Blogging

Monday morning to-do list:

1. Buy milk.
2. Attend Send Steve to property inspection.
3. Finish taxes. (Yeah, right.)
4. Call seller clients with market updates.
5. Find the cat.
6. Write for Inman News Blog.
7. Reorder property brochures.

Wait a minute… Write for Inman News Blog?

Inman News, a long-time industry staple for those of us needing our daily real estate news fix, is reintroduced this morning. The site has been “prettified” for sure, and the news and consumer advice columns which have always been the cornerstone of the Inman offering will remain so. But the content is now deeper with the addition of a “Community” feature which will allow members to interact through groups and commentary and to even create profiles. They say that their goal is not to be the dominant industry social network, but I can certainly see this as a long-term possibility. I am all about one-stop shopping.

As a part of their Community, Inman will be expanding their familiar blog offering to include articles from community contributors. As reported Friday: 

As part of the new Web site launch, Inman News has invited a few top bloggers to lead the new Community section with lively blog posts and podcasts each week. We’re thrilled to have these insightful writers join the team to help Inman News deliver even more insight into the latest technologies, trends and issues impacting real estate professionals.

Our new community contributors include:

• Teresa Boardman, an agent and licensed broker in St. Paul, Minn., and founder of the St. Paul Real Estate Blog
• Kris Berg, broker associate with Prudential California Realty in San Diego, and blogger at the San Diego Home Blog
• Jeff Turner, president of Real Estate Shows in Santa Clarita, Calif., and avid blogger at ActiveRain
• Daniel Rothamel, an agent with Strong Team Realtors in Charlottesville, Va., and founder of Real Estate Zebra.

Now, if that doesn’t scare the socks off of a small-time working girl whose Outlook calendar is about to implode, I don’t know what does! Time to get in touch with my insightful, lively self. Just as soon as I find the cat. By the way, Inman, I noticed that Teresa and Daniel are credited with founding their blogs, while I apparently just hang out at mine. On second thought, it’s probably better to leave the impression that I didn’t actually set out to create this site on purpose. It makes me less accountable.

Inman staff admits that there will be some bugs along the way. My to-do list this morning pales in comparison to what I can only image theirs has looked like over the past year in undertaking a complete redesign and migration of content accumulated since 1995. (Remember 1995? Those were the days when neither Inman nor I needed a face lift. What a difference a decade makes.) Many of us have been test-driving the beta version of the site for awhile and, this morning, the only glitch I am seeing is that the site loads just a little slower than molasses.

I like molasses. It buys me some time.

Tomorrow, more real estate chatter. But, today, the mainstream media gives us a nod.

Bloggers wield a heavy hammer indeed.

Ann Brenoff writes this morning about bloggers in the Los Angeles Times.  In her article, she mentions a bevy of real estate blogs, and it appears I just made the cut. Page two, last paragraph - I’m the closer. Either I’m Trevor Hoffman or an afterthought. Let’s go with the baseball analogy.

Even some agents have caught the “amuse them and they will come” fever. Kris Berg’s San Diego Home Blog is a “must read” because of her Erma Bombeck-like voice.

Erma Bombeck? How funny that our little “educate and get educated project” has found this voice. My children, however, aren’t laughing.

If blogs had been around 18 years ago when I spawned my first tax deduction, I would have been a much more effective parent. Where over the years I had come to rely on tired parenting tricks to shame my children into submission, such as singing “I’m Too Sexy” very loudly in the produce aisle or threatening to wear their clothes to Back to School Night, now I just play the blog card. “Clean your room, or I will post about it!” “No, Mom, Puleeeease!”

The power is intoxicating.

Yet, as cool as the Los Angeles Times thinks I am, my own IRA-siphons think I am yesterday’s newspaper. When I proudly announced that I had finally signed up for Facebook, one daughter (with a quizzical look similar to the one she flashed when I suggested she get one of those job-thingies) wondered aloud, “Why?” When I sent my two satellites-in-perpetual-orbit-around-the-dinner-table the recent invitation to be my GoogleTalk friends, they ignored me. That is, once they had quit howling with riotous laughter.

Who needs a rubber chicken? Unless, of course, it’s the entree.

“Realtor blogs help reel in clients, boost sales” is the title of the LA Times piece. Clients? Boost sales? Now, there’s an interesting angle I hadn’t thought of!

Call me for all of your real estate needs… or I might blog about it.

Yeah - That works. (Just kidding!)

Just a brief note to my three anonymous vistors who were trying to chat with me in the past hour.  I got hungry, which necessitated a trip to the local take-out joint for a Rolled Taco Special.

I am still trying to condition myself to update my chat status when my status in fact changes. I vow to do better. Oh, and to the last guest: I am not wearing the gray sweater.

President proposes $3 trillion budget.

That is this morning’s headline. I did this once, and Steve threatened to take away my credit cards.  “But I need stuff, and stuff costs a lot!” I emphatically reminded him. The harsh reality is that my life has not been measurably richer as a result of the pretty appetizer platter I most recently purchased. And the nachos, it turns out, are no happier.

Need versus want: It is a curious conundrum. Sometimes I need something because it will indisputably enhance my life (Tivo), yet most of the time the need is in fact a want driven by some primal desire to not be left out (black skinny jeans). As in the case of my questionable fashion choices, be careful what you wish for.

Web 2.0 proposes 3 trillion social networking tools.

I am currently subscribed to so many social networking sites that I have to keep a score sheet tacked to my office wall. I am LinkedIn and Plaxo-approved. I am a member of several Meet-up Groups with whom I have yet to actually meet up. I am Twitter enabled, and I have found that Twittering, like sitting around the dinner table with my children, is yet another opportunity to be affirmatively ignored. I have a Facebook account, even though I haven’t exactly gotten around to creating my page, and I GoogleTalk. I have essentially dormant accounts at YouTube, BlogTalkRadio, WellcomeMat, Zipvo, and dozens of others I can’t even remember. I was even a Trulia Voice once or twice, but it was more of a whisper.

Michael Wurzer wrote about this multi-tasking heartburn. I increasingly find myself sitting at a big old buffet with too many choices. I try them all but, in doing so, find that I am unable to savor any one offering fully. They all start to taste the same.

We maintain this blog, we contribute on others, and we still have the Scripps Ranch Home Blog, our weak attempt at hyper-local blogging, still floating around out there. All but forgotten, it still generates a comment now and then, taunting us like the middle child to pay it just some attention. Not too long ago, Steve said we should have secured the simpler ScrippsRanchBlog.com domain. “Too late,” I said. “It’s taken.” A quick trip to the Whois registry confirmed this fact. I own it. I forgot.

So, as I found myself at my keyboard yesterday simultaneously researching comps for a client, talking on the phone with one our Buyers’ Agents and carrying on an IM conversation with a blog visitor, it occurred to me that it may be time to reel it in a bit, and to regain the ability to focus on one part at a time.

Where is my pottery?

My youngest daughter told me yesterday afternoon that she was going to a sculpting class with a friend and would be home in an hour. Cool! Who knew Emily was in to the arts? I had a brief mental image of my youngest seated at a pottery wheel throwing a vase as I waved goodbye and told her to have fun.

Emily returned home in time for dinner drenched in sweat, and only when she failed to produce the much-anticipated warped ceramic bowl, did I realize that her sculpting class was in fact an exercise class. Body sculpting. Isolating the various areas of the overall body. Now I get it. I must be stretched a little thin.

At least, their listing widget is. But, I’m fickle.

I have been displaying their admittedly cool widget on the side bar here for some time now, but I have finally thrown in the towel. I am just a little ol’ agent working for a big ol’ company, and I have been outgunned. And, without boring the pants off of our three civilian (non-agent) readers, I will give only the abbreviated Kris Notes version of how Google ultimately prevailed.

Trulia populates their site by either crawling websites or receiving feeds. Now, I am in a position to feed my listings, but my company, instead, feeds my listings on my behalf and on the behalf of the thousands of other affiliate agents. Clearly, duplicate listings on the Trulia site would be a problem, so my feed and I were shown the door in favor of a better date with my Broker. I can’t say that I blame them, but my own personal branding efforts tend to get squashed like a bug in the process.

This is becoming a common problem. Zillow, the dudes for whom I sang many praises recently for catering to the individual agents and winning our hearts in the process, has become a bit of a two-timer as well. Sure, my photo and phone number appear next to my company-fed listings, but my website has been subordinated and now resides in a cyber-trash bin somewhere, while requests for “more information” are shuttled off to my Broker’s site. Don’t get me wrong, I still love what these guys are doing, warts and Zestimates (pardon the redundancy) and all. And, again, I can’t say that I would do it any differently if it was my own site I was trying to populate with listing data, but as an agent, I’m not feeling the love.

So, back to handy and adorable little Trulia widget. The sad thing is that I really liked and found value in Trulia’s listing display mash-up; it is both customizable and attractive. So, I found myself relying on the inferior and unpredictable crawl-my-website approach, which was my only option. This, however, was enormously unreliable, and it had become a perpetual surprise package of “which listings are accidentally going to be displayed today?” Advantage, Google.

This morning I replaced the Trulia widget with my own Google maps mash-up. It is not as pretty (when a marker is clicked, the information box is not conveniently sized to fit entirely within the viewing area, making it necessary for one to scroll a bit), and it requires that I manually update the maps with each status change or new entry, but at least I can control it. It is incomplete for now, but by sundown will accurately display the homes for sale which we represent - all of them. This is much more than I could ever say for the Trulia version.

For a programmer, this should be a pretty easy problem to address. If someone out there can find a solution, I will drop my Google map like a hot potato in favor of your (branded) widget.  Zillow - get moving! Trulia - it’s not too late to woo me back! You know you want to win my affections and occupy the coveted space on my side bar!

Big news today from the Zeenormous online real estate site that brought us the Zestimate.

Zillow now comes out of its “beta” phase.

That’s not really the big news; it’s the punch line delivered as a throw-away in the company’s press release. It is also the remark that got the biggest laugh at the pre-release briefing I attended last night given to a few of the die-hard real estate bloggers attending the Inman Real Estate Connect Conference in New York City.

If you are a real estate agent, you will get the joke. About seven minutes after their initial launch in 2006, our clients were flailing their own homes’ Zestimates about like the unabridged King James Bible, only this bit of ”truth” was considered far more credible. It came from a computer. The concept that Zillow’s web site and all its data has in fact been ”under development” has escaped most to this day. 

There was an embargo on the news until midnight last night. No worries; in the City That Never Sleeps, I went to bed. As I considered my options before crashing (write something timely or attempt to move this week’s sleep tally into the double digits), I decided that Zillow could wait. That is because the real news is not in the press release itself but in the larger and less time-sensitive issue: Zillow is upside-down. They are upside-down, and this is precisely why their enterprise is genius, but more on that in a moment.

First, the party line:

SEATTLE – January 10, 2008— Real estate Web site Zillow.com today announced a major expansion and upgrade to its database of nearly all homes in the country– increasing data coverage from 70 million to 80 million U.S. homes in 48 states, or 88 percent of all homes in the country. Zestimate values are now available on three out of four U.S. homes, or 67 million, up 68 percent from when Zillow launched in 2006.

That’s big news for some. However, if you, like I, live in San Diego County, our properties and our Zestimates have been represented on their site from the beginning.

Zillow today also announced it has dramatically expanded and improved its Zestimate algorithm, incorporating 20 times the number of statistical models than before that factor in more local and home-type variables…

Blah, blah, blah. In other words, the geeky science guys (and I mean that only in the most affectionate way) have been working overtime to achieve a greater accuracy in their published computer-generated estimates of value. In other, other words, bits and bytes which have never once set foot in my neighborhood, in any neighborhood, never seen my impressive Koi Pond or my highly upgraded home, every inch of which has been appointed with fancy 18th century Italian wall paper depicting cherubs and zoftig unclad ladies of the period, and never enjoyed my view of the shopping center (”evening lights,” in agent-speak), are now better prepared to nail that magic number.

They are factoring in more “variables.”

… and now integrate homeowner-edited home facts – such as the number of bedrooms, bathrooms or square footage. More than one million homes have been claimed and updated by their owners to date, contributing to improved Zestimate accuracy on many of these homes. Incorporating these changes… have resulted in a 12 percent improvement in Zestimate accuracy nationwide. Many larger metropolitan markets, such as the greater San Francisco, Miami, Los Angeles and Atlanta areas, have some of the most significant accuracy gains at 18 percent, 21 percent, 22 percent and 28 percent respectively.

Hold on! From where I sit, that is kind of a big deal. No, it’s genius. They are now considering the one “variable” that truly matters: Their users. Zillow is outsourcing (albeit just a teensy bit), and they are outsourcing to the consumer. But, there’s more.

More specific details about Zillow’s coverage and accuracy down to the county level can be found in its updated data coverage and accuracy pages that now show how often a Zestimate comes within 5 percent, 10 percent and 20 percent of the final sale price… These pages will now be updated every three months, arming consumers and real estate professionals with the most frequent and detailed information possible, supporting the company’s commitment to information transparency.

Transparency is not just a buzz word anymore but expected, even demanded, by the consumer. The consumer wants information, lots of it, and they want honesty and full-disclosure in its delivery.

In Zillow’s case, the consumer is both the real estate agent and the homeowner (which makes for one crazy-big target market), and Zillow needs two things to succeed. They need data, sales and “for-sale”, and they need eyeballs. You can’t have they latter without the former, but rather than build their reputation and their inventory by taking the more-traveled route, courting the big real estate brokerages, they have reached this point primarily by appealing to the individual agent. It is the individual agent who is online and socially connected - and blogging. Appealing to us makes us happy, which in turn inspires us to write nice things about Zillow.

And, instead of pushing the information to the customer, they have given them ownership. What Zillow has done is build a business model designed to work from the ground up, a MySpace for your home. Rather than cling to yesterday’s antiquated marketing practices wherein the customer was slapped silly with a message and expected to respond, they have recognized what so many are resisting. Zillow is recognizing and capitalizing on a new social culture. The conversation is no longer between the guy with something to sell and the guy who might be buying, top down, but between the buyers themselves, upside-down.

Wikis, consumer reviews, chat boards, and, yes, blogs; the customers are the ones doing the talking now, and they are the ones making the rules. We are all journalists, researchers, and analysts. Google and Yahoo! and the likes have made us all, to some extent, famous. The Internet has given the individual enormous power, the power of information and access, certainly, but more importantly the collective power born from connectivity. We are living in a new “Me” generation, and we are all going online to show off our ”All About Me” poster to our friends. And, my goodness, do we have friends! When the people with something to sell in our new world celebrate this, they will rock the house.

Since the day they first opened for business, the much-maligned Zestimate has been under attack by most real estate agents and by many homeowners. By introducing more fancy algorithms and, more importantly, by listening to their clients and including them in their product development, Zestimate accuracy will now be improving. But the Zestimates themselves will still be wrong. Every time. So what?

Rational people know that any estimate, whether it comes from your real estate agent or it is preceded by a “Z,” is just that: An estimate. How good or bad or better Zillow’s data is today is not the point. The point is that they have included the consumer in the conversation and have positioned themselves to dominate that conversation. Genius.

(Note: There are undoubtedly 50,000 sites out there who posted on this hours ago, but I haven’t peeked - That would have been cheating.)

Related posts:
Zillow cultivates their garden… Bloodhound Blog
Bye Bye Beta… Phoenix Real Estate Guy