How do you define a neighborhood? You don’t. How do you obtain neighborhood expertise? Go to neighborhood expert.
By: Greg Swann,
Phoenix Real Estate,
Post Archive,
RSS FeedPosted: Thursday, August 2nd, 2007, 8:28 am MST
Category: Disintermediation, Marketing, Real Estate, Technology, Zillow.com
I’m quoting from David Gibbons from Zillow.com. He wrote these remarks in a comment, but I’m pulling them out because it’s an interesting topic: How can web-based vendors build databases of neighborhood expertise?
What you are seeing in the neighborhood space is the lack of any predefined neighborhood database. It’s never been done before and so, while there’s a great place to start when building a taxonomy of regions at any other level, neighborhoods are tough to build.The 6,500 neighborhoods currently defined on Zillow were done by hand. We’ve talked this through with outside.in – they took the same approach. The solution is to allow homeowners to collaboratively describe their neighborhoods and we’ll iterate towards that but even homeowners seldom agree on neighborhood designations and boundaries. It’s an interesting problem to solve.
That’s what I said. This is me when Zillow 6 was released:
What does all this have to do with Zillow.com?I think they’ve made a mistake in their approach to community building, a mistake that will prevent a true community from emerging from all their efforts.
As an example, what is a neighborhood? It’s not what Zillow says it is, and it’s not what some city council says it is. A neighborhood is what the neighbors say it is, and, as in my North Central Phoenix neighborhood, neighbors can differ about what the neighborhood really is.
So how should Zillow define the neighborhoods it hopes end-users will create content around?
It shouldn’t. It should let the users define the neighborhoods, and if there are different interpretations of what the neighborhood is, it should allow the proponents of those different ideas to create multiple competing neighborhood descriptions. When one starts to draw all the attention and the other fades away, Zillow can snuff the loser. Until then, the neighborhood advocates will have an investment in creating content for Zillow, and an avid interest in getting their friends to the site to show off what they have created.
In other words, they will have created a virtual analogue of their neighborhood as a means of defining and describing it. This is an atom-sized on-line community, an acorn from which a great oak can grow.
I think Zillow is a self-selected, self-inflicted victim of the apple-polisher syndrome. It is so interested in crafting a definitive experience that it creates a sterile environment, like that massively detailed N-gauge train layout that daddy won’t let the kids play with. Zillow is not selling definitive information, it’s selling infotainment. If its suppose-to-be-fun tools are no damn fun, someone else’s will be.
David again:
Greg – what do you mean by “Neighborhood expertise is detailed perfectly on pp. 5-6 of All Marketers Are Liars”
On-line neighborhood databases are the virtual sex of real estate. This, from Seth Godin’s All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World, is how you get neighborhood information:
Arthur Riolo is a world-class storyteller. Arthur sells real estate in my little town north of New York City. He sells a lot of real estate — more than all his competitors combined. That’s because Arthur doesn’t sell anything.Anyone can tell you the specs of a house or talk to you about the taxes. But he doesn’t. Instead, Arthur does something very different. He takes you and your spouse for a drive. You drive up and down the hills of a neighborhood as he points out house after house (houses that aren’t for sale). He tells you who lives in that house and what they do and how they found the house and the name of their dog and what their kids are up to and how much they paid. He tells you a story about the different issues in town, the long-simmering rivalries between neighborhoods and the evolution and imminent demise of the Mother’s Club. Then, and only then, does Arthur show you a house.
It might be because of Arthur’s antique pickup truck or the fact that everyone in town knows him or the obvious pleasure he gets from the community, but sooner or later, you’ll buy a house from Arthur. And not just because it’s a good house. Because it’s a good story.
Forget the silly, way-too-large neighborhood definitions, forget the duplication of records, the omissions, the errors. This is what a database can never do.
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9 Comments so far
… and Arthur could never do this with an out of town buyer or a London-based investor. Online neighborhoods will ultimately allow us to connect with a hundred Arthurs before we even get into anyone’s car and virtual neighborhoods online will be where you find Arthur in the first place.
Have you ever worked with a relo or an investor? I have moved people blind — into rentals, not home purchases — and I have bought blind for investors, but this is very rare. Moreover, relos and investors are niche markets. The bread and butter of residential real estate comes from clients who already know much more than a database ever will about the neighborhoods they want to live in. This is something I’ve been meaning to write about in a general way, the market myopia motivating Realty.bot business models.
So; there’s no need for Arthur? I’m not sure I follow. But again; where do I find Arthur and how do I know that he knows what he’s talking about?
> So; there’s no need for Arthur?
Arthur has no need for Zillow.
> But again; where do I find Arthur and how do I know that he knows what he’s talking about?
I just took an inbound call setting an appointment to talk about a million-dollar listing — our first if we take it. What incited the call? The signs, the cards, the web sites — but especially the “Sold” signs going up right away. “Lo-tech don’t mean no-tech.”
Well I think you hit the nail on the head – what Arthur is selling is his neighborhood expertise. The question is – how can he let people know about it before he meets them? If you’re talking about a top Realtor, I’m sure he’s figured it out. But for the rest of the gang a little help can go a long way.
Consumers know and understand neighborhood names – they don’t know ZIP codes for the most part. And it’s hard to tie your research about where in town you might want to live to the ZIP based information that dominates most listing searches.
Yes, neighborhoods are a point of contention and disagreement between and among residents and agents. But why not move that action up to the Real Estate website and have some lively conversation? Why not be able to display listing and sold home stats by neighborhood?
OK – OnBoard has its neighborhood definitions (so does Zillow, Maponics, etc.). At the end of the day these are just ways of organizing content and making it easier to access. One thing we did was build a framework for this so that our clients can define their own neighborhoods. End users too. Put an aggregation engine underneath it crunch all the data behind the scenes, and we’re able to provide a real community summary, sales trend report, or any other info back to our clients and their consumers.
We’re starting to see more intuitive, usable interfaces (particularly when neighborhoods are layered on maps), and as folks turn on to how neighborhoods as a framework for content presentation can really work, I think you’ll be seeing more and more of this. We’re fielding requests every day about scoring other content against our hood boundaries.
[...] First, from Greg Swann’s real estate blog… I’m quoting from David Gibbons from Zillow.com. He wrote these remarks in a comment… How can web-based vendors build databases of neighborhood expertise? What you are seeing in the neighborhood space is the lack of any predefined neighborhood database. It’s never been done before and so, while there’s a great place to start when building a taxonomy of regions at any other level, neighborhoods are tough to build. The 6,500 neighborhoods currently defined on Zillow were done by hand. We’ve talked this through with outside.in – they took the same approach. The solution is to allow homeowners to collaboratively describe their neighborhoods and we’ll iterate towards that but even homeowners seldom agree on neighborhood designations and boundaries. It’s an interesting problem to solve. [...]
[...] Humans think and talk about regions imprecisely in terms of vague concepts (e.g. downtown). While administrative regions such as area codes and land parcels have sharp boundaries imposed on them, other regions concepts used by people are more fuzzy. The use of vague spatial concepts in geospatial communication have been studies for many years (see for instance Daniel Montello’s Where’s downtown?: Behavioral methods for determining referents of vague spatial queries). However, the understanding human’s perspective of the space hardly translates to its digital definition stored geographic information systems. As a consequence, the local search and location-based services industry has invested a large amount of energy and money in obtaining neighborood expertise. Companies such as Urban Mapping sells its extensive user-centered neighborhood datasets to major search engines. New approaches profit from people submitting their own version of the boundaries for the same neighborhood. WikiMapia is an example of this kind of community editing. It defines specific areas (roads, parks) with polygonal entries (see Matt Jones’ Wikimapia Invades Google Earth!. Similarly, the Intelligent Middleware project at the MIT aims at providing a mechanism for accumulating local knowledge about neighborhood-scale land use. This people-generated content helps re-interpreting the administrative datasets and develop customized analyses of neighborhood conditions. [...]
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