The Way of the Rain Dogs: Peeing on your pictures to mark your Zestifarm — and to avoid becoming an unpuppy

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is from mail from Thomas Johnson of ERA Houston, which, among other things, coins the terms “Zestifarm” and “Zestifarming” for the various ways one can pee on the tree in Zillow:

I love the marking your farm analogy. I walk my dog, Sophie, every evening and I have noticed that she marks everything that is of higher than average height: a clump of grass, a twig, a lump of Spanish moss, whatever. I liken that to canine text messaging a quick sniff, squirt and move on. When we get to the mailboxes, it is different. That is much more interesting. There is lots of sniffing and squirting. I guess we could call that pee mail. My takeaway is that there are so many little repetitions that we can use to mark our Zestifarms. And, the price is right.

Less like pee mail, more like Twitter. Even so, I just quoted that part to make the girls squeal. But: Nothing focuses the mind like an apposite metaphor. One theory says that dogs mark their territory so they can find their way home if they get lost. Hence the poor, lost Rain Dogs.

Dog owners know better: Dogs mark to cover the scent left by other dogs. To have your pee peed on is to become an unpuppy:

I spent the night tossing and turning thinking about “marking my farm”. I think that an agent could take over the cyber neighborhood before the entrenched legacy agent/broker even knew what was happening. A while ago, I bought a cheap little program called “watermark it”. It enables you to digitally watermark photos. I bought it to protect my MLS photos, but it was banned by policy. My 4 AM revelation was to watermark my Zestifarm photos with a small web address. It would not hyperlink, but “Kilroy was here”.

This is something that I’ve been thinking about, but I hadn’t done anything about it until I got this mail. As I mentioned before, there is an even better “pee on the tree strategy” than listing homes for sale:

Instead of announcing homes for sale, walk the neighborhoods you farm, taking photos from the street or sidewalk of every one. Post those photos one at a time to Zillow. Doing this, you will have marked your entire territory, essentially in perpetuity. Anyone shopping your neighborhoods is going to run into you again and again. It seems reasonable to me that people will tend to investigate homes near those they might be interested in buying. What better way to establish yourself as the neighborhood expert than associating your name and contact information with every home they might turn to?

The problem with that idea is that a canonical library of photographs invites theft.

That’s Cameron and Ophelia with a watermark. That probably wouldn’t pass muster with the MLS mandatory mindlessness committee, and it wouldn’t serve Thomas’ objective of driving traffic back to his web site. But no one will ever steal a photo marked like that.

Here’s my question: Does it interfere too much with the image?

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