sure that we will not have Zillow real estate agents and we will not actually compete with them.”

I believe him.

But here’s the thing: If you’re giving agents marketing support, training, tools for managing your business and loads of information all wrapped in a brand that has resonance with consumers, you’ve essentially created something akin to “I Can’t Believe it’s Not Brokerage!”

I wonder what Fabio is up to these days.

…

You may think this post is a Zillow-hating rant. It’s not.

It’s a call to action to brokers to create new ways to engage consumers and deliver value to agents.

It is possible.

…

Holy cow. They’ve done it! The spill-proof beer.

Enjoy the weekend.

[Disclosure: Move, Inc., which operates Realtor.com, is a 1000watt client]

The iPhone is nothing more than a luxury bauble that will appeal to a few gadget freaks. In terms of its impact on the industry, the iPhone is less relevant.

and:

Apple will sell a few to its fans, but the iPhone won’t make a long-term mark on the industry.

Oops.

It’s easy to look back at statements like these and laugh.

But the truth is, no one really expected the tsunami of change the iPhone brought to the mobile space. Only five years ago, smartphones were only carried by geeks, few knew what an “app” was, and for those of us in real estate, “mobile” remained little more than a buzzword.

In 2007, I may have had an inkling that it might be big but I certainly can’t claim any unique prescience:

House hunting seems to me to be an inherently mobile activity but as yet all of the house hunting options we have require you to root yourself in front of the computer. This strikes me as a pretty large disconnect, especially as the mapping/mashup technology already exists. Google Maps and Microsoft’s Live Search for mobile already make good use of it.

What I’d love to see is a mobile versions of Yahoo! Real Estate or Trulia‘s search engine. Something that would allow me to punch in my current location, search criteria and then have it return driving directions to each of the results to me. Maybe even a one-touch ‘click-to-call’ link to instantly connect me to the listing agent.

My wishes came true.

The battle is moving

Debates erupt around the display and syndication of listings online. Rumors abound about efforts by coalitions of brokers to build destination websites that will “compete” with the big portals. MLSes still argue whether they should be launching public facing websites.

Much energy is expended, but I’m pretty convinced it’s all being wasted. While many in the industry focus on websites and web pages, the future lies somewhere else.

Zillow now claims 40% of its weekend traffic comes through its mobile apps. I imagine the other portals see similar trends. There’s little doubt that those numbers will continue to climb to a point where the browser, I believe, will no longer be the primary way we connect to real estate data.

Five years from now the battle for audience in real estate won’t be fought on the web; it will be fought in the app stores.

It’s going to be messy, inasmuch as there are all kinds of form factors to account for. It’s going to be expensive, since there’s multiple platforms that will need to be supported. It’s also going to throw things like traditional SEO onto the back burner.

This reality should be top of mind for any broker or franchise thinking about its digital strategy, its syndication strategy, or its relationship with the online real estate players.

But this future is also going to be a ton of fun. New input methods — multitouch gestures, voice and who knows what else — will open up new ways for us to interact with all this information.

Either way, steel yourselves. It’s time to go all-in on mobile for home search. Get in, or get out – ’cause this is the world we’re heading towards.

Mark my words.

I strolled by this office with my family while on a short spring break getaway.

My wife’s take: “They bought the sign twenty years ago and just keep putting it out.”

My take: “Wow, I guess it works.”

Think about it:

Mike and Linda, Boomers on vacation in this neat little beach town, pull over and grab a list just to see what a second home would cost.

Amy, a Gen X-er relocating for a new job, has half a dozen real estate search apps on her iPhone, but grabs a list because, somehow, a sheet of paper just seems easier.

Not far-fetched, right?

Of course, these scenarios will become less plausible over time, but for now they are part of the strange duality of real estate life.

The industry is responding to massive technological and cultural change at the same time stuff from the days when people drank “Riunite on Ice” while watching Dallas still works.

Go figure.

Lately, I have been feeling we’re close to a point at which the practice of real estate as we know it will collapse like the floor beneath a gallows, bringing a swift end to a long drama.

But it’s things like this photo that remind me why I may be wrong, why we may be straddling old and new for a while yet.

If that is the case, caution is in order.

Sometimes, outside innovators seeking to disabuse the industry of its more antique notions are shocked by the recalcitrance they encounter. A fair number of agents and brokers will themselves to sleep in the face of change and hope everything gets back to normal when they wake up.

They both want something that isn’t wholly real. I find myself in this place a lot, too, thinking “That’s just stupid” or “That makes perfect sense” when in fact the opposite is true. It’s a form of blindness.

So, sometimes, it’s good to catch a glimpse of the other side.

Nudge, the friendly, beautiful web app that moves clients and prospects to action is now live! 

Go ahead and check it out now.

Nudge was born from the notion that agents could use something to cut through the noise and connect with consumers viscerally, almost emotionally, in their marketing.

We wanted to create something different, clear and beautiful.

Nudge is a web-based marketing app for agents, but it’s hard to classify. Because there’s nothing else like it. We’re cool with that, and are betting that you are too.

But you can think about it this way:

Instagram captures snapshots of what you see; Nudge captures snapshots of what you know.

A Nudge is like a Groupon. One offering. One call to action. A Nudge is the tweet from @zapposanthony signing on to let you know he’s there, at your service. A Nudge is Nordstrom’s Pin of a Tory Burch sweater. The one that ties your new outfit together.

Clear and compelling.

This is how major brands market digitally today. This is how they get people to respond.

If you’re an agent, you can now roll this way.

See how it works

On sale now

Nudge is for agents. At launch it’s priced at $99 per year.

But we’re also offering customized accounts for brokers who want to give the gift of great marketing to their agents.

We’re thrilled to say four brokerage companies are launching with us:

Prudential California Realty in San Diego, Orange County, Los Angeles and Santa Barbara

Residential Properties in Rhode Island

Houlihan Lawrence in New York’s Westchester, Duchess and Putnam Counties

John Greene, Realtors in the west suburbs of Chicago

More will follow soon.

Our pricing and set-up process for brokers is unheard of in vendordom. Check the details and get in touch if you’re interested.

Gratitude

We’ve been working on Nudge for about a year while also running 1000watt, which has been booming.

It would have been another year were it not for our friends W&R Studios, the guys that brought you Dwellicious and Cloud CMA, who got us across the finish line and will be working with us to bring Nudge to the masses.

They’re smart, righteous people and we’re proud to have partnered with them.

We also give our thanks to the agents and brokers who gave us feedback all along the way. Even with 15 years around this business, we know that assumptions are folly. Our practitioner friends kept us in line.

So, we’re launched.

There’s more to come. In the meantime, get Nudge!

Agents can now collect and promote testimonials gathered on Facebook through both their social connections and on their Realtor.com profile page. The core of the original SocialBios application – mashing up the social graphs of a consumer and an agent to surface commonalities – is also active.

One of Realtor.com’s frequently overlooked assets is its accurate list of every Realtor in America (ok, I know, you can just buy one yourself). Now that list has been enlivened with a bit of social interaction.

Smart move.

…

Online brokerage Estately went after a “terrestrial” broker in Canada for ripping off its front-end code and interface. Looks like they had a legit claim.

But this dust up reminded me just how much combustible material surrounds companies like Estately that have brokerage licenses in multiple states, significant traffic and access to IDX, but refer the vast majority of their leads off to agents hanging their license with other brokers for a fee.

They exist largely under the radar, given cover by looming DOJ demons, while companies like Redfin, Realtor.com and Zillow take darts from many in the industry.

Don’t strike a match!

…

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

…

Google filled in some details on its magic glasses project.

In the mid-nineties, a friend told me how we’d soon wear cell phones on our ears. It sounded preposterous.

Today, the Bluetooth earpiece, having moved from cutting edge to gauche, is clung to only by men of a certain age and those with mullets.

So I’m taking this glasses thing seriously. And expect it will come, go, and be replaced by something still more magical.

…

Check out this new dating app. Once video messaging becomes widespread over 3G/4G, I’m betting we’ll see a video listing presentation app where consumers push the process of selecting an agent out of the living room.

…

Redfin updated its iPhone and iPad apps to make something like “real estate search TV” possible.

They’ve hooked the apps into Apple’s Airplay API, which makes it possible for those with Apple TVs to throw the search experience on a TV screen wirelessly while controlling it from the iPhone or iPad.

Right now, this benefits a small, geeky crowd. But given all the talk about what’s next for TV, it seems like a wise move.

I believe Redfin’s are the only real estate iOS apps that have this capability, but please let me know in the comments if I have that wrong.

Enjoy the weekend.

[Disclosure: Move, Inc., which operates Realtor.com, is a 1000watt client]