Alchemy

It's About Authenticity

2010-02-26T11:25:00.000-08:00

Sport Illustrated writer Luke Winn just wrote one of my favorite articles of the Winter Olympics titled "Ain't not party like a gold medal party" about the celebration of the Canadian Olympic Women's Hockey Team. In light of the controversy created by what Winn called the "latest moronic piece of news," he writes an article about the "most authentically cool celebration [he's] seen at the games".

The IOC falls into a bucket of people that do not understand the forces behind the progressive maturation of our culture. Social technologies have made us all more transparent and honest in the way we communicate and act. We see more and more salutes to people in positions of power who lighten up and communicate openly and honestly rather than behind the veil of scripted, well rehearsed, politically correct rhetoric (as with Arnold's video tweet).

This isn't surprising to those of us that actively follow trends and research in today's communications. We try and help businesses understand research showing us:

75% of people don't believe that companies tell the truth in advertisements (Yankelovich)

Consumers trust friends above experts when it comes to product recommendations (65% trust friends, 27% trust experts, 8% trust celebrities). (Yankelovich)

90% of consumers online trust recommendations from people they know (EConsultancy);

These trends are telling people that there is low trust in traditional communications, the way we've scripted and shaped and delivered messaging. This is not just related to advertising, but to media and communications in general. People report their own news on blogs now and turn to each other for product and service recommendations.

Maggie Hendricks from Yahoo reported on Jon Montgomery's "needless apology", telling Jon and the rest of us that we don't always have to listen to our PR people. Luckily, Jon showed us all including the Olympic women's team that people want to see us be ourselves because we relate. Until I saw the girls celebrate, Jon's victory walk was my favorite moment of the games.

For those out there that remind us that this issue is about under age drinking and smoking bylaws, I'll submit that last week's story about Alexa Gonzalez showed us that 'zero tolerance means zero intelligence'. As Winn reminds us of how much we appreciate authenticity, perhaps the IOC can show us that they recognize the spirit of our athletes and the work they have put into their victory.

But as a more general theme about our changing communication, we feel that people want truth not spin. We want positive, not negative. We want to celebrate achievement rather then harp on disappointment. We want understanding, not judgement. And most of all, we want authenticity. Way to go girls - luv ya!

How can you build trust and why is it important

2010-02-24T13:34:00.000-08:00

The following is a good bit of content that Michael Charles wrote for our 'about' page on Mashedin.com. I'm publishing it here because I think it does a good job of explaining why trust is important. For more on this topic, see this post by Greg Ferenstein.

so, what exactly is this mashedin thing all about?

It's about creating a sense of trust among people who've never met.

In the offline world, when we're introduced to someone, we quickly discover mutual connections that allow us to make judgments about the trustworthiness of the new acquaintance. So you used to work at WidgetCorp? Do you know Jane Schlumpford?

We've created a way to replicate that experience online. Whether you're displaying the MashedIn widget on your website or blog, or just linking to your MashedIn profile on outgoing emails, now you can show strangers how they're connected to you through the social networks you already use. Maybe they're not strangers after all.

how will this help me build my online reputation?

MashedIn really becomes potent when you add the ability for visitors to leave recommendations that can be viewed by other visitors.

People no longer trust testimonials published by website owners rather than by fellow users. Why should we believe that "Bob from Arizona" is a real person? Wouldn't you rather be endorsed by someone whose authenticity can be confirmed by checking their Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn profile?

MashedIn makes it easy to gather recommendations from your existing customers and contacts - simply by sending them a link to your widget and asking for their kind words. Your MashedIn widget can be placed on multiple sites so recommendations can be gathered wherever you have a presence. All of your recommendations will be displayed everywhere your widget appears.

is this really the best way to build trust online?

We've got some evidence to back us up:

"90% of consumers online trust recommendations from people they know; 70% trust opinions of unknown users." (Econsultancy, July 2009)
"Recommendations from family and friends trump all other consumer touchpoints when it comes to influencing purchases, according to ZenithOptimedia." (AdAge, April 2008)
"Consumers trust friends above experts when it comes to product recommendations (65% trust friends, 27% trust experts, 8% trust celebrities)." (Yankelovich)
"67% of shoppers spend more online after recommendations from online community of friends."(Internet Retailer, September 2009)
"Customer reviews are the most effective social tactic for driving sales, followed by question-and-answer features and a Facebook fan page where companies post information." (Etailing survey of 117 companies, September 2009)
"Some 70% of Americans say they consult product reviews or consumer ratings before making a purchase, according to an October 2008 survey by Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, a research and consulting firm." (Business Week, October 2009)
"The Trust in Advertising survey of 26,000+ found that Consumer Recommendations are the most credible form of advertising." ("Social Media Marketing: The Right Strategy for Tough Economic Times", Awareness, 2008)
"56% of UK website owners say that user-generated content lifts conversion levels; 77% say it increases traffic; and 42% say it increases the average spend on site. (eConsultancy survey of 360 website owners across all sectors, November 2008)
"84% of marketers agree that building customer trust will become marketing's primary objective."(1to1 Media survey of the 1to1 Xchange panel, April 2008)

What are the odds we're connected?

2010-02-01T08:13:00.000-08:00

I've had a lot of people trying out MashedIn after our official release last Thursday. Most of them fill have a ton of common connections because I know them so the shared connections box fills up. But one assumption we are going on right now is that if a local small business, a business professional or a local contractor finds one or 2 common connections with a new visitor to their website or profile, it's a huge success. Is that a good assumption? How many connections is it necessary to show?

A New Way to See Common Connections

2010-01-21T14:18:00.000-08:00

Any of our current MashedIn beta users will notice that we have now included Linkedin as a widget option. This means that widget owners will be able to add Facebook, Twitter and now Linkedin to let visitors to see common connections. If you are already using a widget, the linkedin option will now be visible to your visitors. Give it a whirl and let us know of any bugs you see happening.

One Great Way 'Friending' More People Can Help Your Business

2009-12-22T12:33:00.000-08:00

Today more and more businesses are listening to the popular advice that they must use social media to market their business. Over 700,000 small and medium businesses have created fan pages. While following the trend to jump on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and join the blogging world, many business owners struggle to see concrete results that these activities bring.

Many small business owners are consumed with running their business operations and so time spent on other activities is precious. To actively build community online and engage social media, the appropriate time must be put in. As a small business owner, have you ever felt that it's a bother to reach out and connect to everyone you know on this social network and that social network? If you are a business owner who has yet to really dive into social networking because the returns are unclear, here's a reason to do so now.

It's common sales knowledge that if you have a mutual acquaintance or contact, that connection increases that chance you'll be able to generate a transaction. Traditionally, it's been hard to explore common interests or connections with traffic or leads that you source online. Well follow along: The average Facebook user has 130 connections according to Facebook statistics. Imagine that you're a go getter however and you go out there and hook up 200 people on your account (this isn't unrealistic at all). That creates a 26,000 possibles ways that you could share a connection with someone you don't know.

Now imagine that you also join LinkedIn. The average Linkedin user is estimated to have about 61 connections. Say you go out there and hook up with an above average 100 business professionals. Some experts find that there is about a 30% overlap in Linkedin and Facebook connections. Let's take 30% off both numbers so that you have 42.7 connections for the average user that do not overlap with Facebook; and we'll assume you connect with 70 people that do not overlap with your Facebook conections. You have 2989 possible chances of being connected to another Linkedin user.

Combine Facebook and Linkedin and you have 28,989 ways you could be connected to someone that's on linkedin and Facebook. I don't have Twitter stats handy so let's use the number we have for our purposes here but you can imagine how Twitter starts to add to this.

MashedIn.com has created a simple tool that you can mount on your website, blog or link to in email communications. It allows visitors to your website or people reading your email to see if they are connected to you in Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. On average, we see there could be 28,989 ways that someone could be connected to you. The chances that someone is connected to you increases as you add Facebook friends, Twitter followers and LinkedIn connections. What you have is like a warm introduction to someone who is otherwise anonymous or rather, they have a warm introduction to you.

The Web2.0 movement brought transparency to the web. People who used to just read content now contribute content. Consumers of media have become publishers of media and as more people publish their experiences - conversations, organizations, businesses are all more transparent. Social connections provide context. The more transparency, context and information people have, the more trust we can build with them. MashedIn is one small tool that can help you build a little piece of trust with people that do not yet know you.

MashedIn: The Super Nutshell Version

2009-12-08T12:22:00.000-08:00

Have you ever been to a party or business 'networking' function and been standing around not knowing how to connect with anyone. You sit and say to yourself "how much longer do I have to be here?". Then, someone start a short conversation with you. It's a little strained but you both are trying to make an effort. Then, all the sudden, that someone mentions the name of a person you know and you think "holy crap, you know so and so, and OMG I can talk about so and so..." and then you have a totally engaging conversation. You've connected because you share a common connection. Well that's what MashedIn does.

StepRep Update: Reputation Management One Account at a Time

2009-02-06T08:53:00.000-08:00

This morning I published a post called Strengthen Your Online Search Reputation on the StepRep blog. This post is a continuation of the previous 2 posts on linking. Your linking can greatly affect your search profile - the results that someone sees when they search for you or your company. Hopefully these 3 posts are helpful for people that are looking for a high level plan to start improving their online reputation.

Yesterday the VendAsta team attended the CSSS career fair at the University of Saskatchewan Computer Science Department. It was great to get out and talk to students that will be coming out of the program. We've already received applications for summer students and from graduating students. Hopefully we find some good matches.

By way of an update on our 2 initiatives:

Today, the HomeBook team wrapped up a sprint and started in on the planning of our last 30 day sprint before our public beta launch of HomeBook. We're super pumped to get it out to the world for a first look!

The StepRep team is winding down their StepRep improvement sprint. We're doing a few things in this milestone. We have some improvements and general styling to finish and we're also doing some architecture work for functionality that will be released in the next sprint (30 day milestone). We'll be wrapping this one up next week.

StepRep will officially be 1 month old on Sunday. Today, I'm gathering up a lot of feedback that we've generated from our first group of users and I'll post a bunch of them on the StepRep blog at the beginning of the week. I'll do this just to let everyone know that we are listening, we appreciate the feedback and we are acting on the feedback.

Lastly, I wanted to say a big thanks to Joel Burslem and Inman News for mentioning StepRep. Also wanted to thanks Missy Caulk, our favorite Ann Arbor Real Estate blogger (there's a little link love for you Missy!), for her post about us on ActiveRain. Of course, I was notified of these posts right away by StepRep! Whether a comment is good or bad, you have to be responsive. Luckily, we're seeing a lot of positive feedback...

Fusing the Age of Social Media with Marketing Principles

2009-02-03T08:17:00.000-08:00

I bookmarked a good article on how to evolve marketing by fusing web 2.0 with sound marketing principles. Besides the very obvious plug for SilverPop, the article is has some good suggestions. Some of the better ones I have some comments on:

1. Speak from a place of service - Rather than blatant self promotion. Sounds obvious, but too many people don't get it. If you are using your blog or twitter account to spam thousands of people while trying to build awareness, you are shooting yourself in the foot. Especially on twitter, the best way to build your followers is to publish frequent, valuable content. People find you through feeds and if your tweets have value, you'll get followed. Further, using twitter's content search, people will find you through relevant information you publish on topics they are interested in. You can't splatter your name or your brand all over social media without adding value.

2. Cross-link all of your profiles and social groups. Common sense and I discussed it in my last two blog posts on linking and building a search profile on our StepRep blog. Don't forget to list these profiles, blogs and don't forget about your email footers and other marketing materials.

3. While I noted the obvious plug for SilverPop, I don't think this is a bad product. A more important point here is to clarify what viral should mean. Viral marketing is not trying to produce a video that is soo crazy millions of people are going to share it. A viral product is one that naturally spreads when it is used. Rather, the use of the product spreads it. While SP makes it easier for email messages to spread, an overall focus should be on trying to create something that is spread through it's practical use.

4. Lastly, the point on exclusivity is a good one. If you have several profiles that you are actively trying to promote and build, you have to make the content on them somewhat unique. Sounds simple but it multiplies the workload.

(Oh, and I had to comment - I liked the title of the article ;-) Catchy)

Are Old School Linking Strategies Still Relevant?

2009-01-30T13:02:00.000-08:00

The short answer is yes. Typically, websites have used linking to build page rank and compete for search terms. Over the past number of years, those search terms (across the board) have become more and more competitive. Linking to build site traffic is harder and harder. But one area of linking that is very effective and relatively easy is the area of ORM or reputation management.

Not a lot of people take ORM seriously and thus competing in search for your name is easier, in general, than competing for broad search terms. Obviously ORM for search is harder, the more common your name is, but using links properly can catapult rankings for even very common names.

I wrote a basic background on linking over the our StepRep ORM blog this afternoon. Next week, I'll be supplying some concrete strategies for building a personal search profile.

Traditional Models and New Media

2009-01-21T18:29:00.000-08:00

I was reading Seth Godin's latest post called That's a Special Case and it got me thinking about traditional businesses and online models. He says that everything is online because there is a different experience, different expectations and different rules.

I don't think there is such a clear line in the sand. Traditional businesses are being affected by online models because user expectations are changing. The problem is that the 'online user' defines almost everyone. Search created a greater expectation and desire for instant gratification (instant results). I think that social media played a big part in the US election. I think you can say that social media is creating a larger desire to participate and be heard. Social media is creating a greater expectation around openness,transparency and truth.

The mobile world is creating a more connected individuals. People are now always connected to their online tools.

The game is changing now for all businesses because the mobile Internet and social media are changing they way people do things and what they expect. It's no longer a matter of companies 'needing' to get online or have a website because other businesses do. They need to recognize how technology is changing expectations and behavior.

Advertising and Promotion in 2009 and Beyond

2009-01-21T13:20:00.000-08:00

I tossed up a post on our StepRep blog about Belkin paying people to write positive reviews. I really hate the practice - it's just generally bad form, but it had me thinking how it's really different from other forms of advertising. How do you think advertising is going to change in the future. Love to hear some thoughts from others. Join the conversation.

Yahoo Real Estate Getting it Right... But Could Be Better

2009-01-02T08:44:00.000-08:00

A couple weeks ago, Yahoo! Real Estate launched and new and improved real estate section. I've spent a lot of my time in the past few years thinking about real estate search so I'm going to fire away some of my likes and dislikes.

1. First, it has a nice homey look and feel on the front landing page. This is the way a real estate site should look:

2. The slider bars for narrowing search criteria are really the best way I've seen for effectively narrrowing search criteria (Roost does a nice job using these too).

3. The Map Search on the other hand is in sufficient IMHO. My best experience with a map is when I can select an area either with cross hairs ( or draw a polygon !) and then use advanced search options like the sliders to refine the home price and size criteria for that area. To be perfectly honest, the vast majority of map implementations just make my life more frustrating. They are too clucky and slow.

4. When I search down into an area, such as Denver, when I click on the top menu to find foreclosures, or REALTORS®, I'm taken back to a landing page for that section, rather than foreclosures and REALTORS® in Denver. You have to maintain the user's context.

5. I love the image overlay telling you how many photos a listing has. The most important content for people searching real estate is photo and video content. So part b) to this point is that I don't think Yahoo! should be displaying listings without photos. They are useless to home hunters. Moreover, a listing with no photos certainly should NOT be a featured listing. It's the Prudential agent's fault here, but it makes Yahoo! look bad.

6. This could start a huge never ending debate, but if Yahoo wanted to fully support it's content, it's search engine should return results from Yahoo first. Why wouldn't they? I don't mean to get into the whole natural, organic, unfiltered, and egalitarian virtues of search results. Yahoo! search should return content on their portal first if available.

7. YRE should filter out duplicate listings better. This one in particular doesn't even come from different sources. They both link back to metrolist!

8. Spare me the click through! As a user, I can't figure out if YRE is part of a search engine or a portal. It integrates a lot of information in one place like a portal would but then sends me off to the broker portals for more info. In the complicated real estate business, this seems like a reasonable compromise to YRE and real estate brokers, but as a user, it frustrates the hell out of me.

So if the appropriate phone number and email address show up, why is it necessary to send me on a mad user experience nightmare to view listings and see all the info for each listing on hundreds of different sites? Furthermore, if the agents or brokers recieve the phone calls and emails and also get analytics to show their clients, it seems like it shouldn't matter where the view is ...
You see the problem it creates for the user in the image above. If you have any doubts whether you can create a comprehensive portal with all the listing information available, one only needs to look to Realtor.ca.

... So just a quick look from my perspective. Some things can be fixed easily here, others are symptomatic of larger issues.

Some Small Business Looking to Increase Ad Spending in 09

2008-12-22T08:48:00.000-08:00

Ad-ology has released results from a Small Business Marketing Outlook survey it conducted. Perhaps surprising to some, it found that in 2009, a quarter of small business owners plan to spend more on advertising while another 60% plan to spend about the same as they did this year.

When broken down by media type, over half of small business advertisers plan to spend the same or more on the following:

Online advertising (69%)
Yellow Pages (54%)
Newspapers (51%)
Direct mail (51%)

Other key findings include:

• “Knows my company/line of business” is the top attribute small business owners look for in a media advertising sales rep. “Delivers what they promise” is the second most desirable attribute.
• 52% of small business owners surveyed agree with the statement “you can gain market share by marketing while your competitors are cutting back.”
• 74% believe their company “must be one of the first 2-3 that come to a customer’s mind” when they need what the small business owner is selling.
• More than half of respondents plan to spend the same or more time and money on their Web sites and email marketing in 2009.
• The majority of small businesses are not using other emerging media: 77% do not use online video, 83% do not podcast, and 82% do not use mobile advertising.

While many small businesses appear to be budgeting more for online advertising in, some Adsense users are reporting decreases in revenue in late 08. I'm curious to if the trend in 2009 will be to seek more innovative online promotion methods.

Why people don't trust your blog

2008-12-11T06:46:00.000-08:00

I'm always returning to a state of trying to figure out how to reinvent my blog. Why's that? Well I think the biggest problem is that I'm a lazy blogger. After a lull in the action, I let weeks, even months go by with no posts and I start thinking how I can get into the groove of blogging more.

Here are some of my thoughts from this morning: I just read a really good article on WebProNews titled People Don't Trust Your Blog. First off, it has a nice graph on the types of information sources and the level that people trust them. Emails from friends are at the top while corporate blogs are at the bottom. It's wicked information for anyone in marketing. Richard MacManus dissects the report a bit, but here is where it takes my thinking:

- This is no wonder when I see an ads telling me that Ford is now the same quality as Honda and Toyota. You can't keep promoting on a blog or you are just trying to sell me. Consider a conversation with a friend who just got into the insurance industry and he/she keeps hounding you to sit down and look at insurance packages... that's an annoying friend.

- Have you ever had a know it all friend. A friend that just spews out useless facts about stuff you don't care about? Come on, we all have. They are annoying too. I think a good blog has to have useful information that I can rely on. From the real estate space, Norm write a great blog. I don't read it regularly because I'm not always thinking about real estate. But whenever I want information or stats, I always start with Norm. It helps me that the blog is always focused and on topic

- Ever had a friend that isn't genuine? You grow tired of them don't you? A blogger needs to care. Respond to comments and be real. When people voice a concern, listen to them. Nothing worse than someone that doesn't really care.

- Ever had a good friend that doesn't keep in touch. They don't work hard enough or at all on your friendship. This goes hand in hand with the point above. A good blogger needs to post regularly and cross post. They need to stay in touch one way or another. (I need to embrace the micro post).

Ok, I need counseling now. But that was cathartic. I go through this like people trying to quit smoking or lose a few pounds. I'm like a yo-yo.

I have to say how surprised I was to see corporate blogs at the bottom of the pile. The whole idea that made corporate blogging more popular was for companies to be more transparent and engage the customers in a genuine fashion. So the thought today - can you be more like a friend and less like a company with your business blog?

More on the Death of Search Ranking

2008-11-23T17:24:00.000-08:00

There was a lot of talk at the recent Pubcon about changes in search. Bruce Clay did an interview describing why ranking is dead. While it's arguable whether or not you can say ranking is dead, search engine changes have changed the search marketing game. Recent changes in personalization will have a dramatic affect.

You can see some of the search personalization changes in Google's search results now allowing users to delete results they see and promote ones they like. An example below:

I expect the tool will affect the results that user flags themselves, but Google's entire community of searchers will also have an impact on the search results based on overall blocking and promoting.

How does this affect you? As a search marketer your web presence(s) have to add value. The content needs to be clear and valuable. Moreover, your overall reputation matters more and more. This tool directly affects your search reputation but reputation is many things. It's how people rank your site, it's how they vote on comments you make in communities, it's what you say about yourself and what others say about you. Not only do you need to manage your online reputation now, but you have to pro-actively build it and promote it.

Trulia Critics - Right or Wrong?

2008-05-05T15:44:00.000-07:00

Today Glen Roberts at Inman News reported on a debate that was stirred up by Galen Ward of Estately (there's some link juice Galen...). Galen asked why does Trulia show up in search results above the original source. His answer:

"In this case, two reasons: the original source doesn’t even display the address on the page (dude - MLS rules are stupid, but they usually let you display your own property’s address at least - you gotta fix that!). But the much more common reason is that Trulia blocks Google from following their links."

So I agree the first reason is brutal. The real estate industry needs to help themselves. Some brokers and agent use solutions such as the Point2 where property listing have their own search engine friendly URL that can be indexed (such as this example from Jay Thompson's site).

But the second reason I neither find offensive nor accurate. As Galen explains, Trulia uses 302 redirects that prevents the flow of link juice to the source site. It helps their pages maintain authority. I don't find it offensive because these sort of things are common with any general online advertising arrangement. If you complete a link exchange with another site, you purchase a follow or nofollow link. Nofollows are designed to send traffic, not search authority. Realtor.com has been doing this sort of thing forever, they rank way higher than Trulia, so why the stink now? (see the link to http://www.npreco.com/ from this listing on Realtor.com) So secondly, I don't find the evaluation completely accurate because I don't think it's the main reason Trulia ranks higher. I have a couple of points here:

The NoFollow Reason

Rudy seems to admit SEO is reason for the nofollows. It's debatable in my mind whether or not it would be detrimental for Trulia to link out in their search results. Linking out to relevant sites can help a website's trust. Rudy also states, "Let’s be honest, most broker or agent websites would not rank better than they do currently if we removed the nofollow in the outbound links (99.9% of listings pages have no page rank or page rank 1)". That's true for the most part, but links from main search result pages like Denver (PR 4), would see value - I just couldn't let that one go. But while Galen suggests the redirects are an designed to block PR from flowing to other sites, the specific intent of the method. Rather than a practice to prevent other sites from receiving value, it's design is to help large sites flow page rank to deeper levels in their site hierarchy. By controlling this flow of link juice, Trulia's primary motivation I suggest is to push page rank deeper through their site.

Real Reason's for Truila's Search Success

More importantly, these nofollows (or 302 redirects) are not the main reason for Trulia's search dominance. There's a few big ones in my opinion:

1. First they've done some great marketing and promotion now that's resulted in a PR 7. That's and achievement and not many local sites can top that. Even RE/MAX.com is only a PR 6. This has nothing to do with redirects or nofollows, and everything to do with a lot of buzz and exposure.

2. Secondly, they have great site architecture for SEO. The page titles, content and heading tags all have the right keyword terms. It's consistent whether you are looking for Colorado, Denver or Bear Valley Denver real estate. VERY few real estate practitioners do a good job of this.

3. While there are other reasons, the third and last one I'll mention is that they have a widget strategy - a much more brilliant and interesting thing to talk about than the 302 redirects. Trulia has built several useful widgets that relevant real estate sites like Jay's can use. You'll see at the bottom of the widget there are 2 built in links. One link goes to the Trulia home page, helping out that PR 7. The second link is a deep link into Trulia. Since Jay's site is a Denver real estate site, the Trulia link goes to their Denver page.

So now Trulia has thousands of relevant links form real estate websites linking to their home page and deep linking into their site. Note that there isn't a nofollow on those widget links (of course)! Good for Trulia! It's a brilliant strategy. They have to build tools that add a lot of value (or perceived value) to execute on such a strategy. Also note that they've done some solid business development work and have authoritative sites like RIS Media using their widget's and linking back to Trulia.

If I was a real estate agent or broker, I probably wouldn't use the widget's and give Trulia that link. And if you consider their nofollow policy on their listings and result pages, it's not really a fair link exchange if you're using a widget :-) But my bottom line is - it's all negotiable! If brokers care about SEO for their own site, they can negotiate a removal of the nofollow. If it's not negotiable, a broker doesn't have to send their listings.

Real Estate SEO - Franchises Missing the Boat

2008-04-16T08:40:00.000-07:00

Well isn’t this blog neglected! To tell you the truth, over the past couple of months, I’ve been writing business plans, grant proposals, research documents, project and technical requirements and I have to say that I haven’t had a lot of gas in tank to write for this blog. I think I have to learn the art of micro posting!

So what has awakened me from my slumber? I was reading an RIS article by Glenn Houck this morning on SEO. After leading the Homegain charge for many years, Glenn certain knows a lot about SEO but he keeps things pretty simply in this article. SEO in real estate really gets me going because so many companies are completely missing the boat. This short article reminded me of a post Joel Burslem made listing his 10 favorite real estate search sites. The new Century 21 Canada site was one of them. I have to admit that I like the look and I like the map search implementation but this site missed the SEO boat totally. Let’s back up a bit because really, why does this matter...

Search engines (google) are like today’s phone books. In the old days, you picked up a phone book, flipped to the yellow pages, found the appropriate category (real estate) and searched through the listed ads. The differences are the following. In a search engine there are too many pages to produce a book. Flipping virtual pages just wouldn’t be practical either so you search by topic rather than flipping to a yellow page topic. So the first important point to make here is that websites need to ‘tell’ a search engine what their topic is. What Century21.ca has done is the equivalent to telling the yellow pages to make a topic called “Century 21” rather than ‘real estate’. In fact, it’s like they’re also trying to say, “we transcend real estate so don’t put us in that category at all.” (it’s the only logical conclusion I can make)

Ok, so on to the second point. With a search engine, it’s like having one big phone book rather than many small local phone books. So for large businesses that have many offerings or many local business offices, they can have an ad or listing for each relevant one. I’ll clarify using Century21.ca again. Not only should they be listed under the term ‘real estate’, but they should have relevant listings for terms like ‘Ontario real estate’ and ‘Toronto real estate’ and ‘Scarborough real estate’. It’s like having many yellow page ads. So building on point 1 – not only do you have to identify the category you should be listed in, but you need to identify other sub categories and make all of your yellow page ads (in this case, web pages) discoverable so they make it into the phone book.

The 3rd point in our comparison is that content in search engines is sorted differently than phone books. Because searching is fundamentally different than flipping through pages AND there is simply too much content out there (or yellow page ads in our metaphor), you can’t sort stuff in a search engine in alphabetical order. So the way a search engine sorts content is by relevance and popularity. If people talk about your business offline, you get word of mouth advertising. If they talk about it online, they link to it. A link is considered a popularity vote as Glenn notes.

A copyright notice at the bottom of Century 21 Canada shows WheretoLive.com Inc. so I assume they were contracted to build the site. If it was 1999 or 2001 I can understand a large corporation missing the SEO opportunity, but in 2008, this stuff should just be common knowledge and standard practice. There’s certainly enough information about SEO published online! Search is the way people find information today and unless a website is generating traffic, it’s a billboard in the middle of nowhere. SEO is not something that some geeky kid jumps in and performs on website. SEO is a philosophy for technical design architecture. Beyond that, SEO principles should permeate a company’s marketing so offline and online efforts all help more people find those yellow page ads.

Search engine optimization may be old news to some people and some may think that it’s a web 1.0 way of thinking. But, it still sits at the core of how we define ourselves in the online world. Because content is organized by the popularity of the documents, it is the most fundamental way we manage our reputation online. When I search for real estate in Canada, not only will I never find the content on Century21.ca, if I was actually looking for their site to show up, I would conclude that they don’t have a high enough reputation (and thus quality of content) for me to bother.

Tag, I got meme'd

2008-02-13T14:54:00.000-08:00

I don't know what this is really all about, but Brendan meme'd me a while ago. I was reminded about this while thinking about identity today.

Here is how they work according to Jay Thompson “ someone with too much time on their hands thinks up some question (typically personal) and starts a post, “tagging” others to do the same, and it flies across the Internet. Before you know it, you’ve found out more about some people than you probably want to know…” Then Jay tagged me!

Here are the rules for this one:
(1) list 7 things about yourself, (2) tag 7 people to do the meme on themselves including a link to their site.

1. I'm 35 years old and I'm 6 years YOUNGER than Brendan King, not OLDER. I'm married to Violet with a brand new son Jackson.

2. I was born in Chilliwack, B.c. and grew up in in Moose Jaw, SK.

3. I went to the U of S where I finished my Economics Degree. I was successful because I ONLY lived in Rez for 1 year! When I graduated the only thing I knew for certain about my career path is that I was NEVER going to be an economist!

4. One of my coolest trips was a backpacking adventure in 1997 to Bonavista NF for the 500th anniversary of the founding of Canada by John Cabot. The town of 6000 had 30,000 people there that week. The Queen arrived and a group sailed an exact replica of the Matthew from England to arrive exactly on June 24. The trip ended up in Ottawa for Canada Day. I met my wife to be on that trip!

5. Best trip Violet and I have been on was a 2 week voyage to Costa Rica in 2004.

6. I play almost any sport, but my favorite is golf. My first job was at a golf course where I spent my entire summer's earnings on a new set of clubs!

7. I used to have a whack of hair!

MasterMinds and Snow Angels

2008-02-08T13:12:00.000-08:00

Well, we've been busy lately with our heads down grinding out all things "startup''. Brendan wrote about how nice it is to have a great team. I share his feelings. One of the most influential books I've read is Napolean Hill's Think and Grow Rich. Hill describe what he called the Mastermind principle as the “coordination of knowledge and effort in a spirit of harmony, between two or more people, for the attainment of a definite purpose.” There are 2 characteristics of the Mastermind. One is a economic advantage that arises from sharing and cooperation with others utilizing the Philosophy of Achievement. Hill also believed that the human mind is a form of energy, part of it spiritual in nature. He states that when the minds of two people are coordinated in a spirit of harmony, the spiritual units of energy of each mind form an affinity, which constitutes the "psychic" phase of the Master Mind. Hill states: "No two minds ever come together without, thereby, creating a third, invisible, intangible force which may be likened to a third mind." This force, Hill reasoned, was tremendously valuable and ultimately the source of true wealth.

To me, Hill means that while there are economic advantages of combining 2 or more talents, true success is in the journey taken with others as you work together in harmony.

One of my favorite expressions from Hill is: "Whatever the mind of man [woman] can conceive and believe, it can achieve." Back in Hill''s day, no one used gender inclusive language so we excuse him for that. A great team is required to assemble that mastermind to conceptualize, believe and create that plan for achievement.

You know, it's amazing what you can do - I mean really do...

Settling In at the Concourse

2008-01-22T12:37:00.000-08:00

So we have a few days under our belt at VendAsta! We've been settling into our new office space in the Innovation Place research park. Our new surroundings have brought a bright warm spot to the middle of a cold dark Saskatoon winter. Our office is just to the right of the photo below.

There's a ton of logistics behind getting a business going from the ground up but I have to say it's such exciting work. I was just as excited sitting down and putting my chair together as I was getting on to the first day of white board work. We'll have some website updates coming down the pipe shortly. As we prepare to get stuff live for the world to see, we'll try to let people see what's going on inside our walls.

Jeff

My Departure from Point2 and all Things New

2008-01-17T14:26:00.000-08:00

As most people know now, I left Point2 at the beginning of December along with a number of my colleagues. Together we are embarking on a new venture which has me so excited I can’t sleep. In fact, I have no hope of sleeping with the new addition of my son Jackson! Jack was born on December 8 and he’s our first child. It’s also the reason why I’ve been quiet on the recent news of my departure from Point2 – too darn tired to blog!

To start, I’d like to clarify some parts of the story around my departure which first broke on Inman News on Dec 11. I’ve fielded a few questions on how I left lately because of a Blanche Evans story where she commented:

“the five investors at Point2 cleaned house of about 10 percent of its workforce, including upper management …”

That comment is inaccurate on a couple of levels and so first I would like to clarify that I did indeed resign as Brendan King noted, and as Point2 noted to Inman news and in their own official release.

A Look Back

I’m proud of a lot of things that were accomplished at Point2. I filled a lot of roles since my start in 2002. When I arrived, there were just over 30 people working at Point2, most of them solely focused on heavy equipment software. I was the first person officially hired on to the real estate project by Brendan King.

Prior to my addition to the team, Point2’s real estate endeavors began when John Fothergill, manager of web development at the time, received permission to ‘fiddle’ with Point2’s heavy equipment inventory management system. He was building a solution for Mark Wouters, a local real estate broker. After some adjustments were made and the opportunity began to take shape, Brendan received permission to work full time on a real estate launch. Jason Collins and Eron Wright were working on the initial product while Brendan conducted research. When I started, several dozen local REALTORS were testing a very early platform.

Just prior to Point2, I was working at a real estate management and development company. I also had my own website that sold document templates that I launched in 1998. I was introduced to Point2 by Jason Collins and although I didn’t apply for a specific well defined position, my background in real estate and online marketing seemed a good fit. I started out as manager of market research helping Brendan identify and understand the opportunities in front of us. I helped organize our initial marketing strategies and product launch. There was an exciting atmosphere at Point2, especially for those of us working from a blank slate in real estate.

Shaping a Product

Transforming a heavy equipment product to a real estate product made a lot of sense for a number of reasons. First, the industries were similar in that they were both fragmented and the Internet was proving itself to be a great tool to connect buyers and sellers. In both cases the commodities are large complex capital assets and to leverage the Internet as a power marketing medium, owners and sales representatives need to publish rich content. Point2’s software was very good at that. Lastly, both industries involved complex transactions so it’s likely that there will be a sales professional involved to facilitate the transaction and Point2’s inventory management software was geared toward the sales professionals.

While the core software was the backend inventory management component, our initial research was telling us that it would be impossible to get REALTORS® to enter listing data rather than import data from the MLS. The problem was that MLS data was not rich enough. We knew from our heavy equipment experience we had to provide many valuable reasons to do the data entry. One very compelling reason was to publish it to their public facing website, instantly, and display it in a manner that was superior to typical MLS data display. The development of personal REALTOR® websites not only represented a method to encourage the data entry, but actually represented a large opportunity in its own right. In 2002, few REALTORS® had personal, easy to use, self maintainable websites. Building out that product quickly became our core focus.

One of my first projects alongside industry research was to build a public facing website for our product. Here are the first 2 websites that I wrote:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http:/agent.point2.com
http://web.archive.org/web/20021127001905/http:/agent.point2.com/
(don’t be too critical, it was 2002!)

I wrote the content for some of the first sites we developed with the design talent of Sarah Milne making everything work, flow and look pretty. Sarah moved away to the warmer Arizona climate in in 2004 (I think…?) and I have to say I missed her. She’s such a talented web developer and designer. At the same time, we developed a smart tutorial system that triggered messages based on the user’s progress.

Some Milestones

The “Free Idea” - By late November 2002 we had a self-registration built and officially launched Point2 Agent in January of 2003. I think our first bold move was to release our software for free. Back in 2002 and 2003, websites were things that you paid for and most often, you paid a significant price for a good one. Here we wanted to take software with millions of dollars invested into its development and provide it for free while continually investing in its improvement. It was wildly successful and in fact our biggest challenge was trying to convince our target audience that there wasn’t a catch.

We didn’t even have a pay product for the first year. Marketing Point2 Agent was very fun back in those days. I remember going to our first trade show conference for Century 21 in Toronto with Brendan in January of 2003. Our booth simply said “Free Websites”. Out of the 20 or so booths there, ours was flooded. In fact, a local website provide that was across from us packed his booth up half way through and just went home – especially when he saw all of the things our FREE websites could do!

The websites were so success that our core marketing focus revolved around them. Our core benefit became, “The easiest way to create and completely control an astonishingly professional website.” That’s what differentiated us from everyone else.

Handshake and Shared Listings - In the fall of 2003 we released what we called listing sharing where our members could login and see all the listings from all the other local users. Additionally, public facing home search notification forms would send listing results to leads from all local listings entered into Point2, not just that agent’s own inventory. By early 2004 we introduced the extension of listing sharing – Agent Handshake™. It gave our members control to share listings with whom they wanted and allowed them to publicly display listings. I think the idea was a little ahead of its time. The DOJ threat, combined with an industry opening data up and brokers needing better control, we saw Handshake™ starting to gain appeal throughout the past couple of years.

Neighborhoods - In 2005, we saw in that Handshake could truly become a national IDX solution. One obstacle was our reliance on using existing MLS selling areas. These created a couple of challenges. First, we saw that many IDX providers spent so many resources maintaining MLS selling area mapping, that it detracted resources from core product development. National IDX vendors have and still have a burden to maintain these areas for the over 900 existing MLSs in the United States. Secondly, there were so many areas that have overlapping MLSs that compete with one another. One only needed to look at the listing search on Realtor.com to see the mess that it made in many areas. Lastly, many MLS selling areas did not map onto the colloquial neighborhood names that people were familiar with. This meant that both the consumer search experience and SEO could be improved.

We began working on solutions to this problem. It was soon obvious that there was no existing database of all the colloquial neighborhood names. Even if there were, neighborhoods are constantly evolving, amalgamating and in some areas, the concept of neighborhood doesn’t really even apply.

The solution is to build a community based platform where local people can define areas that make sense. In our case, we leveraged our community of 1000’s of local real estate professionals to help get it right.

Even now, this platform at Point2 needs to improve. Looking back, I wish we had done things differently. The biggest regret is that we confused the important aspect of community involvement to build an accurate nomenclature, with our sale of advertising sponsorships on Point2 Homes. With that said, I was proud of the initial work that was done on this front and I’m glad we pushed our development in that direction. I still believe community involvement is the way to manage local problems on a national scale platform.

Data Syndication - In January of 2006 I officially began working as the platform product manager for our listings engine. The focus at the time was to build out a data syndication platform that would allow our users to automatically send their listings to online search sites with complete control and choice. This represented an opportunity for our members to be able to automatically generate free traffic and exposure online. For Point2, it represented the opportunity to create an even more compelling reason for our members to enter their listings.

The concept is simple enough but building a reliable platform is far from simple. Some of the search sites that I’ll call data end points accept different sets of listings types including rentals, residential sales, condos, and commercial listings. This means that one fixed list of data end points will not suffice for all listings. Some data end points show complete listing details while others simply show a search result and then click through to the listing source. This means that different analytics are collected across the spectrum of data end points. Additionally, not all of these end points provide coverage in all geographic areas. Lastly, data feed communication between the data provider and the end points will sometimes fail for various reasons. That means that publishing reports are necessary to understand if listings are being properly published. If there are errors, an error report is necessary so that the user can try and correct the feed.

Together, this all means that the solution requires a sophisticated user interface, requires complete analytics and must provide publishing reports to verify the successful data transfer and publishing.

I was proud that we developed the most sophisticated feed system in the industry. I believe it remains the best one available to real estate professionals. An enormous amount of development work has been put into it with Kevin Baribeau and Hemant Naidu building the core guts of the system and Todd Sturgeon tying it into the backend software UI.

Predictive Marketing - Point2 Agent was so far ahead of its time in 2003 with the ability to capture and track leads. It evolved into the Predictive Marketing solution by 2007 with Brendan and John championing the innovation in that area. It was such a critical part of the overall solution because it strengthened the advertising platform by maximizing the conversion of leads generated.

There is a lot of further innovation that can happen with this platform and I expect that future development efforts will be lead by James Townley and Jesse Redl. These 2 guys worked closely with John Fothergill at Point2 and proved their skills as brilliant business analysts.

NAR Expo 2006 “NLS” Turning Point - When we returned from a successful showing at the NAR Expo in New Orleans, Greg Miller and I were discussing the challenge we had getting our message out to a huge industry with so many service providers. Some of the frustrations surfaced after working the trade show floor which was a sea of 600 booths. Standing out was a challenge. That is, standing out as an idea was a challenge. We had no problem wowing people when they saw Point2 Agent and Point2 Broker, but getting their attention and time to explain the product was more than a challenge. The product was incredible but we needed to have a purple cow.

In an off-site strategy meeting in the week following New Orleans, we decided to amalgamate all of our products and make a bold statement. Our core group rallied around the idea a Point2 Agent, Point2 Broker, Point2 Builder and Point2 Prop Man all became the Point2 NLS or National Listing Service.

Since 2003, we had been working toward a platform that could replace some of the roles MLSs play in data policing; a national platform without overlapping boundaries and where the real estate professional had complete control over the advertising of their listings. Of course, it was an advertising platform that provided analytics over the aggregate marketing effort of the REALTOR® including the cooperative advertising effort of members within a multiple listing service.

The Point2NLS change has created strong and sustained momentum .

VendAsta!

My new company name is VendAsta! The origin of the name comes from 2 Italian words for marketing and auction. Tune in to our site for updates on our plans!

Brendan King, President – Former COO, Point2 Realty Solutions
Ches Hagen, CEO – Former COO Point2 Heavy Equipment
Jason Collins, CTO – Former CTO, Point2
John Fothergill, EVP Product Development – Former Director Product Development, Point2,
Jonathan Levesque, EVP Partner Relations – Former Director of IT, Point2
Allan Wolinski, EVP Usability Engineering – Former Director of Client Support, Point2
Jeff Tomlin [Me!], EVP Business Development – Former VP Strategy and Business Development, Point2

More to follow…

The Power of the Long Tail

2007-10-09T12:58:00.000-07:00

This Post is mainly to respond to some questions Point2 users have about long tail search in the real estate vertical, and about a particular stat we've quoted: "60% of local homes searches have a neighborhood component to them." The comment came from a Google official in a slide show presentation on Search and the Real Estate Vertical.

The context is that of all the search conducted for real estate, homes for sale, or property (i.e. the real estate vertical), 60% of the search terms contained a neighborhood component. This is also called the longtail of search, which constitues more narrowly defined search terms. While "San Francisco real estate" represents a broad search, an example of a longtail search with a neighborhood component would be: "Nob Hill San Francisco real estate". I don't have the specific Powerpoint or research that were presented,nor do I want to misrepresent what they discussed. But I can demonstrate what this means, leveraging research we conducted at Point2.

If you are not Google and you want to measure the amount of search volume, you need to have a site that generates a lot of long tail traffic. Plus, you need to rank at the top for the broad terms, because they drive the most traffic. This way you are likely to have a good representation of the relative size of long tail traffic vs. broad search traffic.

We used Point2 Homes and chose the city of Ottawa Canada because Point2 Homes ranks well for top search terms used by consumers, like "Ottawa real estate" and "Ottawa homes for sale." Of course Point2 Homes represents a good platform for this test because it is optimized to generate a large set of long search traffic.

Over a 2 day period, Point2 Homes generated 547 visits to Ottawa and it's neighborhood level pages. Of those 547 searches, 259 or 47% contained an Ottawa neighborhood name, proving that consumers use neighborhood terms when searching for real estate in this area.

The ugly screen shot above shows you a piece of the working spreadsheet. Where the first column lists the keyword term, the second column is simply identifying ones with a neighborhood name. The 3rd column shows the search volume for the keyword term.

We have tested several other Canadian cities and the results are very similar with longtail traffic, generating between 45% and 50% of the visits.

You can see from that screen shot that the first neighborhood searches that we identified include: "homes for rockliffe ottawa," "house for sale ottawa west," "houses for sale glebe ottawa," "condos in the riveria + ottawa" and, "country club village ottawa."

Real estate is very local and while not all areas are the same, the patterns we see across the US are very similar. For this research, we did not use US cities because we do not yet have a good set of cities on Point2 Homes that rank at the top for broad terms.

It's clear that there is a lot of traffic out there in the long tail and thus it's clear that we need to take advantage of that traffic and describe content accurately to match what search engine users type into their search bars.

Yahoo Real Estate Confusion

2007-10-03T07:36:00.000-07:00

Yahoo is a common source of confusion for all Realtors. They have 2 sections for real estate content. First, they have a nationwide agreement with Prudential to display their IDX feeds. All listing inquiries in Yahoo Real Estate go to Prudential affiliates. Listings from Point2 and other systems have fed into Yahoo's Classified system where your listing will link back to you and have your contact information. It causes a lot of support for us because a listing shows up twice - once in the Prudential IDX feed and once in the Yahoo Classified system.

You can see this if you navigate to the main real estate page: http://realestate.yahoo.com/, there are 5 options of which 2 of them are "Homes for Sale (MLS)" and "Real Estate Classifieds". The MLS search will display the Prudential IDX feed and the Real Estate Classified listings are from the Classified system.

Now, a while ago, I believe when the home page changed, the Yahoo Classified listings were changed from:

classifieds.yahoo.com.... to realestate.yahoo.com...

That change added to some confusion but it's important to note that the data in the 2 systems is completely separate.

The good news however is that this confusion is going to change. You may have seen an agreement that Realogy inked with Yahoo to feed listings to the Yahoo Classified system. That annoucement marks a huge change in the Yahoo strategy. With a critical mass of listings you can expect the Prudential IDX feed to be a thing of the past and Yahoo to move to a pure classified feed strategy.

A Real Estate 2.0 Vision

2007-07-25T08:55:00.000-07:00

Brad Inman asked for thoughts on the real estate 2.0 vistion. I wrote some of my response on Sunday but could bring myself to finish. It's simply not an easy thing to speal out. Anyway, here are my initial thoughts.

Change that will help define a vision will center around online listings, the way organized real estate cooperates and how that affects business models and compensation. With web 2.0 and the evolution of online advertising, the consumer is more empowered. Consumers have more access to information and the ability to generate exposure themselves. A savvier consumer with the ability to advertise will increasingly bring a REALTORS value into question.

Apart from all of the professional services a real estate professional brings to the table for marketing and transaction management, the ability to maximize market exposure through a network of cooperating real estate professionals is the single biggest value proposition. To maintain that value proposition, the real estate industry needs to evolve to ensure cooperative real estate maintains its edge. The changes that need to occur will help map out a vision for real estate.

Thus far, web 2.0 represents a couple of things to me. Software platforms have become more interoperable and passive viewers have become contributors transforming content from static to dynamic and conversational. These technologies and their paradigms have created a foundation for change that can help a real estate 2.0 come to fruition. I agree with Brad Inman that a real vision for the real estate in 2.0 style has yet to be articulated. Where we have the foundation, we can begin to make sense of more things and its the new knowledge that we gain that will shape a new vision.

There are a few things I see in the real estate 2.0 vision:

Identity Will Evolve

Identity is going to play a big role. There are more and more software solutions that enter the real estate space and that creates account management issues. Currently, there is an enormous amount of duplication of effort. Real estate professionals have to have membership in multiple MLSs and enter data into multiple MLS systems to cover all of their selling areas. MLS consolidation only solves part of the problems. Identity needs to evolve. This is a brilliant presentation that explains the problem and possible solutions that arise from interoperable software. Also consider how convergent social networking plays a role here.

So what exactly comes out of identity? Accounts become recognized cross platform to so that user updates are updated in many places at one time. Trust evolves so that legal responsibilities that brokers carry are more easily managed. Misrepresentation becomes more difficult. When trust is better established, brokers can provide more control to agents especially when it comes to online advertising. This can and probably will affect brokerage models.

Data Control will Evolve

Data control will evolve in real estate thanks to web 2.0 and will have wide ranging impacts. In a recent article in Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper, it was suggested that Facebook’s future would hinge on how it handles privacy. Chris Kelly, Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer commented “Privacy, as anonymity, is declining, but privacy, as control, is on the rise.” Where control of privacy is key to Facebook and other social networks, control of data is key in real estate.

The current way listing data is managed and controlled throughout the industry is problematic in many ways.

The DOJ Threat - The current way that listing data is managed and distributed online by MLS organizations creates and anti-competitive environment according to the US Department of Justice. This is the premise of the lawsuit the DOJ has brought against the NAR. The way the industry needs to eliminate this threat is to put the online control of listing data in the hands of the brokers and their agents, rather than have that data managed and policies created by MLS organizations.

The Discount Dilemma - MLS were originally formed to facilitate cooperation and compensation. While the MLSs control data through existing broker reciprocity, brokers are either forced to cooperate with any members or are unable to cooperatively advertise with anyone. This means that many full service brokers are forced to provide their listings (which many regard as marketing assets) with limited service brokerages that could be undermining their business model.

There are many different business models in the real estate industry and the only way to accommodate all of them and maintain cooperation in organized real estate is to provide control and choice.

Advertising ROI – Real estate professionals will need more control over their listing data to maximize their ROI from online advertising. Too often MLS data is the data used to distribute online listings. As marketing assets, they not only serve the seller but they provide exposure for the real estate agent or broker.

It is clear that better data generated better response. When listings are distributed to other websites, the agent or broker must have control to provide whatever data that needs to be published to maximize the response.

Analytics – The way that a real estate professional obtains the maximum price for seller is by exposing the home to the largest audience possible. Real estate professionals deal with more savvy consumers today that question the value propositions justifying commissions. Any consumer can advertise their own home on classified sites like Craigslist, but the one thing they can not do is advertising on hundreds or thousands of local real estate websites. Today, few real estate professionals can track all of the exposure that they generate on consumer search sites and cooperatively on other real estate agent and brokerage sites.

Through open platforms and interoperability, real estate agents and brokers will be able to track online exposure generated through advertising and organized real estate cooperation.

IDX represents cooperative advertising and that needs to happen on a peer to peer basis to address the problems above. The DOJ threat is best addressed by allowing brokers to make individual business decisions on who can advertise their listings. Similarly, the discount dilemma is addressed by providing the peer to peer choice. ROI is maximized when brokers and their agents have control of all of the data that is used in online advertising, whether that is on consumer search sites or on cooperating agency sites. Lastly and ultimately, when real estate professionals have control of their listings, and advertising platforms are more interoperable, we can see how exposure is can better be tracked across many different domains and platforms.

Geo Location Information Will Evolve

Interoperable systems and communities will allow real estate professionals and consumers better define local geographic areas for local home buyers and sellers and relocating home owners. Neighborhoods and communities are constantly developing and amalgamating. Only a larger user base and an open technology framework can help manage and market real estate described in local areas that all professionals and consumers relate to. Further, it’s the only way that we can provide relevant complimentary information to better understand listings and the areas they are in.

Point2 NLS - DOJ v. NAR: A Third Way

2007-06-19T11:12:00.000-07:00

The DOJ crusade against NAR and its members has far-reaching implications. Below is the executive summary from a Point2 NLS White Paper called DOJ v. NAR: A Third Way. It explores the issues and potential outcomes of the case. Correspondingly, it explains how Point2 NLS can be utilized by the MLS and real estate franchise to mitigate the impact and derive a net benefit regardless of the outcome.

Point2’s patent pending Handshake™ technology provides real estate professionals with opt in / opt out ability to market listings based on personal business decisions, thus transcending the DOJ anti-competition allegations against NAR and its members. As the use of the technology becomes more widespread by the real estate industry, the issue may become moot for such users.

Executive Summary - DOJ v NAR: A Third Way

Limited service brokers, 60 Minutes, the financial press, the US Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”) have joined together to take aim at the REALTOR® commission. Specifically, the DOJ has filed suit against the National Association of REALTOR®s (“NAR”) alleging policies they have established are potentially anti-competitive. If the relief requested is granted, listings entered into the MLS may no longer be a marketing asset owned by the listing broker, but rather a public asset accessible by anyone who wants to use it as a marketing tool.

DOJ success may have a number of implications for the industry including the following:
a) The withdrawal of brokers from MLS;
b) Disintermediation of consumers by users of the public asset listings; and/or
c) A reduced incentive for brokers to produce and enter rich listing data into the MLS.

This white paper aims to simplify and help readers to more quickly understand the single fundamental legal issue behind the DOJ case against NAR, which seems to get lost in the myriad of documents that have been published on the subject.

Point2 National Listing Service (“Point2 NLS”) is available to NAR and/or its members regardless of the outcome. Point2 NLS preserves the listing as a marketing asset of the listing broker. Members of Point2 NLS have complete choice and control of exactly where their listing is advertised on the Internet.

If NAR is successful in its defense, MLSs and/or Franchises will continue to use Point2 NLS to facilitate the distribution of listings as determined by each broker. It also establishes a real-time communication tool between the MLS/Franchise and its members/brokers/agents. MLSs or Franchises can use Point2 NLS at no cost.

If the DOJ is successful, Point2 NLS can serve to connect brokers, agents, and their listings without regulatory interference.

16 minutes, Refin, What's the Point?

2007-05-27T11:01:00.000-07:00

So as many now know, Point2 produced a little Spoof on the 60 minutes about the 6% commission. First off, I hope I’m not commissioned to don lipstick and a wig anymore, but it was a fun day putting it together. So how did it happen? Well, we’ve had a rough wet and cool spring up in Canada. Thursday morning we were having a daily standup meeting with sunny blue skies and warm air in the background. I think we were feeling a little giddy and perhaps feeling less motivation to do real work that morning. Next thing you know, a quick script was slapped together, a wig was purchased and the camera rolling.

Personally, I still have some reservations about it. I don’t know if it was the right thing to do. It was produced in fun and if you really look at it, there are holes in the logic because it is not meant to make sense. Similarly, it does not make sense to produce an editorial about a very large industry, focusing on an involved topic, push an opinion, try to appear objective, but ignore the fundamentals. I disagree with Brad Inman, that the industry had a shot on the CBS show. If I understand the facts correctly, the NAR offered to participate in the program but they did not receive fair representation on air. This common place in media where objectivity is not goal, just the air objectivity is.

I would like to note that neither Point2 nor I have anything against Refin or discount models. I believe in really existing free markets and in perfect competition. Where a discount brokerage can enter the market, compete fairly and win, I’ll be biggest supporter. To be truthful, I really like Glen Kelman and I think he's very smart marketer. The main issue at hand is that Refin is not competing fairly. They are taking advantage of MLS structures and data sharing agreements to undercut brokerages they also want to cooperate with. Let me back up:

MLSs were first formed to facilitate cooperating and compensation between competing brokerages that agreed to pool their resources and provide better exposure for their clients. There is no other industry I can think of where competitors agree to cooperate to such a degree. The offer of compensation makes the cooperation work because the brokerages have similar business models. It has allowed clients to gain maximum exposure by leveraging the collective marketing dollars spent by hundreds or thousands of these cooperating professionals. The Internet added a new dynamic…

At some point, the MLS data became the standard data source for online listing display and IDX (or ILD) agreements became the de facto policy behind data sharing. It’s become problematic to have these managed at the MLS level because it allows companies to take advantage of the spirit cooperation due to global opt in, opt out provisions. Cooperation is possible if companies have similar business models but it does not make sense for a brokerage to cooperate with another company that undermines its business model. Listings are marketing assets in real estate and they are the product of money and time spent on advertising, promotion and networking. It does not make business sense for a brokerage to allow a competing company, that is undercutting commission rates, to use my marketing assets to attract new business for itself.

Now as a member of the MLS, I don’t mind if ANY company brings a buyer for one of my listings. I also don’t mind if that any company contributes listings to the collective MLS cooperative effort and offers a co-broke that will cover my full service efforts. What I can’t accept, again, is allowing that company to undercut my rates but expect me to offer up my listing inventory publicly to help them attract clients.

Cooperation in real estate must continue. Real estate is a local business. As a regular homeowner, I can advertise my own home on Craigslist and Google. I might even feel I can show and stage my how better. What I can’t do is leverage the collective advertising dollars of hundreds or thousands of real estate professional and at the same time, gain access to their collective network of buyers.

If the spirit of cooperating is to continue for organized real estate in the Internet era, brokerages will need to be able to make their own peer to peer business decisions on who to cooperate with if discounters continue to unfairly take advantage of the MLS. A peer to peer system will help melt away anti competition rhetoric. It will allow discounters to continue to participate without harassment from traditional companies because those companies will not be forced to publicly share marketing assets and be undercut at the same time.

Brad Inman comments that “if a spoof is the best way to make a case for full service, the industry has a bigger problem”. I certainly hope this video is not perceived as the industry’s response to discount models. But I would add, if the only way to grow a discount business model is to unfairly take advantage of data sharing, they would be well advised to figure out how to both cooperate and compete in an era where brokerage can make peer to peer advertising agreements.

Brendan King, Uncut and Unplugged

2007-05-23T15:23:00.000-07:00

Oh my. Some of our standard members saw a video show up in their online office this afternoon. I got to thinking, heavens, what if our active Pro and Prem members that know Brendan saw this. I mean, what kind of ribbing would he receive? Geez, I hope this doesn't 'get out' ...

Real Estate Syndication Chaos

2007-05-09T06:52:00.000-07:00

There was recently a very good post on our messageboard that is applicable to a very wide audience. It was posted by Shelly and David Sheffey:

What happens when one of our listings is submitted to Trulia or any of the others via more than one source?As an example, when we put our listing in the Keller Williams listing service they automatically submit our new listing to Trulia, then we put it into P2 and they send the listing to Trulia, and now that we decide to advertise this listing in the Real Estate book they stick it up there too. Which one wins? Does a new version bump an old version? Do multiple sources cause the listing to disappear altogether?I would suppose the answer might be different for each of the destination sites, but could this be a cause of our missing listings?

It's is a really good question and it's one of the biggest challenges we tackle around here. All syndication partners handle duplicates differently:

Some post both copies of the listing
Some filter and take an authoritative feed based on their own criteria [Franchise, MLS, Broker, Agent, 3rd party]
Some post paid listings first
Some will use the most recent feed and replace the existing listing with that newest feed.
Some will take the feed with more information.

For all these reasons, the reports on your status tab will become more and more important over time. We are working with each syndication partner to do what we can to ensure that the feeds from our members are the ones being published. It's a very complicated and politically challenging problem which is why many simple feed solutions are insufficient for this industry.

There may be some people that see that larger picture that exists here. The challenge is identity. How do listing sites identify feeds from franchises, MLSs, brokers and agents? How do brokers ensure their business rules are protected? There needs to be commonality established to for online marketing and there needs to be better identity solutions. How does franchise and MLS feeds provide brokers and agents the statistical feedback they need for marketing and reporting feedback for troubleshooting?

The Problem with Real Estate Listings

2007-05-03T07:36:00.000-07:00

Last week I published part 2 in a series of articles on Realtown titles "Why 95% of Realtors are leaving big money on the table." Part 2 discusses the poor quality of listing data and the effect that it has on online conversion. It perplexes me why more real estate professionals don't market listings properly online, why they don't publish multiple high quality photos. I confront those that use old school reasoning that you should publish a little content and get the prospect to contact you for more info. It no longer hold. the conversion rates for IDX registration forms are decreasing. Online consumers have too many information sources to spend time on sites that don't provide the content they are looking for.

In my mind, the only way to increase the quality of real estate marketing is to talk about what the numbers suggest. The discussion needs to happen at the top and filter down, even though we've heard leaders like Allan Dalton, Alex Perriello and others talking about this for some time. It seems to me that MLS executives play a big part in this because they provide the software, the policies and education to local members. In the next while, you'll see Point2 reaching out to MLSs.

Free Traffic for REALTORS

2007-04-09T07:18:00.000-07:00

On friday, part one of a 4 part series I put together was posted on Realtown titled Why 95% of REALTORS Are Leaving BIG Money on the Table. The first part deals with passing up free traffic. Online marketing opportunities have changed for real estate. There are a lot of places that can provide free exposure for listings. I think this is still the first phase of new trend. I think back to when search engines were coming out right left and center. There was Altavista, Excite, Hotbot, Lycos, let's not forget Webcrawler.. and many others. They used different algorithms, produced different results and it seemed like there were more opportunities to generate free traffic. As we moved into era of paid search, prices were so low at the beginning, we endulged in a traffic bonanza. As paid search prices went up and search engines consolidated, traffic seemed to become more challenging to come by.

Today, there are more and more syndication sites that are providing consumer search and in turn, provide an opportunity for free exposure. I'm not sure where this is going to go. Some search sites will rise in popularity, some will fade into obscurity. We could see massive consilidation or we could see massive fragmentation toward more local portals. We could see these sites continue to build on an advertising model that continues to provide free exposure for some time to come, or we could see many of them try to start monetizing the content providers, the real estate professionals.

What ever the future holds, the strategy is clear for now, get your listing in as many places as possible and milk the free traffic for all it's worth!

The Power of Context

2007-03-25T16:03:00.000-07:00

As traffic flows over the Internet, every click is made with purpose and quickly followed with an underlying question, "What's in it for me?". Every page that is clicked to has very little time to answer that question. Every link wanting to be clicked competes with all other links on that page. The content on the page needs to answer the basic question. If a site can not understand the visitor's purpose and answer that basic question, "What's in it for me", the visitor will leave the site. Sites that hold visitors:

1. Understand the purpose of the typical visitor,
2. Answer the question "What's in it for me"

Now, sites that do an exceptional job of holding visitors answer that basic question over and over again by providing more and more relevant content in context. Let's look at an example.

A real estate website that is discussed frequently by Michael Russer is www.cptaction.com. It's an example of a site that does a good job of identifying a clear target audience, military families. The military relocation families visiting this site have unique needs and the site does an excellent job of providing unique context. Visitors are able to view real estate services in the context of those specific needs. Another great example is www.goarmyhomes.com/.

Google has created the most successful ad serving platform in the world with Adsense. There are many reasons for the success of Adsense, but the main driver is Google's ability to display relevant ads to people viewing a web page, be it Adwords ad on Google.com or on another site using Adsense. The ads have context and click thrus are maximized.

A website that can present better content in better context will create a remarkable experience. Point2 has thought a lot about context. How many real estate agent directory websites have you been to? There are so many of them out there and how many provide any meaningful experience for the consumer? I haven’t found one. The directories serve real estate agents by providing SEO value, that’s all.

Point2 not only wanted to build a directory that provided SEO value but value to the consumer as well. On Point2 Homes, a drill down agent directory was created that navigated right down to the neighborhood level. If a consumer is browsing an agent directory, what matters to them? Well, from studies like the 2006 NAR Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers we can find relevant feedback that could be used. We can learn that some buyers chose an agent because the agent’s market area was where they wanted to move. One of the values that sellers looked for in an agent was knowledge of local area. So from that, we built a directory where you can find agents, by neighborhood that have listed homes in that neighborhood. The result is that you have a directory where you can search for real estate professionals organized in a more valuable context. The goal is to provide SEO value to members, but to drive traffic to member websites from consumers that find value in the directory.

In order to make a study of context valuable on your website, you have to understand your visitors. Who exactly are they? Where did they come from? What are they looking for? GoArmyHomes.com will not be successful if the traffic it’s attracting is not military relocation families. That seems to be common sense, but just because you build a website on topic, does not mean your traffic will automatically be that category of people. But the formula for success holds if the following will be true.

You drive targeted traffic
And you provide context
Your conversion rates will be higher

A short note I should quickly add to those points, please don’t try and choose the largest category of visitors as possible. Your conversion rates will be higher if you don’t have a lot of competition. The GoArmyHomes.com site will not be as effective if the ‘net’ is flooded with similar sites. What is your target audience?

So the question conclude this post, if you are a real estate professional, how can you provide a better context for your website visitors? How can you organize content on each of your pages to provide better context and engage the user better?

New Partners Added To Syndication Network

2007-03-20T07:30:00.000-07:00

Many of our members might have noticed the silent addition of a couple new feed partners last week. We like to do soft launches to ensure things are working properly.

I'd like to welcome House.com and CityCribs.com to the NLS. House.com has been around for a while matching home buyers to real estate agents. They've been successful in the lead generation space and have been successful in leveraging their URL and brand to slowly climb the search engines results page sets. They join the NLS to provide home buyer real estate listings from our members and freely pass on inquiries.

CityCribs.com is fast growing marketplace that first opened up in New York City in January 2004. It has earned numerous mentions in Inman News and was nominted for an innovator award in the category of "Most Innovative Rental or New Home Online Service" in 2006.

We're proud to welcome these 2 new sites to the NLS exposure engine.

Craigslist EZ Posting

2007-02-26T14:04:00.000-08:00

As many Point2 members have seen already today, we have added Craigslist as a semi automated feed partner. Craig and company do not accept listing feeds so what we've done is generated HTML for each listing that plumbs in to our listing management and prospecting system. Inquiries generated from a Craigslist ad will flow into the Prospects list and view and click stats will be shown on the syndication tab.

So it is a little bit of work to get the listing on Craigslist right now, but is it worth it? We added the functionality this morning. By mid afternoon, we had 34 members add their Point2 listings to Craigslist. Those 34 listings generated 965 views and 337 click throughs. I'd say use Craigslist. Here are some examples of the postings:

http://grandrapids.craigslist.org/rfs/284860774.html
http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/nva/rfs/284898988.html
http://fortlauderdale.craigslist.org/rfs/284867451.html

Blogs: On Domain or Off Domain?

2007-02-15T09:34:00.000-08:00

Ok guys, this needs a bit of discussion. The question arose on a Point2 messageboard forum, should blogs be on domain or off domain. You can’t say 100% that you need a blog on a different domain. There are pros and cons of each approach. If you weigh them, it’s almost a 50/50 spit and the only conclusion is that there is a place and reason for each.

We evaluated each and decided on our current approach for a number of reasons, the biggest one being this: If we built the blog on domain, our members could have both approaches, but if we built it off domain, you are stuck with that solution. What do I mean exactly? The current solution has the blog on domain. If you want a separate blog on it’s own domain and you wanted to use the Point2 solution (to take advantage of auto posts, syndication to Point2 Homes etc…) you can create a second portal, purchase a domain, and point that domain to the main blog page. On the other hand, if we build a solution off domain, you couldn’t have the option of the other approach.

So to be clear (for everyone reading) what is the difference in the 2 approaches? Here are the 2 definitions first:

Where some use separate domains,

Zillow.com
ZillowBlog.com

Others keep the blog on domain:

Trulia
Trulia.com/blog

SeoMoz.org
SeoMoz.org/blog

The100Lists.com
The100lists.com/seoblog/

So the next question is what is the best approach? My answer is “That Depends”. It’s also the answer of the SEO forum expert:
http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=28618&hl=

Well, a larger group of people could create a better list of why on and why off domain. But because we built our solution on, some of the benefits of that approach include:
- building more content on your domain. In search, larger sites have an edge.
- If the content of the blog matches the content of the main site, it makes ‘sense’ to have the content together on one site.
- Blogs link to blogs and in general, the technology is a great way to achieve deep linking on your website.
- Because we syndication listings, agent profiles and blog content to Point2 Homes, it makes sense to send users back to the same site for one author. (imagine a blog post about an open house, it’s best to take the user back to the source of the post and the main listing content.
- The approach is best for tracking analytics and total exposure generated from all marketing activities.

Those are some reasons, there are others. There are also reasons for the off domain approach and like I said, if you put them all side by side, you probably have a 50/50 split as far as value goes.

Live From Western Connect

2007-01-27T07:53:00.000-08:00

Well, we're on our last few hours at the Banff Western Connect. The conference wraps up this morning and I'll have to say that the show was a huge success. I heard there were over 600 attendees this year, not including exhibitors and speakers. The Point2 booth was a modest 8 X 10 size but we ended up in a very high traffic spot so activity great. I've got the 7 of us below after setup - Myself, Brendan, Coni, Linda, Wendell, Jen and Jaquelyn.

The last 2 mornings we served champage and orange juice at the booth in the morning. Despite the number of people still fuzzy from the previous night festivities, the mimosa servings only lasted a few short minutes.

I cherish every chance we get to leave the office and speak to the industry and our members as I'm constantly reminded that we need to focus on education, simplicity and clarity in our messaging. We have so many members approach us and apologize that they are not using Point2 to their full potential. Some of the challenge is time, some is ability and some is just the lack of knowing 'what to do next.'

We fielded lots of questions about Handshake and the NLS, and most of the reaction was positive. But, we clearly need to speak to the industry about our intentions more and ensure everyone knows we want to be a partner, in fact the most important partner to the industry, not an antagonist. If our NLS is successful as a marketing tool, we'll help organized real estate communicate a more clear and compelling value proposition to today's consumers. Over and out from Banff.

The Point2 NLS - A Different Kind of MLS

2007-01-04T11:24:00.000-08:00

On January 2, Harley Rouda, CEO of Real Living commented on Inman News that “companies such as HomeGain and HouseValues, Zillow and Point2Homes are playing a role in aggregating property data, … and it's not clear where this trend is leading the industry.” That statement is very true, but it should be noted that the 4 companies listed are playing very different roles. I’m not surprised however that Point2 shows up in the same sentence as HG,HV and Zillow.

Homegain and HouseValues provide consumer portal that primarily grab contact information which is sold in the form of a lead to real estate agents and brokers. Zillow provides a consumer search portal designed to open up information to consumers and earn money with an advertising model. Where those companies are consumer focused, Point2 focuses on building applications for real estate professionals. While we operate a consumer search site at www.Point2Homes.com, solutions to focus on creating opportunities for the real estate professional and connecting consumer facing products to our real estate software that our brokers, agents and builders use.

In November, we displayed a booth at the NAR Expo and participated with the over 600 other vendors. After the show, we had a series of strategy meetings on messaging and development philosophy. We noticed at the show how easy it is to have your message lost in a sea of noise. Not only do we get mentioned with the 3 companies above, we are also mentioned with the likes of Advanced Access, Z57 and Homes.com. How can we tell the industry all the things what we do, how we are different and deliver one strong message that stands out above all others?

The answer we came up with was to execute on a 4 year plan and reveal what we are truly doing: creating 1 marketing system that allows real estate professionals to cooperatively market their listings online with complete control. Let’s be the answer to the DOJ threat. Let’s help real estate professionals take back their future. Let’s tie our product together and announce the 1 National MLS – the Point2 NLS.

Current members will notice that they have a more robust profile that might mimic what you could access in an MLS, but with more information. That profile will be what shows in Agent Handshake when you are managing relationships, on the message board and in the Point2 Homes directory. Members will notice that the referral system is now tied to that profile. Handshake has been improved so that the community can more effectively manage their Handshake relationships with rules and have more faith in the system. Members will automatically fall out of participation if they are blocked by other members for content reasons. Fair play will be necessity, not just a wish. The community will truly be in control.

The system is now more open with more choice for any real estate professionals. There is no longer a need to create a Point2 website for a member and use our software. Listings can be entered, involved in Handshake, syndicated and then posted on any website the real estate agent or broker is using.

Current MLS data was never meant for marketing but became the de facto standard. MLS’s have become most valuable as marketing tools however. Point2 NLS is a different kind of MLS. Data entered into the Point2 NLS will generate better results, have more photos, automatic virtual tours, deep analytics and complete control. In fact, members will even be able to opt out of displaying their listing on Point2 Homes (something we don’t expect to see many people doing).

Today is step one. All current Point2 members are now members of the Point2 NLS. Over the next few months, we will be releasing more features geared to enhance online marketing and facilitate the local cooperation of real estate professionals.

The real estate industry is one of a kind. In no other industry do competitors cooperate to the degree they do in real estate. But there are a lot of different business models coexisting with many different self-interests and industry views. The competition in light of the cooperation creates complicated dynamics that can only be addressed by providing choice, control and community imposed direct democracy (count the c’s in that sentence!). It’s why we love our simple slogan, ‘compete together’.

Let’s make 2007 a good year for real estate.

Why Zillow Will Never be the National MLS

2006-12-17T20:11:00.000-08:00

There’s been a lot of discussion around Zillow’s latest announcement and there have been a lot of people asking for Point2’s perspective. This is my personal perspective on the issue and why I’m not that concerned about Zillow adding listings to its portal.

Much of the discussion sparked by Zillow’s announcement has been around the emergence of a national MLS or a portal that will replace the current MLS systems -company that all real estate buyers and sellers will use.

Why I’m not waiting for Zillow to be ‘THE’ place.

The September 2006 monthly internet portal statistics from Realtor.org claims the total traffic to the real estate vertical was over 40 million visits. The list contains 25 portals in the vertical. The highest trafficked portal is Realtor.com with 6.1 million visitors, accounting for roughly 15% of the total. But there are many noticeable exceptions to this list: real estate sites such as Zillow.com, Point2Homes.com, busy media sites like the NewYorkTimes.com, Boston.com, major classified search sites such as Oodle.com, Craigslist, Backpage.com, LiveDeal.com, vertical search engines such as Google Base and Edgeio, large regional brokerages such as RealLiving.com.

Give the above, Realtor.com’s share of the real estate vertical traffic is much smaller than 15%. In fact it’s infinitely smaller if you want to include all of the thousands of brokerage websites and all the personal websites from over 1.2 million REALTORS®; 80% or more have a site they market. You see, real estate is a local business and that’s why there isn’t one national search site with all the data and all of the eyeballs. All those REALTORS® don’t have for sale signs with the Realtor.com url on it and they won’t be advertising Zillow.com either. I’m not saying that Zillow can’t or won’t ever operate a wildly successful portal. But being the one spot for real estate is more than a challenge.

Why Zillow is NOT the national MLS

The exercise above is all academic. More importantly, the issue around an MLS replacement is moot if we are talking about Zillow. Zillow is a consumer search portal gathering data, making it freely accessible for buyers and sellers. They are now allowing sellers to post homes for sale, will allow buyers to search and contact the poster of the listing directly.

An MLS on the other hand is NOT a consumer search portal. An MLS is a system that facilitates the cooperative sharing of information and the cooperative marketing of listings between real estate brokers. Marketing is the most important part of that definition. While the cooperative sharing of information may change as times change, because more information is being made universally accessible, the cooperative marketing is key. Organized real estate adds value to consumers because you can have hundreds or even thousands of local professionals working together to sell homes. Real estate is a local business that involves the sale of complex capital assets. Those assets can’t be purchased over the Internet. Homes need to be seen and it is preferred by most home owners, that the transaction is further facilitated by a real estate professional.

While commissions may change, and brokerage models may change, and methods of marketing may change, real estate brokers will continue to be essential by cooperatively marketing listings and offering to share compensation. Consumers will become more informed, new real estate portals will come and some will go, but the real estate professionals will remain essential. An MLS system is required to allow real estate professionals to cooperate.

It would appear that Zillow’s focus is on the consumer and not on building a system that facilitates brokerage cooperation. Bottom line: a consumer search portal is not an MLS.

An Edgeio Analysis

2006-12-05T09:32:00.000-08:00

I read a blog post on the new Edgeio purchase on Transparent RE.com. The writer discusses the purchase of ARES by Edgeio and the possible implications. I have a few comments:

Edgeio is a vertical search engine. It currently works to drive traffic back to the listing source. On the listing example that mentioned, it only links to 1 source - www.point2homes.com (not 3 as suggested). Point2 is the service provider that has syndicated the listing to Edgeio. The listing was inputed by a Keller Williams Agent using Point2 software. In this case, the agent is using a free version of the software so the link back is going to the listing detail view with more information at Point2 Homes. If the agent was paying for a website with Point2, the listing on Edgeio would link directly to the listing agent's website.

I suspect that Edgeio will use the MLS IDX feed to eliminate the duplicate entry problem and syndicate listings for the Broker of Record. The challenge is that the listing will not index as well because the MLS does not gather enough local, search information.

I don't see Edgeio syndicating an entire MLS inventory via the broker's IDX feed (as the writer suggests). It opens up a whole can of worms around a listing broker's ability to control how and where their listing is advertised. Yahoo Real Estate currently uses IDX feeds from Prudential. In the process, they have ostracized the rest of the industry. You can't do that in an industry that is this fragmented, with 1.2 million professionals that spend collectively around $11.9B / year on advertising and promotion.

Shaking things up

2006-11-24T06:12:00.000-08:00

This blog has been quiet lately. My excuses? We were down in New Orleans for the NAR expo from the 10 - 13. What a milk run by the way! Because of flight cancellations, delays, missed connections - this was my flight down:

Saskatoon -> Toronto -> Baltimore -> Houston -> New Orleans!

Coming back was only slightly less of a fiasco:

New Orleans -> St. Louis -> Chicago -> Toronto -> Saskatoon!

Anyway, I took a couple of slow days to catch up when we came back. What was our take away from the Expo? Well I can say that there are a lot of companies out there doing some great things in this space. This was the first major tradeshow that Point2 erected a booth. It was so good getting out of the office and speaking with many of our members face to face. I thnk we learned a lot and we receive a ton of valuable feedback.

Brendan giving a chat at the Point2 booth

With so many service providers in this vertical, it's easy to be lost in the noise. There were so many people at the show walking around looking for 'the thing', not know what that thing was. One of the biggest challenges we have at Point2 is communicating what we are, what we provide. Sometimes we try to simplify our message so much just to get people to sign up for free, try us, and then discuver all the things that lie under the hood. Other times we tell a more detailed complete story so we can better communicate to brokerages looking for the total package. But all of the time, we want to be 'the thing'.

This last week we've been planning our next 6 months to year for Point2. I can't talk about our decisions at this point, but I can say that I'm pumped for our release at the beginning of January! With a mere 100,000 members in 84 countries, we're all feeling at Point2 that we need to find the next gear and kick it up a notch.

Spotlight Ads Live!

2006-11-08T12:29:00.000-08:00

Ok, some of you may have noticed that the Point2 Blogs went live yesterday. Well just a few minutes ago, we lit up spotlight advertising. When you manage or just add a new listing, the syndication page will show you a list of all the sites you can syndicate your listing to for free. Now, you will also see options in the right hand side spotlight add column for enhanced placement.

The 2 partners currently offering spotlight ads are Point2 Homes and Google. You will also see our newest partner, the New York Times where you can showcase your listing for $125 - all from 1 dashboard! Here's a screen shot

Major Change Underway with Feeds

2006-11-06T14:03:00.000-08:00

Some of you may have noticed a change in our feeds now. We've started our migration with the latest release so all professional and premium members will have their listing feeds link back to their own Point2 Agent website. That is, when you add a listing and syndicate it to our partners such as Google Base, Yahoo Classifieds, Trulia, Oodle etc, the listing link will no longer point to Point2Homes, but rather your own website.

In the next little while, members with a large number of listings should see a significant increase in traffic to their website. Our latest release improved the statistics we have for each listing and we'll be able to show how many click or views you recieved from most of our partners.

Jeff

Sneak Peak

2006-11-01T05:34:00.000-08:00

I can't contain myself. In the next couple of days, we are going to release the biggest single release we've ever pushed. I'm excited, i'm nervous and I really just can't wait to get feedback from our members. I'm going to go out on a limb here post some screen shot of just a couple upcoming improvements.

So the first change you'll notice to the syndication screen is that we will have 1 new partner. I won't say who yet. But the major change is the new look and the introduction of spotlight ads. For this release we'll have a couple of partners participating where you can enhance the placement of your listings.

The next screen shot below is of the advanced reporting for syndication. We've heard from our members that there is nothing as frustrating as syndicating your listing, but not knowing where to find it. So we've developed an API that a couple of partners will be using for this release to a few things. First, here is the screen shot:

Publishing reports are available now so you can see what real estate search sites you have syndicated you listings to, if they have been successfully uploaded, and view them through the url they are published on. If there was an error successfully uploading your listing, an error report will indicate the reason. We will have a couple of partners using this API when we release. Results and feedback will hopefully help bring the rest of our partners on board.

The last screen is of our Listings2Go functionality. It provides some code for you to drop on another website you own and display your Point2 listings. The display settings are completely configurable. The real benefit is that it allows you to have more than 1 website, but keep all your listing stats, prospects and publishing reports in 1 control pannel.

White Paper Part VIII - Conclusion

2006-10-30T12:45:00.000-08:00

Predictive Modeling

We’ve noted that the most important factor to increasing response is publishing better listing content. The most important factor in increasing conversion of inquiries into leads and sales is simply the quality, relevance and timelines of the response. The last piece of the lead generation/conversion story is a focus on generating deeper pipelines.

Let me explain.

Not all leads are created equal. Many generated directly from listings tend to be of hot prospects active in the home search process. Many others are of consumers who are further out in the home buying cycle. A study conducted by HouseValues, Inc. in 2005 indicates that the average consumer spends up to 16 months in the home search cycle. Leads created that are further out in the cycle represent future business for the brokerage, but if they are handled correctly. Brokerages that pay attention to these leads can create long term sales pipelines that before long turn into a regular stream of mature opportunities to route on to their sales force.

Reaching further upstream to consumers early in the home search process can also establish the brokerage as the go to source for research information, a reputation that can boost the company’s position and competitiveness in its market.

The lead incubation process begins with a solid lead capture solution. Your software needs to be able to establish lead criteria such as first visit, last visit, location, home search areas, home search price ranges, repeat view patterns, contact information, financial qualification information, contact history notes and other relevant website or portal activity. This information is extremely valuable in pursuing and communicating with those leads.

Typical lead incubation systems on the market today allow real estate companies to place leads into automated drip marketing systems. Leading solutions however have the ability to operate different campaigns based on a trigger system that places the lead on a relevant drip campaign based on the prospect’s activity on the site. Some of those systems may also allow brokerages to develop their own company specific drip campaigns. A state of the art system such as Point2 goes one more step. It identifies prospects that have been on a drip campaign and have now matured (i.e. they have turned into a hot prospect), as their home search activity increases or specific request for contact or information is registered. Hot prospects are then marked, and notification is sent to the brokerage or agent indicating contact must be made.A state of the art system such as Point2 goes one more step. It identifies prospects that have been on a drip campaign and have now matured (i.e. they have turned into a hot prospect), as their home search activity increases or specific request for contact or information is registered. Hot prospects are then marked, and notification is sent to the brokerage or agent indicating contact must be made.

Future lead management and incubation capabilities under development today will focus on predictive modeling. While current drip systems tend to provide home search notification and static drip campaigns, predictive modeling will take lead profile information and send ultra relevant static and dynamic content to the lead. The goal is to make the brokerage the source of research information right up until the lead is ready to engage a real estate agent to help narrow or close their home search.

Conclusion

With the vast majority of consumers using the Internet in their home search, brokerages need to advertise their inventory in as many ways possible to maximize exposure and leads. Today, this includes focusing on both natural and vertical search marketing. Listings are the most valuable marketing assets brokerages and their agents possess. Better listings (rich data) generates more buyer leads, which increases the chance a company’s listing is sold in-house. The most important step in converting those inquiries is to focus on responding immediately. Because agents are mobile and not sitting at their desk all the time, lead notification needs to become mobile, with text messaging.

Brokerages that focus on developing longer term lead pipelines will maximize the total number and percentage of leads that will eventually transact with someone within their organization.

These strategies are not simply nice to have. They are essential for the survival of traditional brokerage business model during this time of rapid change. Real estate companies that do not develop a complete online marketing and operating strategy will risk losing market share and will squander the opportunity to lead, as new waves of innovation enable better, more efficient and more cost effective marketing and lead conversion strategies.

White Paper Part VII - Responsiveness

2006-10-30T12:34:00.000-08:00

The verdict has been out on this one for a while. The fastest Realtor® to respond to an inquiry, whether it came by e-mail or through the phone, is likely to win the business.

Consumers rate responsiveness as the most important factor in choosing an agent, ahead of qualification, knowledge or commission, according to a CAR (California Association of Realtors) survey published in 2005. Yet, independent industry research published that same year suggests 45 percent of all online inquiries still went unanswered!

Considering that 45 percent of consumers also said they expect agents to get back to them within 30 minutes, there is significant room for brokerages to take advantage of the statistics.

For one, agents are on the road a lot of the time. It’s just part of the business. Many don’t get to their e-mail until the end of the day. Others don’t read their e-mail except once or twice a week. By then, the lead would be long gone. While the computer is a great tool at the office, your team must be able to connect with serious leads as quickly as possible.

While e-mail is not always accessible, unless your agents all carry a Blackberry, they do all carry cell phones. By routing online leads to your agent mobile phones, responsiveness is dramatically increased. And revenue growth follows.

Text messaging works best. It is non intrusive and keeps the agents in control of when and how they respond. They may be with a client at that particular moment, or they may prefer, depending on the opportunity, to respond either by text, e-mail or via telephone. A regular phone call or voice message does not offer the same flexibility.

There are a number of proven wireless lead routing systems on the market today. Considering the importance of responsiveness in the real estate business, the benefits of adopting this technology sooner than later are obvious. What it takes to win is to get to a lead first, and lead routing is an easy way to make this happen. While some brokerages have formal lead response and routing teams, others send inquiries directly to agents, but regardless of the model, brokerages need to ensure inquiries are responded to quickly and, preferably, immediately.

Lastly, brokerages need to recognize that inquiries generated from their listings originate from more sources than just their own website. Vertical search sites and classified websites that listings are syndicated to need to be integrated into their system, to enable text message notification for inquiries, irrespective of the source. This is the only true solution to consolidating the lead management process and optimizing conversion from all the diverse online advertising efforts.

Advanced systems such as the Point2 platform have been able to achieve integration with a number of syndication advertising partners and deliver leads right to the Realtor® cell phones. The initial inquiry is not only sent through email and SMS (text messaging), but the lead information is also added to the Point2 lead capture and profiling part of the platform, for long term incubation and follow through.

White Paper Part VI

2006-10-26T06:40:00.000-07:00

Rich Data

There are a number of appropriate places in this paper to start the discussion on rich data. It drives exposure, lead generation, increases conversion and, better results for home sellers. For our purposes, rich data refers to the publishing of detailed, professional listing information.

Search

Rich data is critical for maximizing traffic as a result of online search. The more descriptive a listing is, the better chance someone will find it online, especially when doing long tail searches. That is, when consumers type detailed search queries into search engines. The better a property is described both in the main copy and the document meta content, the better chance the property will be returned in a search engine result set.

Conversion

Rich data also increases the number of inquiries an online listing generates. In 2005, Alex Perellio of Realogy(formerly Cendant), was quoted at a broker conference saying, “Realtors® are being out marketed today by 10 year old kids selling baseball cards on Ebay.” I may be paraphrasing what Mr. Perellio said, but the essence of the remark remains. You can’t maximize the potential of the Internet as a powerful marketing medium by placing a short paragraph and one shoddy photo of a property worth hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. Yet, the number of such listings, some even without a single photo, on Realtor.com and other real estate search sites is still astounding.

Part of the problem stems from Realtors® using MLS® data for marketing. The MLS® was never designed for marketing.

The MLS® was first established to facilitate cooperation and to ensure compensation between cooperating brokerages. With the emergence and growth of the Internet in the 90s, MLS content became the de facto standard for online listings display. Today still, it is rarely readable by search crawlers, and online listings documents are rarely descriptive enough to make any significant contribution. Further, the content is insufficient to effectively market properties as ‘homes’ and expect to maximize consumer inquiries and response for the listing Realtor®.

Internal research conducted by Point2 in September of 2006 shows a dramatic increase in page views detailed listings generated and the number of inquiries they yield.

Over 110,000 listings in the Point2 database were examined over a 30 day time frame. The listings were broken down by the number of photos per listing. The results were dramatically consistent. As the number of photos provided for the listing increased, the number of times that listing was viewed also increased, as did the number of leads generated from that listing.

Recent research conducted by LiveDeal.com reinforces the findings generated in the Point2 study. LiveDeal, a consumer real estate search site noticed the listing feeds from Point2 contained far more photos than other feeds. Upon further analysis, Point2 member listings were found to generate almost 300 percent more leads on LiveDeal.com than listings provided by other feed partners.

The message is clear. To maximize Internet leads, Realtors® must start adding a lot of information and photos to their listings.
Accessibility

A highly effective approach to generating sales leads is to provide detailed listing information and useful tools website visitors can access without registration. Consumers today want to remain anonymous, until they are ready to make personal contact with the Realtor®. Once they’ve identified your site as a valuable and helpful destination, they’ll become more receptive to providing personal information. Free home valuations, or unique neighborhood information and statistics can be of interest to thousands of prospects in your area. That’s the value add. Consumers appreciate it, and it works.

Independent market research identifies the top reasons why consumers go to real estate sites. Armed with this knowledge, brokers and agents can easily position themselves to win in their markets.

According to the National Association of Realtors® 2005 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers report, 95 percent of visitors to real estate websites go there to look for listings.

Within listings, 86 percent of consumers said the most valuable content was photos and descriptions.

Independent research also lists photos as the top reason why consumers go to a real estate website, at 89 percent. The second most important reason is property search, which comes in at a close 81 percent. Mapping takes third place at 77 percent, followed by financing and locating an agent, at 31 percent and 26 percent respectively.

Why is it then that Realtors® often fail to leverage such findings on their websites? Why do many listings often feature a single photo, and often none?

Holding back information is a strategy that no longer works. If consumers can’t get the information they need, on your website, they’ll move on. The strategy of placing a registration on a real estate website to gain IDX access is slowly dying. Sure there will still be some business around for you, but you’ll never know of the opportunities you lost. There are simply too many real estate search sites popping up that provide open access to listings, including major franchise portals like RE/MAX.com.

Listings featured on http://www.point2homes.com/, a website that aggregates listings from tens of thousands of real estate agents indicates that more and more Realtors® are investing time to post a number of photos with their listings and offer to the consumer details that go far beyond the basics of square footage, number of bedrooms and bathrooms. Comments contributed by home sellers about their listings have also started to grow in popularity on the site, further reinforcing the fact that consumers today, be it buyers or sellers want to be more informed and more involved.

Over and above direct access to compelling and useful information, do provide access to one or more important tools, in exchange for an e-mail address. It’s non-threatening. It’s also a very important element of the lead conversion process.

White Paper - Part V

2006-10-26T06:34:00.000-07:00

Lead Generation & Conversion

There is universal consensus that exposure is by and large useless if you can’t convert leads to revenue. Today and in the future, methods of lead generation and conversion will have to change for real estate companies to improve the ROI on both online and offline advertising. New online services such as Zillow seek to empower the consumer with more information. Companies that turn themselves into knowledge destinations and leading sources for information will win the consumer over – and their business.

This next section focuses on 3 issues with lead generation and conversion: rich data, responsiveness and predictive modeling.

White Paper Part IV - Online Branding

2006-10-26T06:28:00.000-07:00

Branding

Traditionally, the best source of advertising for a real estate brokerage is the ‘for sale’ yard sign. It brands the agent and the brokerage in the specific neighborhood. Search sites are now providing a new and similar branding opportunity online through the broker’s listings. Sites like Move.com, Trulia and Point2 Homes provide different branding options for displaying listings. In short, the more sites your listings are posted on, and the more sites they are branded on, the stronger your brand will be online. Considering the shear volume of consumers researching real estate online, branding on the Internet should be just as important to brokerages as offline branding.

Unfortunately, few brokerages are taking full advantage of the different ways they can today brand themselves on the Internet. Service providers offering syndication tools should facilitate the different branding options as well.

Effective online branding can be optimized further by enhancing online exposure for the brokerage website as well as its affiliated agent sites.

There are several common brokerage models in as far as agent websites are concerned:

Centralized Model - Some brokerages choose to operate one website and focus all their marketing efforts on it. Agents affiliated with the company are not permitted to have their own websites. Brokerages that provide their agents with a web page, directory, or 3rd level domain name derived from the main brokerage site fall under this category. The main benefits of this model include the brokerage’s ability to protect and control its online branding, control lead generation and management, and effectively manage its responsiveness in the marketplace.

But these benefits come at a price. The major draw back is that the brokerage ends up losing important search engine visibility advantages. A number of well marketed, interlinked websites that connect the brokerage’s main site with all of its affiliate agent sites is easy to set up and maximizes visibility and exposure on search engines. Such a system optimizes search engine rankings for both the broker site as well its agents’, turning the network into a highly competitive online exposure and lead generation engine that delivers significant, incremental benefits to the entire organization.

In-House Service Provider Model - Some franchises and real estate companies offer agent website solutions that are free standing, and typically not directly linked to the brokerage site. The benefits of this model is that the website solution can be a revenue source for the company, provided development and support costs are manageable. The obvious downside is that few companies invest enough into these technologies to keep their agent solutions on the leading edge. They suffer in their visibility, flexibility and lead handling capabilities.

De-Centralized Model - Other brokerages choose to operate a website of their own but give their agents the option to have their own separate website irrespective of whether they use the same service provider or not. This is the more common model, especially for smaller brokerages. Companies like RE/MAX where agents largely operate as independent contractors also use this model. The main draw back from this model, which is a source of pain for many brokerages we have spoken with is that it does not allow the brokerage to control how its brand is represented online.

On the other hand, some of the benefits this approach delivers is more personal marketing freedom for agents, and linkage between sites, which is valuable for enhancing search engine rankings and exposure for everyone involved.

With this approach being the most popular, many brokerages who deploy this model face more challenges over and above controlling the consistency of their branding online, namely:

1) How to maximize online exposure by leveraging website linkage;
2) How to streamline and manage the lead management process between the brokerage and its affiliate agent sites; and,
3) How to ensure the solution remains ahead of the innovation curve to benefit from its technological advantages as well as its value as a recruitment and retention tool

A proven model is to provide agents with a quality template website solution that gives them personal marketing and positioning flexibility, yet reflects the brokerage’s branding accurately and professionally. When distributed to agents, the sites would link to the brokerage site, right out of the box. The benefits are far reaching and go beyond brand control and natural search optimization. Distributing a strong agent solution is also empowering for the brokerage, as it can be a valuable top talent recruitment and retention tool.

An important footnote is in check at this point. Although providing strong template solutions can be a very sound strategy, there are no easy ways around work that must be done in order for it to be effective. Agents cannot all be provided with websites that feature the same canned content. Each agent must customize their site and add unique, timely and relevant content, in order to optimize search engine positioning for the entire organization. An innovative way to help achieve this goal is to provide agents with websites that incorporate blogging functionality.

Where a template solution may have a few canned pages such as an ‘About the Company’ page, home valuation and home search forms, the focus of the sites should be the agent listings, which are all different and, ideally, blog content.

Blogging not only promotes unique content but also benefits the site from the long tail of search (Broad Search terms) and the linking benefits blogs inherently bring to the mix.

White Paper - Part III

2006-10-23T07:28:00.000-07:00

Vertical Search

Vertical Search in real estate refers to websites that are solely dedicated to real estate property search. More and more consumers are today choosing to go directly to such sites for their search, rather than through natural search engines. Examples of vertical search sites include Move.com, Point2Homes.com and RealEstate.com.

Growing Search Options

Over the past year, with the Web 2.0 craze, we’ve seen new real estate vertical search engines pop up everywhere. Trulia, Propsmart, Extate, RealEstateAdvisor and others launched within relatively short periods from each other. We’ve seen many of these new companies innovate the search experience to levels unseen before. Still, many generate content from scraping other real estate websites. In an effort to improve their accuracy and to operate more cooperatively with real estate companies, the majority quickly started to accept structured data feeds as a preferred way to generate their content.

For the purpose of this paper, we will include classified search sites as part of the vertical search discussion. Classified ad sites include Craigslist, LiveDeal, Oodle, Yahoo! Classifieds and perhaps Google Base. Again, over the past year we’ve seen rapid growth in free classified ad sites. Founded in 1995 by Craig Newmark, Craigslist was one of the first free classified ad sites out. Today, the site generates billions of page views each month. While Craig and his team have not aggressively monetized the site, most of the other classified ad sites will move towards generating revenue from selling enhanced advertising placements. In addition to classified ads, Yahoo! and Google allow users to place structured data into their systems. Google Base now provides users with a structured way to search for real estate listings that have been added to its database.

Because most vertical search sites do not charge any fees for uploading listings, they have created new advertising opportunities for real estate companies. For Realtors® who have been accustomed to paying high fees to advertise listings on sites like Realtor.com, this is welcome news.

Numerous real estate search sites have also brought on new challenges. They have dispersed consumers, making it increasingly difficult for brokerages to effectively target their advertising, optimize their online marketing efforts and focus their resources and efforts. Widening the net, beyond exposure on search engines, the MLS® and Realtor.com, has become critical.

Another issue we must examine in the context of online listing exposure is the practice of data scraping by vertical search sites in addition to the use of different listing publishing sources to generate content. Open access to listings comes at the expense of, whom else, the listing broker or agent. It is crucial as such to control listings, for a number of reasons, the least of which is the fact that they are the most valuable marketing asset a Realtor® possesses. Another good reason is to leverage the data to generate analytics and reports that can enhance Internet lead conversion, as well as secure and benefit from a full menu of advertising options available to the real estate professional, on the Internet.

Point2 Technologies was one of the first companies to offer syndication solutions for real estate companies to manage and drive listing feeds to vertical search sites. Over the past year, we have worked closely with the Google Base Team, the Yahoo! Classifieds team, LiveDeal, Trulia, Oodle and other, new startups. In the process, we’ve gained significant insight on syndication:

- Many of the vertical search sites and classified sites have their own feed formats. This means that to send listings to these sites, a separate feed will have to be provisioned for that partner. In their quest to maintain a positive quality of search experience for their consumers, many maintain their feed specifications such that real estate companies must maintain their feeds up to date.

- Real estate vertical search is relatively new. In 2005 and 2006, new companies in this space focused mainly on securing content. What lacks right now, almost across the board, is the ability to provide listing publishing reports to the listing provider. Wide exposure through these new sites can be a powerful addition to listing presentations, but when included, consumers will invariably want to check for their listings. If they are not found, the Realtor® would likely receive a call from the customer, and syndication becomes more of a hassle than a valuable tool. When listings are sent to a search site as part of a structured feed, a real estate company will want a report confirming its listings have been successfully uploaded, along with a URL directing right to each of those listings. Should the upload fail, the report would provide an explanation that can help to resolve the issue quickly and efficiently. To allow better integrations with 3rd parties, vertical search sites that consumer listing feeds need to provide machine readable XML documents - something that is not yet commonly done.

These types of services have been the focus of recent work Point2 has undertaken with its syndication partners, and are proving extremely valuable to real estate companies in incorporating vertical search as part of their marketing.

- The next step is receive analytics back from publishing sites on views and clicks that can be shown to home sellers, to demonstrate the added value a real estate company is bringing on the marketing side. Very few vertical search sites today provide these statistics, but they will soon need to in order to effectively sell enhanced advertising placement products. Once more sites begin to provide useful statistics and reports, real estate companies will gain the added confidence they need to spend advertising dollars on those sites. They will also need an integrated dashboard to efficiently help measure ROI.

The reality is that listings have to show up where consumers are looking online, but the task is daunting and costly. Automating the process is critical, and the collective effort can be a substantial technical investment even to brokerages with strong IT (Information Technology) departments.

Real estate companies will be working with more educated consumers in the future. Companies will need to syndicate their listings to as wide an audience as possible, and they will want to provide their clients with ways to view that exposure and understand its reach, coverage and impact.

The best and easiest solution for leveraging vertical search is to syndicate your listing content. Send structured feeds to listing sites and ensure your company’s website is not being scraped. Your listings get distributed automatically to specialty websites across your markets, and as more of these sites emerge, your service provider is likely to expand their partner network to cover them. Seek one point of data entry, a single menu of syndication sites with the option to opt in or opt out, and an integrated reporting interface with analytics to help you figure where your leads are coming from, for better decision making.

Exposure - Natural Search

2006-10-20T09:53:00.000-07:00

Market Fragmentation & Exposure

According to the 2006 Internet vs. Traditional Buyers Survey published by the California Association of Realtors (CAR), 9 out of 10 Internet buyers found their agent through a real estate search site. As of 2006, Internet buyers represented 71 percent of total buyers, a 10 percent increase over the previous year.

With numbers this high, increasing online exposure should become a major goal for any real estate brokerage. This section explores four strategies successful brokerages must adopt to win in this area:

· Natural Search optimization;
· Vertical search optimization;
· Offline advertising; and,
· Combined online and offline branding.

As we examine each of the four categories, it is worthwhile to note key differences between natural and vertical search. It’s also important to highlight that both are critical.

Natural search refers to optimizing online content for inclusion in traditional search engines indexes, such as Google, Yahoo, MSN Search and Ask. Vertical search on the other hand involves getting listing content submitted to real estate specific search sites. This generally involves feeding structured data to these sources, wherein natural search involves allowing content to be automatically crawled and indexed by machines.

Natural Search

For years, relevance has been one of the primary goals of major search engines. By most accounts, search engines such as Google have improved the relevance of their search results and their ability to programmatically identify the most appropriate documents for specific search terms. Leading local real estate brokerages are in the best position to take advantage of improvements in search, yet few do. Most brokerages lack the basic search engine optimization knowledge on their team, but more problematic is the abundance of choices of online service providers they can work with, many of whom also lack this basic knowledge.

According to the CAR survey mentioned earlier, of all Internet buyers who found their agent through a real estate search site, 60 percent started their search on an Internet search engine. But, unfortunately, many real estate brokerages have made natural search optimization a non goal. While a company’s position on a search engine is by and large not controllable, there are some fundamental strategies companies should follow to optimize their ranking. This is critical, as it directly relates to lead generation. 63% of Internet buyers started their search on an Internet search engine
- CAR 2006 Internet vs. Traditional Home Buyers Survey

Following are three fundamental strategies real estate companies need to think about with respect to visibility through natural search.

I- Popularity - Search engines quantify a website’s popularity by measuring the number of links it has pointing to it. There are many key algorithmic factors that play into the ultimate placement of a site, but in general, the key is to have as many online articles and blogs point to your website as you possibly can. The better quality these websites and blogs are, the more beneficial and relevant their links become to the search engine. A real estate company can start a program focused on seeking links, but the best long term strategy is to incorporate the company’s URL in all offline and online marketing so anyone seeing it can easily access the site and, in the case of blogs, comment on it. The latter is especially important, given the increasing popularity of blogs.

Blogs are an entire topic to themselves, but for the purpose of this paper, I will briefly go over what they are and why they matter.

Blogs are simple websites or website sections that generally display content in reverse chronological order. Content posted by a blog author is typically open for comments by readers, usually leading to discussion about the content by interested parties. The content can be syndicated to third party blogs and websites through a feed (RSS, Atom, XML). Blogging commands time commitment because in order to be engaging and generate an audience, blog content has to be timely, relevant, and valuable to the readers it targets. The benefits however can be significant. Because of their conversational nature, blogs naturally link to each other, helping to multiply the number of links back to your website, a key part of your ‘‘popularity strategy’ with search engines. An excellent source for a more comprehensive discussion on blogs is the book Naked Conversations, by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel.

II- Content - It is critical for search engine optimization to ensure that your most valuable online content can be easily found and indexed by machines. This refers to property listings. Commonly, real estate companies have websites that display listings via a feed or link from the MLS, and place the listing content inside frames. The most important thing to remember from this section is that content in framesets can not be readily seen and indexed by search engine crawlers. Some framesets launch a listing search in a new window with JavaScript, and some hide the majority of listing content behind a registration. These implementations prevent listing content from being properly crawled.

Let’s consider the example of a brokerage that has over 100 property listings. Each listing represents a minimum of one page of valuable content. Since a website’s position in search engines is enhanced by increasing the amount of content it offers, you can effectively leverage each of your listings by giving each its own web address (URL). And to maximize the value of that page to search engine crawlers, that URL should be descriptive.

III- Web Page Description - The third major strategy for search engine optimization is to accurately describe online documents (pages). Real estate is a local business. Therefore, terms consumer use to search for real estate include local information, such as the general location and neighborhood name. Of course, descriptions need to consider listing types, styles and features. As such, online documents or web pages must accurately describe the content on the page, both in the title and meta information. But they also need to describe the content using commonly used search terms and phrases. Doing both will maximize traffic from common searches as well as from the long tail of search. More on that in a moment.

While identifying popular search terms to apply to your listing descriptions on your site, it is important to be deeply descriptive in order to take advantage of the long tail of search.

The long tail refers to deeper or narrower searches conducted by consumers using search engines to find what they are looking for. As search engines have improved at returning relevant content, many people have become more efficient at using them and are conducting more exact searches to help find exactly what they are looking for, faster.

For comparison, following are some examples of Broad Search and Exact Search terms.

Broad Search:

- San Francisco real estate
- San Francisco homes for sale
- Denver real estate
- Denver homes for sale

Exact Search (typically considered the long tail):

- Nob Hill San Francisco homes for sale
- Homes for sale in Nob Hill San Francisco
- Lakeview Denver homes for sale
- Condos for sale in Lakeview Denver, Colorado

It is important to realize that the long tail of search (Exact Search) has today become extremely relevant, as more consumers are now refining their real estate search queries down to the neighborhood name level, rather than by larger city names. Recent analysis conducted by Point2 Technologies using Google Analytics, on traffic generated to the company’s real estate portal www.Point2Homes.com, showed that some of the busiest market centers are getting anywhere from 15 to 40 percent of their direct traffic from narrow neighborhood searches, such as the examples listed above. Below is a chart of direct traffic to a content section on http://www.point2homes.com/. Over the specified time period that covered a total of 420 searches, 126 or 30 percent of the keyword searches were local neighborhood level search, or, search from the long tail.

If all this sounds like a lot of work, it is. But solutions such as Point2 Agent, Point2 Broker and Point2 Builder are designed to address these requirements, automatically optimizing listings pages for major search engines. The real estate professional needs to merely input listing data on simple web forms, and select structured feature sets. In other words, simply enter your listings and allow the underlying technology to manage search engine optimization for you. Further, the Point2 system gives each listing its own optimized URL, so it can be more easily crawled and indexed by search engines.

White Paper Overview

2006-10-20T09:42:00.001-07:00

Overview – Brokerage Online Marketing Strategies

The real estate industry is changing rapidly. The source of much of that change is the Internet, which itself is undergoing rapid and constant change. The Web is becoming a richer medium with innovations in video that are raising user expectations to new heights. Online service companies are turning themselves inside out, creating open and interoperable systems that are driving innovation at blinding speed. Internet adoption as part of daily life across all segments of the population has made it near universal. Search has evolved, allowing consumers to more quickly and easily find what they are looking for. For the real estate industry, this means that an extremely high percentage of consumers today research real estate online, demand more access to data, and expect a better user experience. This also means that innovation in real estate and related businesses is happening at a faster pace than ever before.

Story after story suggests that more brokerages are drawing significant benefits from new consumer trends online. This is the consumer who goes first to the Internet to research real estate.

Be it to research their next home, the value of their property, or merely to gauge how much of a home they can afford, more consumers are now going online.

Specifically, over 80 percent of them and increasing, according to numerous surveys published by the National Association of Realtors® (NAR), regional Realtor® associations, franchises and other industry sources.

We’ve all become very familiar with the numbers. But how to exactly take advantage of these trends and the massive technology advances in the industry remains elusive to many real estate organizations.

With the majority of consumers now using the Internet to research real estate, brokerages must first and foremost focus on increasing Internet exposure, brand awareness, lead generation, conversion and lastly, better inter-brokerage cooperation.

Real estate companies that do not develop a comprehensive online strategy will risk losing their competitiveness and will see enormous, constantly evolving opportunities pass them by. Moreover, it is the responsibility of all real estate firms today to participate in a strategy that can ensure the new consumer continues to turn to organized real estate despite the constant barrage of innovation that incessantly encourages them to consider or seek alternatives.

This paper looks at specific, actionable strategies and technologies real estate brokerages can embrace today to help enhance their competitiveness online.

Brokerage White Paper

2006-10-20T09:37:00.000-07:00

Again, it's been a while since I've posted. I'm going to post chucks of a white paper we've been working on that discusses Brokerage marketing and adressing the needs of the new consumer. I'll try to get all the images up properly.

Looking for Syndication Feedback

2006-09-28T16:02:00.000-07:00

Ok, i'm also looking for a different set of feedback. I'd like to know how Syndicating listings has impacted your business. Do you mention it in listing presentation? Does it help you list? Do consumers ask about advertising their listing in places like Google? I need some success stories. I also need to know what is right and what is wrong. Please submit your comments!

Looking For feedback on UltraStats

2006-09-28T15:53:00.000-07:00

I'm looking for any of our users to comment on their experiences with Ultrastats. How have you used? What type of results were you able to generate from the information? How valuable are they to you?

I'm preparing a case study and I need a couple of members to include. Looking forward to any and all feedback.

Jeff

Agent Handshake, it's legality and the MLS

2006-09-26T15:06:00.000-07:00

As more and more people begin using Point2, we have a non-stop flow of questions that come in regarding Agent Handshake. Many MLSs are now telling their members that they can not use Agent Handshake. So I thought it important to post this information about the system, its legality and its relationship to the MLS.

Facts
a) Real estate brokers enter into listing agreements with real estate sellers to advertise their listings;
b) Members are bound by the Point2 Agent License Agreement (“License”);
c) The License contains a provision that states as follows:“Where User (Member) participates in or utilizes Agent Handshake, User grants the right to use, publish, promote or otherwise advertise User’s shared listings to other applicable Point2 Agent users. Further, User represents and warrants that they are authorized to make said grant of rights to other Point2 Agent users…”;
d) After agreeing to the License, Members can enter listing information about real estate into their Point2 Agent portal and subsequently choose to advertise those listings on other specific Point2 Agent Member portals;
e) Of that listing information in d), a separate, proprietary compilation of listing information about real estate may or may not be entered into the local MLS system.
f) Each jurisdiction (State/Province) has regulatory bodies relating to the “trade” of real estate. The regulations often relate to the advertising of Multiple Listing Service real estate listings. The regulations protect real estate consumers.

Questions
Questions about Agent Handshake arise with respect to different Real Estate Boards and Legislation and Multiple Listing Services. Generally, the questions tend to arise due to a lack of clarity with respect to:
a) How the Agent Handshake system operates among the members of the Point2 Agent Community (“Member(s)”)?
b) How the Agent Handshake system operates between Members and third parties?
c) How the Agent Handshake system operates between Members and MLS’s?

Analysis
a) How the Agent Handshake system operates among Members?
The Agent Handshake system and how it relates to locate real estate professionals, is generally governed by the listing agreement between broker and seller, the License and applicable state legislation respecting the regulation of the trade of real estate.

Normally, these governing documents recognize that the listing information is owned by the broker. As the owner of the listing information, the broker is generally able to advertise this listing information in any medium or mechanism as desired (subject to certain requirements of state legislation). The Agent Handshake system is an applicable mechanism that the broker is legally entitled to advertise their listing information on.

b) How the Agent Handshake system operates between Members and third parties?
Simply put, it doesn’t.

Agent Handshake is a “closed system.” It does not accept any compilations of listing information from other systems. A Member must enter a separate, proprietary compilation of listing information in the Agent Handshake system. That compilation of listing information can only then be shared with other Members of Point2 Agent.

However, the Member also may choose to utilize Point2’s listing syndication services. This service lets Members advertising their compilation of listing information on recipient sites such as Google Base and RealEstate.com.

c) How the Agent Handshake system operates between Members and MLS’s?

Similar to b), it does not. The Listing entered into an MLS system is a different compilation of the listing than the one entered into the Agent Handshake system by Members. Therefore, two diffferent listing information compliations of the same real estate may exist in each respective system. These compilations are two different pieces of property, both owned by the Listing Broker.

The MLS system and how it relates to listing compilations created using their tools is generally governed by the listing agreement between broker and seller, the MLS licensing agreement and applicable state legislation respecting the regulation of the trade of real estate.

Conclusion
Agent Handshake and the MLS are two different systems. Listing information in each respective system are both governed by the listing agreement between broker and seller and applicable state legislation respect the trade of real estate. However, the listing compilations in each system are governed by the respective systems Agreement with the user and neither system’s Agreement have any impact on the other system.

Now, that is the long answer to the question: Why is my MLS telling me that I can not use Handshake? The short answer is that most MLSs mistakingly assume that listings in the Point2 system are being imported from the MLS. They are not MLS data, but are rather original content posted manually by our brokers and their representatives (agents). Thus the MLS has little or no jurisdiction over the use of that data in almost all cases.

Agent Handshake, MLS Data, legal, real estate listing use, real estate advertising

Messaging and Clarity

2006-09-25T13:00:00.000-07:00

So reflecting back on the title of this Blog, "Real Estate Alchemy", "... a power or process of transforming something common into something special." What makes a company or service special? I think clarity is one thing that makes a company special.

David Dalka wrote a brief summary of a speech Google's Michael Adelberg gave at Associated Cities' Geo Domain Conference. Michael's short statement that Dalka quotes has an impact. In Dalka's words, Michael state that it is his division's mandate to, "Organize the world's local information and make it useful."

That is an example of a very clear outward facing message. It creates clarity for the consumer audience and the mandate itself must create clarity within the Local Team itself. It surprises me that with all the growth Google has had and all the new tools and product offerings, their outward messages remain the same. They are a search company. "Use our stuff to search."

Clarity is something that we at Point2 have struggled with to improve. As a company expands its product offerings, it's difficult to have a succinct outward facing message that also explains the breadth of what the company does. And certainly, clarity itself is more important than breadth. But clear messages not only align internal teams, they help differentiate your company from others.

Whether you are a software development company or you are a Realtor, how are you creating clarity in your audience's mind? What do you do? When you say it, will I remeber it? Why are you different? Does what you do grab my attention? Are you solving a problem of mine? Are you solving my problem in a way that other people can't or in a way they aren't?

Michael Adelberg, Google, Oranizational Clarity, Messaging,

Amazing Design Effort

2006-09-21T09:19:00.000-07:00

I linked to this site in my post yesterday, but I really need to give it more props. Ginger Fawcett created her own website using Point2 Agent and it's one of the most outstanding efforts I've seen to date. It's important for us at Point2 because we are trying to build flexibility into our system that will allow for unlimited design options. Here is her site: www.websterkirkwood.com

More impressive than the actual results is the effort that Ginger committed. She wrote in Realtalk,

"I originally spent several thousand dollars with two different designers trying to get a custom site. They failed me miserably. So I decided to buy a book, learn html and attempt setting things up in a "template" site with some serious customization ... It has taken me four months to design, learn html, edit, write, etc. Now I feel a bit like a mini expert on Point2 sites but I still have much to learn and much to tweak."

That's a commitment to excellence and I hope the effort pays off lots of new business. Outstanding work Ginger.

Point2 Agent, Point2 Real Estate Website Design, Ginger Fawcett

Get the New Feed

2006-09-20T08:45:00.000-07:00

I've updated by to use Feedburner. Please get the new feed!
http://feeds.feedburner.com/RealEstateAlchemy"

(Your efforts are appreciated! I'm really going to blog more)

Software Product Strengths Not Always Apparent

2006-09-20T06:35:00.000-07:00

I'm back from the black. Ok, this time I'll really commit to staying current :-(

I came across a review of Point2 Agent this morning posted by Joel Burslem. It immediately put me on the defensive. I was going to post a comment on his blog, then I was going to slam him here, but I grabbed a coffee, chilled and took some time to think about it. He tried our software, it told him to use a specific type of browser, he didn't use the browser choices and thus didn't recommend us. Really, our software should have just worked.

Here are the high/low points on the review:

He says some nice things about Point2 Homes. It's a work in progress and I hope people continue to track our success there.

Joel doesn't care for our claim to be "The Most Popular Real Estate Software in the World". As of this morning, we have just under 93,000 users. While adding 100-200/day, I'm not sure who beats us here, but if someone shows us we've overstepped our bounds, I'm sure we'd gladly adjust our slogin to "93,000 Realtors are using us, why aren't you?"

The real kicker however is that he tried to create an account and he received an error on login indicating he needs IE version 5.5 or higher to use Point2 Agent. Since we received zero points from him, I gather he didn't try to login with a version IE. IE 5.5 is very old now, updates are free and we are several versions past it now. Google Analytics tells us that 99.5% of all IE users are using version 5.5 or higher with 96.78 using version 6. Jay Thompson (one of our favorite members!) commented on the blog that he can successfully use Firefox with Point2 Agent. Indeed you can with the IE plugin. These 2 browsers cover 95.31% of all users visiting Point2.

Ok, so there's part of the justification behind our IE selection. We can make our system universally accessible, but it falls lower on massive list of projects, maintenance issues and feature requests that we receive. We conducted an informal poll of many of our users several months ago and found that while some prefer to use a browser like Firefox, almost everyone also had IE. Moreover, all were willing to use IE 5.5, 6.0 (and now 7) OR get the IE plugin for Firefox when they login to manage their Point2 account. So that's the other part of our justification.

I logged an issue to update that error warning this morning to give more details, be more friendly and provide work arounds links for other browsers.

As I stated above, our software should have just worked. So we will be working on compatibility. In my humble opinion, to recommend another product [until Point2 makes its software more accessible] is a little short sighted. We are nearly universal and while Joel was not tempted to dig deeper, our support team almost never hears accessibility issues from our 93,000 members.
I also have a couple of notes from comments that were made. I was concerned that a couple criticisms that came out, are actually some of our strengths.

Bill Nadraszky commented that all Point2 sites look the same. There is a key distinction here. Point2 provides a tool set but we do not offer custom design services. If you look at most Blogger blogs, you would see a lot of common themes. It's because the average users will only go so far and there tends to be common preferences. At this stage in our product lifecycle, Point2 Agent is becoming more of a platform and from a template based solution, is the most flexible in the industry. I've assembled some links and I think you would agree that these members all look like they are using custom websites. They are in fact using Point2, many with the help of professional designers. The limitation is not in the software, but in the desire of the member.

http://www.tararosen.com/
http://www.websterkirkwood.com/Home/page_1682688.html
http://www.teamtotrust.com/
http://www.prescottlandagent.com/
http://www.newportlandhome.com/
http://www.vreas.com/
http://www.elizabethmcqueen.net/
http://www.charlestoncommunities.com/
http://www.joannesizemore.com/
http://www.yourmidislandrealtor.com/
http://www.call-pam.com/
http://www.bakersfieldfineliving.com/

Lastly to the comments on search engine indexing. It's important to know that Point2 Agent is the best solution in the industry for gaining exposure in natural and vertical search. We are currently syndicating listings to 9 partners which means that when our members add a listing, they gain instant exposure.

While our sites index well for broad search terms, the ultimate rank our members achieve will depend on their own marketing. Broad search terms drive the majority of traffic, but nearly 40% of the traffic we track comes from the long tail of search. We generate a unique URL for each listing and optimize the page for natural search. Search or "lakeview Saskatoon homes for sale" and you will probably find 5-6 unique listings in that local neighborhood.

Future of the MLS

2006-08-20T10:26:00.000-07:00

Brian Larson, just wrote a 3 part series for Inman News on the Future of MLS without interbroker compensation. It's a great read. In part 3 that was published today, he discusses a potential new model he calls FLS, Future Listing Services. He notes most MLS participants percieve the main value in of the MLS lying in lisiting and data organization and management, rather than in the core purpose, interbroker compensation. Without interbroker compensation, he discusses what an FLS might look like.

It is important to note that Larson states, "...I suspect that readers will find as many solutions as they will problems and will probably offer more compelling potential models as well." So he is not trying to provide the definitive model, but I want to talk about a couple fascinating talking points.

The first question Larson asks: "What if as FLS merely viewed itself as an aggregator and distributor of listings on behalf of brokers?"
- Why would Larson limit this description to brokers.? More and more consumers want to participate in the selling of their home. It seems that an FLS would need to consider consumer, FSBOs, in some capacity if it wants to be an authoritative source of homes for sale. Many MLSs will include FSBO listings today. Well the reason Larson provides is one of data quality. The FLS would have no leverage over the one time consumer in its quality control efforts. But according to one of his own solutions, if some data is backfilled, or corrected, by checking 3rd party sources such as public record, many potential missing data points such as sold price, date etc, can be eventually updated. Secondly, I feel that the power of online community can compel most people to voluntarily participate in a desired way. You don't have to look much further than Craigslist to see this.

More importantly is the issue of representation. What does allowing FSBO's to enter data into an MLS or FLS do to the organized real estate industry? I don't have the answer for that but my feeling is that the way to connect all home sellers and buyers to organized real estate is to ensure they use the same interconnected platform rather than having them go to 3rd party solutions such as Craigslist, FSBO.com and any myriad of the FSBO or classified search engines available today. For every FSBO that eventually lists through a Realtor, there are ones that are successfully selling their own home.

Larson discusses access. His idea is that an FLS would provide free access to brokers and the public to view listings, but visitors must register. My first reaction is that this makes the FLS a second class source to vertical search engines that do not require registration. Why require visitors to register? The data is out there, it has been liberated and in my opinion that train has left the station. Now, if registration is something that the industry just must have, the issue of user adoption can probably be solved by using solutions such as federated identities, allowing users to use accounts they already have for other online services.

The 3rd set of comment I have to mention are those of listing control.

"The principal broker in each listing firm can pick and choose which registered recipients receive that brokerage's listings, checking a box for each entity she wants to receive the data... If a broker does not like the way a data recipient is using her data, she can complain to the recipient, and if dissatisfied, she can stop sending her listings to that recipient..."

Cooperating brokers in an FLS with full control. There is no discrimination of any kind. Brokers own the listings and in order to use a broker's listing content, a party needs to maintain a good relationship with that broker. This is exactly the reasoning that lead to the development of Point2's Handshake platform. And now other's like Mr. Larson are talking about the very problems it solves and the sense that it makes.

t

Future MLS, Point2 Agent Handshake, Brian Larson

Back from Inman

2006-08-02T14:52:00.000-07:00

Now if I was a real blogger, I would have been blogging from Inman... I'm working on it! I've got to say that blogging is a commitment.

Brendan was on a panel for the Boot Camp opening session on sourcing Internet leads. The discussion went well, Brendan represented and we got a chance to distribute our second copy of BrokerAge magazine. The magazine was heavily read and well received... i'm trying to upload some photos here but Blogger isn't letting me :-(

Whilst there here are a few things we accomplished:

We met with almost all of our feed partners. We're going put together a case study with LiveDeal who reports some awesome results to us. I hope to have it together in a couple of weeks and i'll post it here first. We met with Oodle, who by the way has a very cool new office, Trulia who has a big presence there, Propsmart, and reps from Google. The boys at Google are nice and laid back... must be all that $ they're rolling in. We communicated the urgent need for better reports on upload failures and the publishing of URLs so we can verify a listing has been accepted by our feed partners.

The most important feed partner meeting we has was with Yahoo. Their current classified system is old and in need of a complete overhaul. It appears that they are in the middle of an overhaul and we hop to participate with feedback and user testing. Their reps, Michael Yang, Brian Rothenburg and Vivin were great to speak with and seemed eager to work with the right partners.

We've just signed a significant co-marketing deal with a industry leader that'll we'll announce publicly soon enough (sorry to do that). We enjoyed a celebration dinner at Silks. The food was amazing, but I wouldn't recommend going if you have a big ol hunger on.

We met with some Bus Dev's from Zillow. I've got to say, they're a very humble bunch over there. Smart guys that I think are doing some good things. They recently partnered with Yahoo in integrated the Zillow API into Yahoo Real Estate. I'd love any feedback on what our members would think of such an integration with P2 sites?

We also met the guys from Active Rain, Matt and Caleb. I really like what they are doing... smart guys. I'd like to find a way to work with them and I

We met with a bunch of new, potential partners and I expect that we'll return next year with a similar presence.

Point2 and Yahoo Organic Search

2006-08-01T07:48:00.000-07:00

There was a post on Realtalk indicating that Advanced Access sites and Point2 sites were dropped from Yahoo. I had heard of the AA dilemma, but not ours. The first search I checked was "Calgary Homes for Sale". I found 4 Point2 sites on the front page. So time to breathe easy. I checked the Yahoo referrals over time and this is what the trend line looks line from March to present.

It's not going up quickly, but it certainly hasn't fallen off. Having said that, Yahoo has not been kind to real estate sites in general and their overall strategy in the real estate vertical is questionable. Why would the Internet's largest portal and second largest search engine align itself with one franchise (Prudential) and alienate the entire rest of the industry? Strategically, it does not make sense. The Prudential affiliates represent only a fraction of the 1.2 million Realtor population that is prepared to spend advertising dollars online. The IDX feeds they have from Prudential do not represent a sufficiently high enough percentage of the total homes for sale. Thus the consumer search suffers. According to a Prudential Executive at the recent Inman Connect Conference, Prudential affiliates can not handle all the leads that Yahoo is sending, exclusively to them. Again, the consumer experience suffers. Their natural search index is yet another example where I feel the consumer experience is inadequate.

As for Google, which is where any online business should focus the majority of their attention, their search results are becoming more relevant and their index is including better and better content to improve consumer search.

Point2 Agent websites have been performing well in Google which is by far the largest referral source. Growth over the past year has been steady. Natural search is more relevant today for consumers who are conducting targeted local neighborhood searches such as "Capital Hill Denver Homes for sale". If content is indexed, a consumer can find their target faster than going to a real estate website. And thus natural search is more beneficial for local Realtors who target local content. This is known as the 'Long Tail of Search'.

Point2 Homes has experienced massive growth this year and it is the most effective portal at getting local neighborhood content indexed. Conduct a search for any neighborhood, city with the keyword term homes for sale. Try this search - "north denver heights homes for sale". Our goal is to get listings indexed and drive consumer inquiries directly back to the Realtor. This provides our members a 2 fold strategy for natural search. If their website is not ranked high enough to have listings displayed prominently, there is a good change Point2 Homes will be found.

But it brings up a good topic of natural search. How much time should the average Realtor be focusing on natural search? The search landscape is changing fast. The newest and fasted growing trend is vertical search and online classified services. Vertical search refers to serach engines that focus on a specific vertical market. In real estate, vertical search is exploding with new 'pure' sites like Trulia, Extate, Edgeio and Point2Homes, emerging to compete with the traditional vertical search like Realtor.com, Realestate.com. Complemetary to this trend, classified search sites such as Craigslist, Oodle, Google Base, Yahoo Classifieds and LiveDeal are growing just as quickly. Together, these sites provide a way for for consumers to search through structured data better than traditional search engines. Data is organized bettter, the search has appropriate filters, maps are commonly provided for local data and the data is updated better by publishers providing a better consumer search experience.

As search becomes more and more competitive for large meto marketplaces (city and state level searches), it will be more and more difficult for Realtors to compete for broad search terms (like: Denver Real Estate) with sites like Realtor.com, RealEstate.com, Homegain, other lead generators and the main sites for large brokerages. It is clear that Realtors should use tools to get indexed for targeted local searches, and them focus on getting their most valuable marketing assets, listings, into as many vertical search engines and classified sites as possible. A major focus for Point2 is helping our members follow these 2 strategies.

Yahoo Classifieds Feed Update

2006-07-20T09:04:00.000-07:00

I wish I was posting good news on the Yahoo Classifieds feed. Alas, i'm not. We are still waiting on their techincal team to identify and resolve the bug on their end. Just to show how erratic their display of our feed has been, here is a graph of the referrals from Yahoo over the couple of months.

Every once and a while we'll get a big jump. The good news here is that we'll be meeting with the Yahoo Biz Dev people in San Francisco at the Inman Connect Conference next week. We hope to get someone committed to not only resolving the issue, but also committed to placing new resources on their classifieds engine.

As everyone should know, Yahoo Real Estate has a agreement with Prudential to display all of their IDX feeds. It was an easy way to get a lot of data. It's great for Prudential affiliates, terrible for everyone else and frankly, I'm shocked that Yahoo would align itself with one franchise and alienate the rest of the industry.

Yahoo Classifieds is the one bone they throw to rest of the industry. Notwithstanding the limitations they have in real estate as a result of their contract with Prudential, they should be focusing more resources on their Classifieds product to give more even exposure to other affiliations and expand their content base.

Yahoo Classifieds, Point2 Syndication

Point2 Syndication Update

2006-07-10T14:39:00.000-07:00

Some of our Canadian members may have recieved some bizzare emails the past couple of days. We are just working the final kinks out of the new LiveDeal.ca feed. When a new listing was added some member may have received an email that looks something like this:

----- Original Message -----
From:
To:
Sent: Wednesday, July 05, 2006 11:10 AM
Subject: Items uploaded

> Thank you for advertising in point2tech, powered by LiveDeal. Your
> classified ad is now online at
> http://point2tech.livedeal.com//ShowItemDetail?id=344370
>
> To modify your ad (expand your ad copy or upload photos) please click
> here:
> http://point2tech.livedeal.com//ModifyItem?publisher=point2tech&ref_id=E7F2308D-3F63-4A7C-A092-140DB6B26D59
>
> Your Ad Login ID: E7F2308D-3F63-4A7C-A092-140DB6B26D59
>
> Your Password: Enter your phone number in the space provided
>
> Questions? Please email Member Support at support@livedeal.ca
>
> *****************************
> This is an automated mailing.

This email is obviously meant for individual people who open a single LiveDeal store. The email should be suppessed and will be shortly. Sorry for any confusion out there.

Jeff
- One feed at a time...

Point2 Syndication Update

2006-06-30T08:20:00.000-07:00

On our messagboard, Cyd Weeks noticed that Edgeio has not been quickly updating their content from our feed. Most of the others update their feeds regularly. We noticed that Edgeio has not been regularly updating their content from us and are working with them to increase the frequency of their updates.

You'll notice that some of these new sites (Edgeio and Propsmart) are very slow sometimes. I think they are going through some growing pains. It's certainly a challenge for us trying to ensure they are providing some reliability.

As for other updates, LiveDeal.ca is in the final stages of testing and we should be up shortly. Propsmart has identified a bug they have that is preventing some properties from displaying. They are in the process of fixing.

Point2 Syndication Update

2006-06-23T14:09:00.000-07:00

Ok gang, I'm going to get my act together and start providing better update on our syndication initiatives. Here is an update on what partners we have live:

Canada - Listings are syndicated to Point2Homes, Google Base, Edgeio. Very soon, we'll have LiveDeal.ca up.

US - Listings are syndicated to Point2Homes, Google Base, Edgeio, Trulia, Oodle, Yahoo Classifieds and Propsmart. We have a number of other partners in the works, but I'm not going to announce them until we are either live or a little closer to being live.

Issues that our members should note:
Yahoo Classifieds - There is currently a bug where it appears not all of our listings are making it there. Yahoo just recently changed their Yahoo Classifieds section. We have a couple of issues submitted to their team.

I'm looking for any and all feedback on from our members on how to make our syndication services better.

Jim Buckmaster From Craigslist on Classifieds

2006-06-20T14:00:00.000-07:00

I suppose I should get cracking and get part 2 and part 3 finished and posted.

I came across this article of an interview with Jim Buckmaster of Craigslist. There's something to be learned here, but I'm can't put my finger on it...

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115049840863382886-9QyN65ef6meo_D2UlLOxAdRmbN0_20070616.html?mod=rss_free

Craigslist, Jim Buckmaster, Classified Advertising

The Critical Need for Rich Data: Part 2

2006-06-05T15:38:00.000-07:00

Increasing Exposure and Visibility
on a congested Internet

Listings are marketing assets. In the past, a listing has given the listing agent the opportunity to place sign in front of a home and brand him or herself in that local neighborhood. The Internet is providing the same opportunity for real estate agents to brand themselves online through their listings.

Major industry store fronts and the wave of new store fronts and vertical search engines are providing the newest and most effective way to brand yourself through your listings. Currently, it is also the most cost effective way to advertise as most of these site will publish listing content for free.

Vertical Search, blogging systems that facilitate tagging, and microformats are all providing ways for consumers to find more content, more easily. It is becoming more important to publish better content that not only gets consumed, but can be found. By publishing content better, what do we mean?

When you publish listings to your own website, do they exist on their own unique URL or do they exist in an iframe. Search engines can not generally view content in an iframe. If you conduct local real estate searches you will find sites like Homegain, RealEstate.com because they have figured out this very simple fact a very long time ago. You will not find Remax, C21 or Coldwell Banker, because they have not focused on publishing search engine friendly content.

When you publish a listing, do you write detailed content, meta information and page titles that not only describe the listing, but use keywords that consumers use in serch? The document must accurately describe the content.

When you publish photos of your listing, are you embedding meta content so the images can be indexed by search engine image search?

If you have a extraodinary listing, does your listing content, the photos, slide shows and video make people want to talk about it and share it? With blogging, more people are having discussions online. Are they talking about you and your content?

Are your listings syndicatable?

Publish content properly is becoming increasingly important for online visibility. Real estate companies will need to ensure they are using tools that facilitate easy publishing and syndication.

The Critical Need for Rich Data: Part 1

2006-05-30T13:31:00.000-07:00

Generating Consumer Response
from a changing consumer

There are some critical online consumer trends to understand by all real estate professionals. According to the 2005 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, 93% of visitors to real estate websites are looking for listings.

When asked exactly what they were looking for, 86% indicated the most valuable content is listing photos and descriptions. With new classified listings sites, vertical search engines, national and local FSBO websites, you need to provide a better consumer experience to keep attention and make the consumer want to return to your website.

It is critical to pay attention to this online consumer and connect with them. According to the California Association of Realtors 2005 Internet vs. Traditional Buyers Study, 83% of buyers will use the Internet in their next home search. 62% will be classified as an ‘Internet Buyer’ who will use the Internet as a significant part of the home search process.

Make no mistake however, this changing consumer should be embraced, not feared. Look at the compelling profile of Internet Buyers:

1. Internet searchers are higher income earners and thus more likely to be qualified.
• Internet buyers had an annual income of $185,088, compared with $151,190 for traditional buyers.
- California Association of Realtors' "2005 Internet Versus Traditional Buyers Survey”
• On a National scale, Internet searchers had an annual income of $74,600 compared with $56,600 for those that did not use Internet to search.
- 2005 National Association of Realtors “Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers”

2. Internet buyers have conducted more research and transact faster after they contact you.
• When Internet buyers shopped for homes with an agent, they took only two weeks before selecting a home, while traditional buyers took seven weeks.
- California Association of Realtors' "2005 Internet Versus Traditional Buyers Survey"

3. Internet buyers take less of your time in the homes search process
• Because the Internet allows buyers to preview homes, a typical Internet buyer only viewed 6.2 homes with their agent, while traditional buyers visited 14.5 homes.
- California Association of Realtors' "2005 Internet Versus Traditional Buyers Survey"

4. Internet buyers are more likely to use a real estate agent
• 93% of Internet searchers used a real estate agent while only 75% of non-Internet users or traditional buyers, used a real estate agent.
- 2005 National Association of Realtors “Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers

5. Internet buyers are growing in numbers
• As the graph above shows, Internet buyers are increasing as a total percentage of real estate consumers. 62% of all buyers are now using the Internet as a significant resource.
- California Association of Realtors' "2005 Internet Versus Traditional Buyers Survey”

A listing is a marketing asset. Your competition, FSBO sites, the Zillow’s of the world, are all aggressively trying to connect with the consumer. You have to keep pace if you want to generate online response and create a destination point for consumers.

Introduction to Rich Data

2006-05-30T13:13:00.000-07:00

The Critical Need to Publish Rich Listing Data: Why Your Competitive Advantage Online Depends On It

With online competition heating up, consumers are finding and revisiting websites that give them what they are looking for. Traffic is becoming more expensive to generate. Your content needs to be found, it needs to hold attention, generate return visits and generate response.

There are 3 emerging trends you critically need to understand and capitalize on in order to take advantage of a changing industry. Those that understand and take action will lead. Those that do nothing, will at a minimum, leave money on the table and in the worst case, lose their livelihood.

The 3 trends are changing consumer behavior, syndication and search, and the way the Internet is changing brands. Consumers want more access to data today. They want to do their own research and become more involved in the buying and selling process. Search engines are evolving. Not only is search becoming a more important way to advertise, it is changing by focusing on vertical markets and improving they way content is indexed and represented. The Internet is creating and destroying brands. With the volume of online traffic surging, the Internet may be the most important medium to promote a brand and those that ignore it suffering. It’s not good enough to just ‘be’ there. You need to take an active role and develop an online strategy.

Rich data in real estate refers to the publishing of detailed, quality photos, property descriptions and information. The discussion I’ll have in 3 parts will explain why publishing rich data is crucial to take advantage of the 3 big trends we are facing in real estate.

New Feeds

2006-05-15T13:44:00.000-07:00

We're excited to get some new feeds up for our Point2 Agent members. This last week, we have been testing the new feeds live on Propsmart, LiveDeal, and EdgeIO. Here are some samples:

http://www.livedeal.com/ShowItemDetail?id=12907282
http://www.propsmart.com/520-8219
http://edgeio.com/item/housing/air+conditioning/363646-Home-for-Sale-in-Oaklawn-Dallas-Texas-$625000

Point2, Real Estate Feeds, Listing Exposure, LiveDeal, edgeio,Propsmart

Opt-Out Clarification

2006-05-01T07:08:00.000-07:00

Brendan's blog post on a National MLS got quite a bit of industry reaction. Inman news published the post as a guest perspective. I was asked the other day however if our support of the NAR's position on opt out was our actual belief or just a capitulation to the industry. It deserves some clarification.

We believe in the need of opt out provisions. In general, brokers are not going to opt out of exposure like Google Base, Yahoo Classifieds, Oodle, Trulia, etc. that advertises them and sends the contact back to them. But they need control over the cooperative marketing (IDX, ILD, VOW) with other real estate companies. Brokers shouldn't be forced to cooperate with companies that undermine their business model. The MLSs can't however have a selective-opt out provision, it's anti-competitive (probably). But Brokers can make individual business decisions on whom to cooperate with if they have the technology to do so. Handshake is meant to address that need.

Handshake, Point2, National MLS, Real Estate Brokerage Technology

Google Real Estate is dark cloud over newspapers

2006-04-07T12:39:00.000-07:00

I read this article on Google Real Estate:

http://news.com.com/2061-11199_3-6058496.html

It seems to me that there are too many industry analysts bashing the likes of Google Base and Zillow on the topic of quality and quanitity of content. Google Base is new to the game and I am confident that they will get all of the content. Newspapers will not be able to compete in so far as Google continues to index all the content they can and monetize those that want improved placement. Yahoo has backed itself into a corner by making content secondary to revenue. He who has the most content, the best content and provides the easiest way to find the content, will win.

Real estate leads - answering is the first step

2006-03-30T07:19:00.000-08:00

In the past Inman Audio conference, the discussion was on vertical search. When asked about using search to generate traffic Ira Serkes, a RE/MAX broker commented that traffic isn't his problem now days. He is most concerned with maximizing leads generated and most importantly, converting those leads into business. It's an issue we have been working on at Point2. We've been building a new SMS lead notification system that is currently being tested in Beta. Realtor.com conducted a consumer survey that showed over half of email inquiries go unanswered by Realtor's. Moreover, most consumers expect an answer to inquiries within 4 hours and a significant number expect immediate response. It seems obvious that the first part in conversion is timely response. While not all leads generated from websites want to be contacted, our Hot Prospect notification system will allow members to configure what types of leads get routed to their mobile device while the other will be handled and incubated with drip email. I'm anxious to get this out have hear the feedback.

Technorati Hookup

2006-03-21T15:35:00.000-08:00

Technorati Profile

Transparency

2006-03-21T10:07:00.000-08:00

Web 2.0 companies are all about transparency and interoperability. How about this for transparency, the founder of Edgeio, rss engine for classified listings, formally introduces the product at PC forum with 2 testimonials, 2 bad reviews and 1 ugly one! Online companies are using a different model of promotion. It’s about building trust through honesty and it creates a refreshing form of connection – discussion, community and relationships.

Here I am

2006-03-12T19:55:00.000-08:00

On March 7, 2006, I returned home from a trip to the Dominican Republic. Over the course of a couple of days, while relaxing by the pool and sipping tropical drinks, I read Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. I was already excited about blogging technology and RSS before I read the book, but I'm absolutely spinning now. It's hard for me to credibly help bring the Real Estate Industry into the blogosphere without having a blog of my own however. So here's me stepping into the 2000's!