Online Real Estate Technology

I’ve just moved all my RSS feeds over to a new account with Google, so if you are reading my blog and normally recieve updates via RSS feeds, there may be an issue with you recieving updates.

Please click on the RSS link on the side of my blog to reset the feed if you believe there may be a problem or you are not recieving new updates. 

My apologies for any confusion this may have caused.

Mike

Ever wondered when visiting a new city how safe you were, or when you’re looking for your dream home and find one in what looks like a great suburb, but you don’t know how safe that suburb really is? If this is you, then here’s an Iphone application that is just made for you.

Lethal is a new Iphone & Ipod touch application available through Itunes. The application draws on information in various data bases which has been compiled from government and academic sources. The app uses a lethal index system which tells the user how dangerous that area is. There’s a “Wildlife” index, a “Crime” index as well as “Disease” and “Disaster” indexs.

This application is ideal if you want to know what strange animals, or “beasties” might be lurking near you when you go out walking or if you want to check out how safe you are in your current suburb, this little beauty will give you the score. If you are travelling or sightseeing and start wondering how safe you are, this unit uses GPS to find you and then let you know how safe you are in your current location.

Unfortunately, this application will only work in the US at the moment, but if you are planning a trip to the states, this would be an absolute must have before you leave.

Just imagine the impact this would have if launched in Australia on property searches or suburb choice.

The application is available at a small cost from Itunes and I’ve included a screen shot for you below:

New Iphone & Ipod Touch Application

News from the USA that Myspace has laid off a number of its employees, in what the company says is a simple restructuring. The lay offs took place in the Los Angeles and New York offices and social media being what it is, the laid off employees checked their ex bosses Myspace pages for messages of sympathy. 

Portfolio.coms Jeff Bercovici reported the ex employees discovered brand new and jarringly chipper status update messages.

Jeff said, the company’s senior vice president for marketing, described her mood as “focused,” with this message: “just another manic monday. after a sublime weekend. can you say SUNNY LA.” Meanwhile, sales and marketing president Jeff Berman seemed preoccupied by Malcolm Gladwell’s new book. His message, punctuated with a big smiley face: “loved Outliers — great read.”

Talk about lack of sensitivity by management to ex employees, maybe they’re better off not working for the company, so be careful what you say on your social media sites.

Know any management like those in Myspace? If you do then please let me know, and no smiley faces please.

At a time when some real estate offices and groups are cutting their advertising, and in particular their on line spend, Century 21 in the US have announced they are are committing more of their advertising dollar to the internet. In particular they plan to spend on display advertising, search engine marketing and enhanced listing partnerships with the leading real estate web portals. Century 21 will be decreasing their spend on main stream media namely TV.

This announcement comes hot on the heels of the news that Century 21 US was recently voted the most recognised real estate brand in the US. In 2008, the company reported that their leads from on line advertising increased by over 237% and their cost per lead decreased by 62%.

It really is good to see one of the major real estate groups in the US publicly endorse the strength of the net.

Now, if we could just get that confidence to flow through to Australian real estate groups and break some of their old media habits. 2009 might just be that year!

I first wrote about walkscore.com back in September, How Walkable is Your Home or Suburb? – Like to Find Out? and I’ve been an advocate of it’s use by real estate agents in Australia. One of the real estate sites has even done some research on it’s impact on a property listing, when used as one of the images and surprise surprise, it’s the most clicked on image on the listing, so it comes as no surprise to me that the site has continued to grow in popularity.

Last week, at the Inman Technology conference in new York, it was reported that the Walk Score rating system was being added to over 85 million property listings in the US. You’ll soon see the rating system on the major real estate portals such as Zillow.com.

Walk Score promotes the car free lifestyle by providing a personalised walk-ability rating for any address. 

The company says: “Homebuyers rank proximity to daily conveniences as one of the two most important factors in choosing a neighborhood.

Check out the web site on www.walkscore.com.

Just before Christmas I was visiting an agents office in Perth WA and we got talking about video and how he and his office could use it to market themselves and their clients properties, during the course of the discussion he asked me how professional do the videos have to be. He then mentioned he’d seen my first video attempt and said it wasn’t a very professional video, I told him the video had been done in a hotel room on a web cam at 6:30 in the evening and was more to demonstrate that you can record a video, no matter where you are, host it and then syndicate it. This whole process by the way took me just 5 minutes. That video then has been embedded over a 1000 times and still today comes up in my Google alerts as being continually syndicated.

The main point of my video was to show during my presentations that this was all free and not that difficult to do, so every real estate agent could record and then syndicate their own weekly market updates. But now to the point of this post, over the past few weeks I’ve been doing some research and looking at agent produced videos, not the professional ones but those recorded and hosted by the agents themselves. The results of this search have really just confirmed to me, that most real estate agents are not movie director Ridley Scott and should leave it to the professionals, as the example I’ll show you indictates.

The bottom line on this is that with these new tools becoming available to you, you need to really plan what you will show and how you will provide that information to the viewer. The more amateurish the video is, the more it damages your brand and your reputation, so make sure if you are going to film or video your own property tour that you use some of the following rules or suggestions and do not, at any time, replicate what you see in the video here. My apologies to the original agent on this, but when you see the video you’ll know what I mean.

1. Plan the video and make sure you sequence the shots so the video has a natural feel to it, conduct the open home with a structure. 

2. Plan what features you will highlight in the video before you start to shoot, not during the filming.

3. Write and rehearse the script and then film

4. Wherever possible, use a tripod. Hand held shots and fast panning really are detracting for the viewer, not to mention having them vomit on the computer.   

5. Make sure you light the room or house correctly, identify the areas of the house that need to be lit during filming and use lights.

6. Tidy up the house first, remove any clutter from kitchens or bathrooms or other areas of the house that you will be using to film.

7. Try not to move around to much whilst being filmed, make any on camera appearances smooth, you can still show the house whilst providing the voice over off camera.   

8. If you’re using titles on the video, make sure your spelling is correct, not like the example on this video.

9. Limit the length of the video to 2 minutes, that is about the attention span of the average consumer. 

10. If you are using music as a background make sure you use music that is not copyright or is available for public use, if in doubt don’t use any. If you decide to use background music then please match it to the property. Keep the levels low in the background.

I hope these suggestions will be of value to you and if you get it right, your video will be a pleasure to watch, just check out some of the professionally produced videos to see what I mean. In the meantime, check out probably the worst example of a luxury property video tour I’ve seen. I’ll share more with you over the next few weeks.

The Hearst Corporation in the US has finally put Seattle’s oldest newspaper the Seattle Post Intelligencer up for sale, saying that if it can’t find a buyer in the next 60 days, they will close it down or continue to publish it as an internet based information source. The owners have also stated that in no way will they continue to publish it in it’s current form.

The media release from the Hearst Corporation states:

After 146 years of delivering news, the Seattle P-I faces becoming what it has chronicled: history.

“We’ve been on the knife edge all this time,” P-I managing editor David McCumber said Friday. “We finally slipped.”

Economic reasons have forced the state’s oldest morning newspaper into a sale, Steven Swartz, president of The Hearst Corp.’s newspaper division, told employees Friday.

“One thing is clear: At the end of the sale process, we do not see ourselves publishing in print,” Swartz told employees gathered in the newsroom overlooking Elliott Bay. “Since 2000, the P-I has lost money each year, and the losses have escalated and continue to escalate in 2009. We have had to make a very tough decision.”

Hearst said the P-I lost about $14 million in 2008.

One observer noted “The speed with which the 200-year old newspaper industry is disintegrating is remarkable. The model no longer works, at least not for most papers. And most of the industry seems incapable of–or unwilling to–adapt to the new reality”

There are signs that the same situation is starting to impact in Australia as well and that is why I can’t for the life of me understand why some real estate franchise groups and individual offices are continuing to invest in a medium which is very quickly starting to die. These groups that have so much invested in press will pay the price in the future if they don’t start to create and invest in digital communication channels and open up new mediums to communicate and advertise to the changing consumer.

Yesterday, the Gold Coast Bulletin real estate section had over 208 pages of advertising from real estate agents, and not one agent advertising listings in the paper integrated into their press adds their on line presence, this is so important today. I wrote about this back in November Integrating your On Line and Press Advertising- How Important Is this To Your Brand?  The other interesting situation with all of this, is that some of those agents spending on full page adds in the lift out have just recently cancelled or halved their on line spend.   

It’s been my experience in working with real estate businesses, that they mostly work for today and not to the future. You really need to now look at opening or creating new communication channels for your business, because most of the real estate industry uses a very small fraction of the power of the web and most leave it to the major portals in Australia to drive leads and branding.

Look forward to 2015, how will you communicate to the consumer then if you have no strategy in place today to gear your business to the future and to open up new marketing opportunities on the web.

The writing is on the wall for newspapers, don’t let your agency be so press oriented that you fail to see the bullet coming. Create that strategy today and start to implement a digital communication strategy for the future.

If you don’t know where to start with this, let me know because that’s what I do.

As a follow up to my previous post, thought I’d check out who is using Twitter close to me on the Gold Coast in Queenland, and you can check out who is Tweeting in your area. Just use this link and type in your local area and you can Tweet along with them.

http://www.twitterlocal.net/  

Happy Tweeting!!

Just got back from Adelaide yesterday and over the course of the week, I’ve been chatting and presenting to lots of real estate principals and sales people and I talk about social media and other tools they can use to communicate and create cut through in a very cluttered market. Well they looked at me like I was a real live alien in their midst when I mentioned  Twitter. I’ve been using Twitter for awhile now and have posted about it a number of times including this post Hackers Strike at Twitter.com and Barrack Obama , I use it as an instant communication tool to let my followers know what I’m doing, reading, listening to etc as well as promoting my blog,podcasts and video updates. I’ve started to pick up a nice following, as well as following a number of like minded people and their travels and interests on the net.

I can’t get out of my head the image of me standing there and talking about Tweets and Twitter and trying to explain to them what the concept is, well I’m hoping it might just get a little easier from now on, given the growth that Twitter has gone through in 2008. Mashable has reported that Twitter.com has grown 752% in the last 12 months, that’s massive growth in the popularity of the service. Twitter had around 500,000 unique browers at the start of 2008 and finished the year in December with 4.43 Million Unique browsers.

So for those that don’t know what Twitter is, here’s a quick snapshot, and of course the best way to find out about the site is to sign up and follow me:

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS, or email, or through applications such as Tweetie, Twinkle, Twitterfox, Twitteriffic, feedalizr, and Facebook. SMS available only in the US,Canada,India and the UK at this stage. So there you have it.

This still leaves Twitter behind the giants Facebook and Myspace, although interestingly enough , Neilson Online have reported that Facebook just finished the year ahead of it’s rival Myspace in the US, more on those stats in a later post.

So after this post, when I’m back in Adelaide next week, I’m hoping that I won’t come across as the Klaatu of real estate. If you’re interested in following me on Twitter here is the link: http://twitter.com/mikeandrewre

Just announced from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is the technology to provide Myspace on your TV.  You’ll be able to exchange messages with your friends whilst watching your favourite TV show thanks to a new widget that has been developed by Myspace,Intel and Yahoo.

Networkworld has reported the development of the the widget although no date has yet been given for it’s release, with the widget, users won’t have to rely on a browser to access MySpace.com. They can receive instant updates of friends’ activities directly on their TV screen, without having to refresh a browser. The widget will also let them view their friends’ profiles. Users can access the widget using a remote and type messages for friends with an on-screen keyboard, a MySpace spokeswoman said.

The widgets are designed to work with Intel’s Intel Media Processor CE3100 system-on-a-chip platform for consumer electronics devices. Here’s the full story if you would like to read more about this: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/010809-myspace-comes-to-tv-with.html

My personal opinion on this is that it will go nowhere, with traditional mediums such as TV you are really stuck in one place and given the development of mobile platforms and the direction that the internet is moving in, in the future. I can’t help but think this is just a gimmick.

My guess is that most users of social media sites will more than likely continue to use their Iphones and other mobile tools to access these sites.  Anyway, I can never get the remote off my wife, so that’s me done!!!  

It seems though from reading the responses on the Networkworld blog that I may be in the minority on this. Only time will tell!!