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Category: Technology (page 49 of 60)

July 17, 2007

Redfin cops another $12 million, raising investors’ stake in the discount realty.bot to $40,000 per closed transaction

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The indefatigable John Cook:

Redfin has raised an additional $12 million in venture funding, money that the Seattle discount real estate broker will use to enhance its Web site and expand into new markets.

First up for Redfin are the Washington D.C and Baltimore areas, which are being unveiled today. Next on the agenda are Sacramento and Chicago, which the company hopes to open later this year. Redfin, which refunds two thirds of its commission to home buyers and offers a flat listing fee of $3,000 to sellers, already operates in Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, San Diego, Orange County and Los Angeles. Since its launch 17 months ago, more than 500 homes — valued at more than $350 million — have been bought and sold through Redfin.

To put things into perspective, Russell Shaw’s team of around ten people sold approximately 600 houses in the same span of time. With a head-count of 75 people — so far — and a capital investment of $40,000 cash-American per closed transaction, Redfin.com is somewhat less efficient.

But: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! Redfin will be profitable any day now. Scout’s honor!

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July 17, 2007

For pure home search, Terabitz puts all the cards on the table and all the icons on the map

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

When first I read about Terabitz this morning, I was prepared to make fun of it. It looks and “plays” like an on-line video game. Instead of a simple check-box-based user-interface on top of a map, you drag out icons for the types of searches you want to run, then build a mashed-up map like the one shown above from the results. My guess is that the intent is artificially to limit the number of things you search for at one time, but the overall effect is at least as fun as an on-line video game.

From VentureBeat:

Terabitz is launching a comprehensive site for home buyers wanting to organizing and map information about their prospective homes.

Think of it as a cross between a personal homepage (like iGoogle or Netvibes, for example) and a real estate information site (like Trulia or Zillow).

You can drag and drop housing information from menu bars into a central dashboard with a set of data displays. With one click, you can map this data using the site’s Google Maps mashup.

Besides for-sale listings, there’s information like average local mortgage rates, average rental fees and other real estate information.

You can also find out all sorts of good things about a place that are harder to quantify, like nearby restaurants, libraries, schools, coffee shops. Even the FBI’s crime — and specifically sex offender — database gets included.

This non real estate data is what sets Terabitz, of Palo Alto, Calif. apart from sites like Zillow and Trulia, which also offer home profile pages that are limited mainly to real estate data.

You can customize your own page of data widgets about your prospective home. You can also make an image of your data collection and share it with other users or email to friends.

More from John Cook’s Venture Blog:

Yet another startup company is entering the online real estate category. Palo Alto, Calif.-based Terabitz — backed with $10 million in funding from Tudor Capital and originally conceived by 17-year-old Kamran Munshi — is attempting to create a site that will help home buyers or apartment hunters manage the process from beginning to end. Its Read more

July 16, 2007

What would Seth Godin do? Probably not one-size-fits-all . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

(I’m waiting for a phone call, which is how Realtors address that awful burden of time that befalls them between birth and death.)

Joel Burslem mentioned the What Would Seth Godin Do plug-in today, and Jim Duncan has also written about it recently.

I like the idea, I just don’t like the execution. Too much one-size-fits-all for my tastes, where CSS and a WordPress theme can make everything unique and perfect.

I have code that will make the “intro.php” behavior introduced in WordPress 2.0 cookie-dependent. In other words, if the cookie is not set, visitors will see intro.php (or any other “sticky” pseudo-post you prepare under any arbitrary filename). If it is, they won’t.

I have it set with the cookie expiring in 60 days, so if someone has been away for a while, I can remind him of what’s what. People who forbid cookies will get the introductory post every time, but this is the default behavior for intro.php anyway. And if I change the name of the stored variable, I can cause everyone to see my presumably-substantially-revised introduction the next time they visit the site.

(There is a lot more you could do with something like this: Show it the first three visits, for example, or show a special message to very-frequent visitors.)

I don’t use this in BloodhoundBlog, although I could easily enough; it doesn’t require WP 2+. It’s really nothing but bread and butter PHP, as is WordPress itself.

If you want the code, it’s yours, but you have to hold your own hand. You don’t need to know PHP, but you do need to know how to edit and FTP your WordPress theme files. Email me if you want the files.

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July 13, 2007

Realtor.org’s inner-geeks peer into the iPhone

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Center for Realtor Technology Web Log (there’s a mouthful) has a Realtor-oriented review of the iPhone:

On the real estate side of things, though, there were a few disappointments. I went to Trulia, Zillow, and Realtor.com. All three had some rendering issues from a missing MAP to elements on web pages covering each other (making filling out a search impossible.) One issue is that one of the sites has their map via Flash, which isn’t yet supported on the iPhone. I visited some of the sites on Safari and Mac and Windows and didn’t have the same rendering issues, but did still have the same missing non-flash map elements. The rendering issue I saw on the iPhone could be a bug in that version that will hopefully be corrected soon. Don’t get me wrong, they were still mostly usable, but it wasn’t as clean an experience as most of the non-real estate sites I’ve visited. It could just be luck on my choices either way.

We’re not ready to make the leap yet, but it seem clear that this device — or a near-term competitor — is inches and hours away from shipping my laptop off to the Museum of Computer History.

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July 12, 2007

What might make the idea of community work on Zillow.com? The individual autonomy we have learned to expect on the internet

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We live and work right on the Arizona Canal in North Central Phoenix. North Central is a nebulous geographical region. Properly speaking, it runs from Seventh Street to Seventh Avenue, Missouri Street to the Canal. Within those boundaries, you will find some of the most prosperous and powerful people in the city — two categories from which we are more than amply excluded.

People living as far east as 16th Street and as far west as 19th Avenue might claim to live in North Central, and it would be considered churlish to contradict them. But this courtesy would not be extended to anyone living north of the Arizona Canal. North of the Canal is Sunnyslope, one of the worst neighborhoods in Phoenix.

What’s the difference? About $150,000 right now. In other words, the house you could buy just north of the Canal for $250,000 would cost you at least $400,000 if you were to buy it just south of the Canal. Location, location, location.

Now suppose you have joyfully paid that price premium to own, use, enjoy and profit from a home in North Central. If you went to your neighborhood page on Zillow.com, what might you not want to see?

I added the highlighting, just to put a finer point on the slur. In fact, this is just the kind of ham-handed stupidity you would expect from a robo-bartender, which, if you think about it, is one of the bogus roles a social network can take on.

Full disclosure: I am a social networking skeptic. The youthful fetish clubs are immensely popular with people who are determined to stay forever young. The commerce-oriented sites are full of self-promoters, every bit as interesting as the Friday morning business card exchange at the Denny’s over by the freeway. It could be there is something else I’m missing, but I’m not predisposed to care.

The truth is, I’m an introvert, as are many smart, technically-oriented people. My skin doesn’t actually crawl when I’m around other people, but my social interactions are always project-focused, and I’ve never been to a party that I didn’t want to leave before I got Read more

July 11, 2007

Zillow.com to launch Realtor rating system

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From John Cook’s Venture Blog:

As an investor and board member at Avvo, I asked [Zillow.com’s Rich Barton] when Zillow might roll out an online rating system for real estate agents. That idea is in the works, with Barton saying that the company also is trying to develop ways for consumers to search for agents based on specific criteria. Stay tuned…

First we’ll milk ’em for free content as the only persistent members of our “community.” Then we’ll sell ’em astoundingly low-yield advertising. Then we’ll get anonymous misanthropes to write poison-pen letters about them. That sounds like a plan…

Am I missing something, or is this evidence of an unbounded cluelessness?

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July 10, 2007

Zillow.com’s latest release me-too’s Trulia.com’s recent me-too release: Can either make the leap from ghost-town to community?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

With its Z6 software release, which goes live tonight, Zillow.com adds a neighborhood level of user conversations, similar to Trulia.com’s Trulia Voices feature released in May of this year.

From Zillow’s press release:

Real estate Web site Zillow.com today added a number of new community features, opening up the site even further to user contributions. Chief among these additions are individual neighborhood pages in more than 130 U.S. cities (more than 6,500 neighborhoods in all). The pages are seeded with rich local demographic and real estate information, but are built for communities and neighbors to make their own. Anyone within a community has the ability to add photos, events, local news, engage in discussions and ask or answer questions about neighborhood real estate.

“Adding the ability for neighbors to meet, share information and learn about their local neighborhood is a natural next step for Zillow. We started with individual Web pages and Home Q&A for more than 70 million homes, and today we’re bringing the conversation out to the neighborhood level,” said Lloyd Frink, Zillow president. “In the offline world, conversations happen all the time around homes, neighborhoods and communities. With these additions, we’re adding the data, tools and a platform for these conversations to thrive online — and help people become smarter about real estate, for free, in the process.”

Neighborhoods are accessed from any of the 70 million Home Details pages within Zillow, or via the “local real estate” link at the bottom of every Zillow page.

There’s more, but we’ll come back to it.

First: Is this a surprise to anyone? The new features were accidentally pre-announced last week in an inadvertently transmitted email. I understood the portent of that email, as I’m sure did everyone else in the RE.net who got it: Responding to Trulia was Zillow’s obvious next move, and they’re fairly steady at doing major upgrades once a quarter. The only real surprise was that the hermetically-sealed start-up actually leaked something.

But could it be that Zillow and Trulia are stuck in a tennis volley of answering each other’s features? Truila Voices was the loud claim from the Read more

July 2, 2007

With the iPhone is Apple’s Steve Jobs placing a collect call to the entire wireless communications industry?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I haven’t laid my own hands on an iPhone yet, and we’re off to Lost Wages for our anniversary, so unless I infest an Apple Store in Clark County, my own gratification will have to wait still longer. I’m assuming, if you were interested, you had your fill of iPhone news over the weekend. If not, Engadget has words, links and tons of killer video.

Here’s a fascinating take from Publishing 2.0:

Apple will significantly improve the already revolutionary iPhone in subsequent generations, and lower the price, as they did with the iPod. With each new release, more and more people will look at Verizon and Sprint, who don’t carry the iPhone, and say, WTF!?

The real battle for control is between Verizon, which has hands down the best network, and Apple, which now has hands down the best handset. The tide will turn when die hard Verizon customers start switching in significant numbers to AT&T to get an iPhone. People like me, who stood firm on the network is more important principle, will crack under the pressure. There will come a tipping point, then, when the cost to Verizon of refusing Apple’s terms will be greater than losing customers to the iPhone.

What Apple really wants is to sell unlocked iPhones that can be used on any network — and I believe they will pull it off. Thus, Apple will do to the wireless carriers and other cell phone makers what they did to the music industry and makers of digital music players — they will completely take over.

More: The contrary argument.

Still more: Half-a-million sold.

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July 1, 2007

Immediate, accurate, authoritative, unbiased: News on Wikipedia is everything the news industry is not

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Landing somewhere between “Just what are those crazy kids up to now?” and “Alien ambassadors may not be as dangerous as previously thought,” The New York Times Magazine discovers Wikipedia. The article, about Wikipedians’ intense efforts to police breaking news on the site for accuracy and neutrality, is actually more even-handed than usual, if only because the writer is striving mightily to snicker behind his hand. I can’t help but think that for-pay journalism will be much improved when the last of these habitually off-line antiques are put out to pasture.

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June 29, 2007

iPhone may herald a whole new way to shop for homes

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me in today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
iPhone may herald a whole new way to shop for homes

Could Apple’s new iPhone have been more hyped? Maybe not, but a feature of the mobile phone announced last week could have an enduring impact on real estate marketing.

Technology vendors have talked for a decade, at least, about the idea of convergence. Some day, the telephone, television and personal computer will merge into one device through which we will pursue networked “edutainment.” TV set-top boxes get more sophisticated with each new generation, but we’re a lot closer to true convergence on our mobile phones.

Like many Realtors, I use a Treo 650 mobile phone. In addition to being able to make calls, it has Internet access and email capability onboard. Underneath all that is a Palm-OS-based personal digital assistant, a small but very powerful computer that “syncs” with my desktop computer back in the office.

It’s long been my belief that a sufficiently powerful mobile phone could replace my laptop computer. Even now, my Treo 650 is only missing one mission-critical function: I cannot directly access the MLS system through my phone.

The iPhone may be the laptop-killer for Realtors. The new version of Apple’s Safari Internet browser, to be included on the iPhone, successfully navigates the MLS system. The contract-writing software Phoenix-area Realtors use can be run through a Web-based service. Between portable, battery-powered printers, emailed PDF documents and the onset of digital signatures, a hi-tech Realtor could have a fully functioning office in his pocket or her purse.

And Apple also announced last week that the iPhone would implement the YouTube.com video standard. Because of the company’s marketing clout, we can expect other phone and software vendors to follow suit.

What this means in that someday soon, you will be able to drive from house to house in a neighborhood, visiting each home’s Web site and taking video virtual tours, all without getting out of the car.

When you find a home you want to see in person, your means of making contact with your Realtor will be right there in your hand.

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June 28, 2007

The big iDea: iPhone could spawn a host of new products

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This was written by my friend Mike Arst, a very clever man whom I’ve entreated for years to start a weblog.

iStatements

In honor of the release of Apple’s new iPhone, which I just can’t seem to want (even though I know I should want it), today several new product names occurred to me. Having decided that I probably can’t sell them for a small fortune on eBay (iBay?), I have decided to pass them along to you instead. No charge, even.

This for someone who drops his little MP3 player: the iBroke

For folks who enjoy listening to music while they’re eating their favorite Vietnamese soup: the iPho

For workshops that are all about one’s self-esteem: the iMe

(If they’re conducted in French: the iMoi)

For people who developed a bit too much self-esteem at the workshops (and/or for people who love odd-looking little jungle prosimians): the iI

For people like me who are just plain slow, and proud of it: the iPlod

For people who hate settling for less: the iMore

Then again, for folks in the simpler-living movement: the iLess [contributed by co-worker]

For people who loved “Young Frankenstein”: the iGor

For the lonely fisherman in his boat: the iCod

For the local crows who wake us up every morning: the iCawed

For our infamous bad-tempered cat, of whom many people are justifiably terrified: the iClawed [also contributed by co-worker]

For guys who had too much to drink and got rude at a party: the iPawed

(The individual who behaves this way is the iClod)

For the ladies who had to put up (but only briefly) with such rudeness: the iSlap

(Could substitute the iClawed there)

And last but not least, a product for the marketing people who have managed with great success to persuade us [I plead guilty] that we need all this electronic stuff:

The iCon

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June 28, 2007

ShackPrices.com a tear-down? Innovative map-search portal reconstructed as Estately.com

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The most-innovative little map-search in Seattle, ShackPrices.com, today relaunches as Estately.com, a name perhaps more fitting for a town where you can still get a decent fixer for less than a million dollars.

The site is also launching its monetization model with this release: A fee-based referral system for users who ask to be introduced to an agent, paid by the agent. From company co-founder Galen Ward:

Agent Match lets consumers get personalized recommendations for the best real estate agents in their area, hear personal introductions from the recommended agents, and see feedback from previous clients. Where most brokerages assign potential clients in a haphazard fashion, Estately recommends three prescreened, high quality agents from local brokerages to consumers.[…] [W]e already have a few happy beta-testers and a “rock-star” team of agents from a bunch of local brokerages.

We’re selective and we’re keeping the referral fee low enough (12%) that we have been able to recruit great agents who do most of their business from referrals.

Under the name ShackPrices.com, the company pioneered a number of great ideas in map-search technology, including showing nearby parks, schools, restaurants, access to public transportation, etc. The AgentMatch idea is also an innovation, sort of an eHarmony for Realtors:

Estately’s Agent Match algorithm uses consumer answers from a brief questionnaire to match them with highly qualified, individually recruited agents who meet their needs. Consumers and agents are matched geographically, based on consumer’s needs and based on agent feedback from past clients. Consumers are shown all the feedback for each agent recommended to them. Home buyers and sellers can choose to remain anonymous until they are ready to work with an agent.

This is smart enough to be truly scary.

More coverage: The Real Estate Bloggers, John Cook’s Venture Blog.

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June 27, 2007

A contrary point of view: “Apple iPhone debut to flop, product to crash in flames”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Surely fifty million Frenchmen can be as wrong as one, but just try getting them to admit it! David Platt makes an interesting argument about why the iPhone will fail, but, even stipulating his entire case, it seems reasonable to suppose that most early-adopters will be stout fans for at least two years — the length of the service contract with AT&T.

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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