Something big happened this week. And I’m not talking about the move towards a vote on health care reform.
According to online measurement firm Experian Hitwise, Facebook eclipsed Google in weekly traffic estimates. The difference was razor thin -Facebook visits tallied 7.07 percent of Internet traffic in the US versus Google’s 7.03 percent – but the event is nevertheless significant.
If you are like me (an admitted fan of the infographic) and a visual learner, I found this image particularly helpful in putting it all in perspective. (Click on the thumbnail to get the full version.)
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It’s 2010.
Real estate is an odyssey.
It’s time you took your Web users for the ride of lifetime.
How it was, still is
In the old days, you picked a real estate Website off a vendor’s shelf. Chose a color palette. A layout. Slapped on a logo. Got the IDX paperwork signed. Switched the DNS and you were good to go.
These boilerplate solutions were never optimal. What they told the world is how much you don’t understand the Internet, how little you care about your image, how you can’t effectively market yourself, let alone some stranger’s home. They screamed cheap. Unprofessional. Directionless. All the things people too often associate with real estate.
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Yesterday I participated in a session at the Leading Real Estate Companies of the World conference on “The future of technology.”
I thought about this a lot before the event and decided I didn’t want to talk about technology, for two reasons:
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Edward Tufte is a statistician, author, lecturer and graphic design legend.
His seminal work, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, is considered by many to be the go-to book on data visualization and has been described by Amazon.com as no less than one of the ”best 100 books of the 20th century”.
Pick it up. If you’re a visual design nerd like myself, it’s gorgeously fascinating.
So it was a pleasant surprise to hear that last week, Tufte was charged by the Obama Administration to help communicate and visualize the progress of the $787 billion stimulus program. (For more on the appointment, Newsweek has the scoop.)
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In a recent post I waxed on about the type of agents I would recruit if I started a brokerage.
As someone who believes branding results from the conscious decisions you make about what you want the world to remember about you, well, I’d create something memorable. And a brokerage filled with salespeople isn’t memorable. It’s commonplace.
So why duplicate that?
Especially when it appears that isn’t working out for most brokers.
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I find it hard to discuss the RPR these days without a certain wistfulness. Conversations slip into the past tense.
Which is a funny thing because the product hasn’t even been released. It is also a sad thing, because the basic idea, and its early manifestation, is so appealing.
Am I nuts? Or has the launch of this thing just been screwed up that badly?
I tweeted a couple weeks back that the communications effort around the RPR is “at once excellent and catastrophic” and I still feel that way. The excellence is mostly tactical – the great looking blog, the nicely executed demos – but these things alone cannot mitigate a botched launch and persistent strategic gaffes.
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DC residents now have a virtual panoply of real estate search sites to choose from.
Estately, the IDX-powered online brokerage, just moved into DC, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia today, adding 60,000 new homes and condos to their database.
In addition to Estately, lucky Mid-Atlantic residents can thaw themselves with dreams of warmer springtime home searching by hitting a slew of MLS powered sites like Homesdatabase.com (run by local MLS heavyweight MRIS), Sawbuck Realty and national brokerages like Redfin, among others. (Full disclosure: 1000watt Consulting has performed consulting services for MRIS and Sawbuck in the past.)
In addition to the new states Estately added, they’ve revved up their site by optimizing their page load times (now 50% faster, according to the company), redesigned map balloons (now 100% prettier!) and some great new features like auto-suggestions for searches and the ability to search by price drops.
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The following companies have been added to the 1000watt Index this week.
All submissions are reviewed by the principals at 1000watt Consulting before publication. Publication in the 1000watt Index does not constitute an official recommendation or endorsement, nor is any financial compensation accepted for inclusion.
Total links = 402
If you’d like to have your company or product added, please complete the submission form found on 1000wattindex.com
Redfin expanded into Oregon this week.
I’m excited – if for no other reason that I am finally able to use one of the best online search interfaces in my home market.
We’ve come a long way with search since the introduction and explosion of map-based search tools not so many years back. And while the tools available to consumers today are better than they’ve ever been, I still think there are more exciting things to come.
Here a few things that get me fired up when I think about the future of search:
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I took part in a radio interview yesterday. The interviewer sent me some questions in advance.
We never got to any of them. But one really stood out and beckoned me to respond:
How might Google upend the real estate Industry?
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