“Now recruiting dual-career agents”

Big. Bold. Proud.

And insane.

A large regional real estate company planted this billboard. I wondered for a moment why a respected real estate brand would do such a thing. But then it occurred to me that “respected” made no sense here; “recognized” was more appropriate.

Like in, “I recognized the familiar aroma of grease wafting from the lunch truck.”

I spent the next half hour thinking about statements that were possibly more offensive than the one plastered on this billboard:

“Make money performing surgeries – ask us how!”

“Now seeking motivated sperm donors – work from home!”

OK. Sorry. But you get the point.

Ironic transparency

This billboard is an extreme example, but we see it all the time: real estate companies opening up their robe just a little too far and revealing some unpleasant sights.

How many times have you seen a real estate school promoted on a real estate company’s home page? Or a “Careers” page promising “Leads” to those “New to the business?”

Do you think today’s buyers and sellers are too confused or too caught up in the “emotional nature of the real estate transaction” to notice this stuff?

Of course not. The whole world is watching now. Blemishes – let alone fundamental weaknesses – are nearly impossible to buff away. Stuff that didn’t strike a sour note during the good times rings with contradiction in an environment where the cover of Time magazine is dedicated to “Rethinking homeownership.”

Ouch

Maybe you think I’m wrong, that there will always be enough people to hire the friend of a friend who just needs a break, that we choose sales people we like regardless of qualifications.

You’re going to get dinged anyway. By competitors.

Companies with strong organizations, a discriminating approach to recruiting, and standards around service delivery are beginning to pointedly position themselves against the companies in their markets without these things.

It’s resonating.

Bingo

I started this post a few days ago. Today, Greg Robertson over at Vendor Valley posted the video below. I’m sharing it here because it encapsulates everything I’ve written above:

Real estate matters. Let’s treat it as such!

He co-founded Hotwire and was part of Expedia’s management team.

Now, he’s explaining the foreclosure process to homebuyers and sellers.

He’s doing it clearly, credibly and in a manner that at once plays off and enhances the Zillow brand. And he’s offering up a nice little content morsel for the search engines.

Take a look:

If you’re a broker and you’re not doing this sort of thing, you have no right to complain about Zillow kicking your butt on Google, getting their chief economist quoted in your local newspaper, or conditioning the structure of your agents’ listing presentations.

Surrender

I know some brokers who think of themselves as being in the recruiting business. Others place themselves in the training business. But it is a surprisingly small number who are indisputably in the real estate business.

To be in the real estate business, you must know every square foot of your marketplace. You must be able to answer any question posed by a homebuyer or seller with the easy confidence of the Old Spice Guy.

And sitting in front of a camera for two minutes to explain foreclosure clearly and credibly should be about as challenging as brushing your teeth.

You could get away with not being in the real estate business ten years ago. Sins of neglect were washed away by the cool waters of prosperity. Recruit, rinse, repeat.

Today? Not being in the real estate business is senseless surrender.

Dust in the wind

They say that on a windy day, you can hear the erosion of the Great Sphinx at Giza – the chips of human effort flying off with the wind. So it is with the brokerage that does not place accretive energy behind its value proposition to, and credibility with, buyers and sellers.

“But we serve two masters – the consumer and the agent”

“I suffer from channel conflict.”

“The agent is the customer.”

Cling to these maxims and watch your achievement fade, with every passing day, with every blog post or video from someone else, in every moment you let the gap between you and the marketplace you depend on widen, into a history no one will even pause to appreciate.

You, $500, and the things you know

Good for Spencer. I mean that. He spent 15 minutes in front of a $500 camera talking about something people who come to his web site care about.

Is that too much to ask? More than you are willing to pay to give expression to the knowledge you have stored between your ears?

Don’t let it be too much to ask.

If you’ve got the goods, get into the real estate business.

Between juggling a fussy baby and and even fussier Labrador, I finally got to my local Starbucks for my morning coffee. In the calm of that moment, staring over my steaming cup, I pulled out my iPhone and fired up the new Facebook app. Nothing unusual there: part of my morning routine these days is to see what’s been happening in my friend’s and family’s lives.

Only this time, I checked-in first and let them all know where I was.

Check-in behavior like this has provided the foundation for all kinds of popular apps of late (Foursquare, Pegshot, Gowalla, just to name just a few), has distracted others (Yelp) and has, no doubt, firmly established geo-location as one of the hot new services in the mobile category.

So when Facebook launched its Facebook Places product last week, it came as a pretty big splash and, I think, threw some cold water on this party. Thanks to the sheer weight of the social network’s user base, this mechanic is soon going to be ubiquitous.

What’s left, therefore, is just the sprinkling of features on top. The layering of ego (Foursquare’s mayorships), design (Gowalla’s badges) or gaming (Booyah’s Monopoly-like MyTown) give each of those services their own unique flavor. And it remains to be seen which, if any, have any real staying power.

Facebook has effectively commoditized the check-in.

All this got me thinking, though. This is where things for real estate start to get really interesting.

My cup of coffee was going to get cold.

What does the check-in mean for real estate?

So far, we’ve seen only a handful of geo-location apps built exclusively for real estate. The first, Agent Footprints, is launching soon and was built by the guys behind Neybor.com. It promises to document (through the check-in) “a real estate agent’s professional life including listings, sold properties, and more importantly, visited properties.”

Basically, an agent can check-in to any of the for-sale properties in the system and indicate that they’ve viewed the home. I got a demo of this app recently and it’s pretty darn impressive. The implications at both the broker and agent level already have us thinking of ways this can be utilized.

The other, HomeFinder.com’s Race for the Home event in Atlanta, is going down on September 18. Through a partnership with the SCVNGR, 1,000 of HomeFinder’s home buyers are going to compete in a series of location-based check-in challenges in an effort to win a down payment on a new home.

[Disclosure: 1000watt Consulting has performed consulting services for Homefinder.com in the past]

And while both of these are creative examples of business and consumer-focused use cases for the check-in, the greater potential here is staring at us in the face.

Coffee is getting colder. Ideas smoldering.

In real estate, the check-in by itself is largely meaningless, but bolt that check-in to a simple qualitative query – like “Did you like this property?” – and bingo, you start to have something really interesting.

Brian and Marc and I have talked at length about John Battelle’s idea of the Web being a database of intentions.

So with a simple yes or no response added to a check-in to a home, you start to have a series of geo-coded markers of intention, in real space, tied to real homes.

This is powerful stuff. In the aggregate, this data could serve to power Amazon-like recommendations to a home search. Sliced and diced it could even serve to help determine the saleability of a home itself.

Shared through a filtered social graph, this could even serve to aide the home-buying process among families.

But why stop there…

• Imagine a Weeplaces-type visualization of color-coded “likes” and “dislikes.”  Rolled up at a macro-level, this could give us fascinating insight into the popularity of certain neighborhoods.

• Imagine an enhanced StreetAdvisor.com with a leaderboard for every block, the most popular homes floating to the top.

By now, my coffee was ice cold. Perfect, given the rising heat of the day. I stood up, gathered my belongings and wandered up the hill in my village back towards home. On my way I noticed a new home that had just gone on the market.

I thought to myself, man, that’s a cool house. If there were only a way to tag it, like it and share it.

Not Smart Real Estate. They understand people require something deeper than sexy images of domiciles to stimulate decision making. So they taped market trends printed from their MLS right on their storefront window for everyone to read.  

It’s just so simple. And pretty darn smart.

It speaks to me. And what it says is…

You’d rather collect leads than make a sale

If I had a super power, it wouldn’t be flight, invisibility or Hulk-like strength. My super power would be to make all the bad ideas expressed across real estate’s websites vanish with the snap of my fingers.

My first snap: The “Contact Us” page. And the minefield of form fields that stand in the way of a simple, clean, invitation to engage.

I came across this form today on the contact page of an IDX vendor.

First reaction: They’re not looking for business – they’re conducting a Census.
Second reaction: They’re conducting market research, turning leads into survey respondents.
Third reaction: They’re making me run the gauntlet instead of rolling out the red carpet.

If this form could speak, it might say: We’re a small company. Understaffed. Unable to manage the sales cycle. Alternatively, it could also say: We’re huge. So big, in fact, that we can’t really be bothered by your little questions. If you mattered, you’d know our number and the right extension.

But here’s what it doesn’t say…

We appreciate you

If your home page is the welcome mat to your business, your “Contact Us” page is the receptionist. What this page says, and how this page looks, should be as well appointed and as welcoming as the person you’ve placed on the front line.

Consider W&R Studios – a software company that specializes in products for Realtors. By making it so obviously simple to contact the stakeholders, they create a seamless connection between what they believe and what they sell. It instinctively increases the visitors’s confidence in the product, creates believability in their sales pitch and presents the company as reachable and affable.

Jetspring helps companies convert online leads into customers. Imagine if all they had on their contact page was a form. They’d get lumped in with the hundreds of other firms in real estate that offer this service. But these guys are smart. Their form offers every possible way to connect with the firm including a live chat widget, which these days is dead simple to install and even simpler to manage.

Vendors aren’t the only transgressors. Broker sites are notoriously guilty of transgressions against users, making it nearly impossible to find someone to talk to.

Michael Saunders & Company’s new web site does the opposite. In typical Michael Saunders fashion – this a company that promises to bend over backwards for customers – their “Contact Us” page proves how seriously they mean it.

Of course, there’s a form there too. We’re not down on forms. Just poorly executed forms.

[Disclosure: Michael Saunders & Company is a client of 1000watt Consulting]

Don’t forget your header and footer too

The problem I believe is created by form based contact pages is you risk turning people ready to do business into a less important category: leads. Leads that don’t get followed up on in a timely fashion. Or worse: Customers for your competition.

If you’re in the business of selling something, stop playing hard to get. Place your number where people look. Enough studies, surveys and heat map tests have been conducted to tell us that people start at the top and then go right to the bottom of your site when they’re looking to get in touch with you.

UK-based digital agency TicToc Family clearly paid attention to this research. There, in their footer, is exactly what a user might find useful after viewing the home page – their contact info, including all of their locations:

BrightDoor Systems, a CRM solution provider, also paid heed. They placed their contact info in the header, directly above their navigation, relieving every user’s eye from ping-ponging around the site trying to find it. If I were interested in licensing a CRM tool right now, who better to work with than a firm who clearly understands how to manage their own customers?

If these Websites could speak for their companies they’d say, Please call us. We want to hear from you. You matter.

Isn’t that what you really want your site to say?

If, moments after arriving at your site, a visitor was able to reach out and connected with a human being happy to help with their needs, a feeling would fire across every fiber of their neural network.

The feeling of an expectation fulfilled. A promise kept.

Folks, that’s money in the bank.

So when Joel wrote about an iPhone search app Yahoo! launched five months ago that allows users to draw a search area with their finger, I was hoping to see something like that pop up soon in real estate. It was a great way to “Take the search out of property search” and deliver a simpler, more direct experience.

I didn’t have to wait long.

Realtor.com has done this with an update to its iPhone app. And, for the most part, they’ve done it really well. So well, in fact, that in some ways it feels as if the company, which for over a decade has failed to deliver a category-killing experience on realtor.com itself, has managed to make mobile real estate search apps that don’t offer something unique (A Zestimate, for example) pretty useless.

Let me explain that a bit.

Realtor.com has always had an advantage with inventory. Their inside track to listings data gives them a more complete, higher quality representation of properties for sale than other big real estate search sites.

But amid their struggles early in this decade, and by offering a user experience that left a lot to be desired, the door to new entrants was left wide open. Those new entrants came and delivered incomplete or out-of-date listings data to users in a snappy “user friendly” experience.

I didn’t like that then. And I don’t like it now.

And while Realtor.com may never fully escape its UI history on the big screen (It is, after all, tied to its product and business model history) the handset is a different matter: This app rocks.

Let’s take a look at highlights of the new release:

Most significantly, users can draw a search area on a map with their finger. This is the vision behind scores of kludgy “draw your own search area” features on the big screen realized.

Or they can a create a small radius search by creating a “fingerprint” on the screen with their fingertip, like this:

They can even view properties for sale on a specific street by drawing a path down that street.

I stumbled moving between this drawing tool and the standard “around me” map search a bit, but this is really nicely done.

Other enhancements include the ability to share any listing via SMS, enhanced search filters and prompts for city and neighborhood names.

While I’m at it, I want to point out a couple things about this app that are not new with this release, but are nonetheless worth pointing out:

Calls to action, lead generation and conversion were not central to most early real estate mobile app builds. Most companies just wanted to get an app out and worry about making it pay later. That’s changing. Notice the call to action on the property detail screen below – it’s simple, direct and prominent:

Photos were supposed to be the Achilles Heel of mobile real estate search. But done right, I think it can be more satisfying to view property photos on a mobile device. This is the photo display for a property in the Realtor.com app. It smoothly flips into landscape mode, and fills the screen with the subject photo while keeping the filmstrip control at hand:

I’m not ditching my mouse and keyboard just yet. But the idea that I will, someday, seems less preposterous all the time.

I thought it might be big. But boy was I wrong. It’s huge. The landscape of the web is tilting towards the small screen faster than I ever expected.

Allow me a brief anecdote: Last night at dinner, some friends were raving about their new phones. These are good friends, but hardly tech savvy, and successful in careers that don’t require them to be at a computer all day.

The ease with which they were now “persistently online” with their Droid X’s – checking email, catching up on Facebook and downloading apps – had caught them by surprise. They were hooked. I doubt very much they’ll spend much time in front of a traditional PC in the future.

Sure. This is one couple, in one town. Hardly a large sample, you say. But if you look at the big picture, I think this is an experience that is being replicated day-in, day-out, across America.

Let’s look at the numbers:

• According to comScore, 49.1 million Americans owned a smartphone at the end of May, an 8.1 percent increase from the previous three-month period.
• Google’s Android year-over-year growth is flabbergasting. Up 850 percent. This time last year, Android phones accounted for only 1.8 percent of the market. Today, it’s 17.2 percent.
• Apple’s iPhone is no slouch either. The latest iPhone 4 model sold a record 1.7 million units in just 3 days at launch. Seven weeks later? The phone still remains sold out at over half of Apple’s US retail stores.

Back in January, I suggested there were three ways you could start prepping yourself to react to this sea-change:

1. Create a mobile web site. According to a recent survey, 80% of businesses across various industries are prepping mobile websites. What are you waiting for? Your competitors?
2. Consider mobile advertising. According to the LA Times today, advertisers using Apple iAds are seeing truly remarkable results. Customers are interacting with the medium 10 times longer (over 90 seconds) than with comparable online ads.

Finally, I wrote that you should take mobile to its natural home: the streets. Integrate it in your existing offline marketing efforts. I suggested using shortened URLs on your for sale signs that would take people to a mobile version of your listing pages.

Well the guys behind Postlets were listening. And they’ve built something extremely cool.

Vyoo.it (pronounced “view it”) is a service just launched in beta that lets you create a mobile landing page for any of your existing property pages.

Login with your Facebook account and you’re ready to go. Drop a URL into the system and Vyoo.it will automatically stitch together a page with as much info as it can find: property details from Zillow, photos from the listing page and more. You can, of course, edit any of these at will.

It pulls all of this information together, along with your contact info, in a tight little mobile listing page complete with Google map, Walkscore and information on nearby schools from Education.com.

Vyoo has just single-handedly made the paper listing flyer obsolete.

You get a short URL that’s easy to share (e.g., http://vyoo.it/fw2rr) or print on your marketing materials or sign rider. You even get a QR code for each listing.

This is the kind of innovation that’s going to drive home adoption of the mobile web. Services that are simple – evolutionary, not revolutionary. Those that provide tangible benefits to both professional and consumer.

Services that make you stand and stare in wonder, like my dinner guests did, at that little computer in your hand.

The following companies have been added to the 1000watt Index this month.

All submissions are reviewed by the principals at 1000watt Consulting before publication. Publication in the 1000watt Index does not constitute an official recommendation or endorsement, nor is any financial compensation accepted for inclusion.

• AgentOffice / CRM
• Suburb Scout / Android Apps
• RealYields / Home values/Investing
• SlicedSimple / MLS-based applications
• Abogo / Neighborhood/Local
• Displet.com / IDX Solutions
• Gondola / Agent Blogs/Websites

If you’d like to have your company or product added, please complete the submission form found on 1000wattindex.com

You click “Find an agent.”

On the “Find an agent” page, you login using your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google or Foursquare account.

You are then presented with a list of agents in the company with whom you share a connection, an interest, a shared experience, employer, hometown or other commonality.

You can see, for example, that agent Mary Jones shares your interest in antiques. She also happens to be connected to your cousin on LinkedIn.

Or that agent Mike Thomas worked for Microsoft in the 1990’s, just like you. And you’ve both been checking in at the same gym for the past few months – you just never crossed paths.

Or even that agent Angela Davis has three friends that went to college at Ohio State around the same time you were there.

These discoveries, while not necessarily conclusive in your choice of agent, do provide you with a starting point. A basis for engagement. And, hey, you may even call your cousin to see if she’s got any background on Agent Mary.

This isn’t conjecture. It’s possible right now with a new app called Peep.ly.

The social graph as catalyst for commerce

Peep.ly has been under the radar for a while. It’s now in something of a semi-private beta.

Peep.ly exposes the connections and commonalities that lie beneath the surface of the Web, deep in the social graph. It thus aids consumer decision-making, builds trust and uncovers a host of information that can serve as indicators of compatibility.

You can try it out here on the site of one of peep.ly’s beta partners. Just click on “Agent Match” in the left-hand navigation.

Rather than offering the same old marginally useful “find an agent” page, brokerage companies using peep.ly can instead match prospects to agents in a novel and meaningful way.

An individual agent can use this too. They’ll be able to create a peep.ly profile and place the app within their own site.

I like this app because it leverages the social graph to drive business connections in a way that’s both expansive and targeted. Your connections, contacts and preferences – bits of life that may spark a bite of interest – are made available to any prospect, but in a controlled one-to-one manner.

You can filter out connections, check-ins and “Likes” that may not be advantageous in a business context too.

Dispersing the “Undifferentiated Realty Mass”

Differentiation – or, for that matter, any ranking or sorting of agents – is usually anathema.

Most brokers or MLSs won’t do much more than provide keyword and alphabetical “Find and agent” functionality on their sites for fear of playing favorites or clipping some dubious area of expertise.

Media sites don’t like to categorize or rank agents too specifically for fear of limiting the ad space they can sell.

And agents themselves – too many of them – struggle to set themselves apart from what I have called the “Undifferentiated Realty Mass.”

Peep.ly cuts through all of that in a way that avoids the political crap while also being useful.

That’s remarkable.

For better or for worse, choosing a Realtor is not always a rational decision. It’s sometimes based on personal rapport. More often, it’s based on a referral from someone you know who has some sort of connection to a real estate professional.

Of course, there are tons of obvious use cases for peep.ly in other industries – and, indeed, for a general consumer audience. But the company seems intent on making peep.ly work well as a real estate app. At least for now.

I’m digging this app. What do you think?

“How do we stack up against the other real estate companies you’ve worked with?”

I paused briefly before answering. Not because I didn’t have an answer. I was just surprised by such a question coming from a respected brokerage CEO in the middle of an impromptu video chat.

I was honored that he would think to ask me that question.

I didn’t want him to think I was stalling or speed dialing a safe answer. Especially in this case. My response echoed my belief:

“You belong to an elite group of extraordinary people and companies within our industry. A very short list.”

It sounded like flattery when it came out. But I meant it.

Comfort versus action

Most of us are not conditioned to open ourselves up to criticism. Comfort is taken from buying into our own story. Believing what we want to believe. Like how we’re killing it.

We conveniently ignore our shortcomings, hoping others are as blind to them as we are. We sometimes cling to pillowy reassurances from those with an interest in preserving our ignorance.

This guy? Not that type. His honesty and openness are something else.

But there was more. He egged me on. So I explained:

He’s engaged

It’s one thing to have your name on the yard sign or occupy the big corner office. But not every CEO is engaged. Not like him. He’s not gone for months at a time partying like Jayzee Jay-Z. He attends meetings. He remains inside the loop without trashing it. He wants to understand new things in the marketing, media and tech world because, for him, expanding the horizon of awareness is never a bad thing.

He has a vision

I respect those who are not sure what their path forward is but remain open to possibilities. But this guy’s a different breed. He has a vision. He knows where he came from and respects that legacy. But he knows where he has to go. And trusts the people he hired to help him get there.

He invests in smart people

I’ve met most of the corporate staff at his company. They too respect the company legacy, but are passionate about building upon it. They project an honesty and competence that’s refreshing.

And they all share one thing in common: each has a little Errol Flynn in them. They’re ready to duel with every opponent, every canard, that confronts them.

Everything is questioned

It’s all placed on the table at this company. Open for scrutiny. The best of idea wins. The culture does not support the paranoia, insecurity and ass-covering that keeps too many real estate brokerages or, for that matter, any sort of business, forever behind.

He likes his agents

If you’ve spent a lot of time with real estate brokers, you know this is not a throwaway statement. Agents are tough customers. Their wants, needs, demands and quirks can be a major bummer. But I’ve never heard him say that. When he speaks about his agents, he smiles. Their hard work has supported his family and company for a long time. He never forgets that.

He’s not distracted by the competition

He’s aware of them, but he’s not obsessed by them. They do their thing. He does his. As a result, everything has his mark on it. A brand.

Reflection

I realize I did not include GCI or market share in my list. These are important. To say so is obvious.

But I’m into the raw elements of extraordinary. And so, I suspect, are you. You became a fan of Google well before they made their first billion. And probably loved U2 back before Bono grew facial hair and had a pot to piss in.

Some extraordinary firms are big and profitable.

Others can fit their bankroll into a fanny pack.

They all have the potential to become extraordinary.