I’m not claiming this is genius. Or the most unordinary thing ever. But I passed many real estate stores while here in PDX over the last three weeks. Almost all have pasted flyers of homes for sale on their windows. Nothing else.
Not Smart Real Estate. They understand people require something deeper than sexy images of domiciles to stimulate decision making. So they taped market trends printed from their MLS right on their storefront window for everyone to read.
I see it over and over again.
On the “Contact Us“ page.
A lonely form.
It speaks to me. And what it says is…
You’d rather collect leads than make a sale
The Internet may not be a “series of tubes,” but real estate search from a desktop is feeling increasingly mechanical, like I’m manipulating a digital marionette with three strings – my mouse, my keyboard and my monitor.
So when Joel wrote about an iPhone search app Yahoo! launched five months ago that allows users to draw a search area with their finger, I was hoping to see something like that pop up soon in real estate. It was a great way to “Take the search out of property search” and deliver a simpler, more direct experience.
I didn’t have to wait long.
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You may know HTC as the object of a lot of smart phone industry buzz.
What you may also know is that their phones – Evo, Aria, Eris and Incredible – are taking this industry by storm.
They’re kicking Nokia’s nuts and threatening Apple’s attempt to corner the market.
How is that happening? I decided to do a little checking. Seems they’re doing a lot right. More on that below. It also made me think it would be instructive to pull this brand through a cosmic wormhole and ask the question…
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The Economist recently published the results of a survey of the blogosphere that revealed that – gasp – “the rate of growth of blogs has slowed in many parts of the world.”
My take: Content creation is hard. Great blogging is tough. And the rewards remain fleeting.
So that’s why I’m calling it, on the eve of Real Estate Connect 2010:
The death of the real estate blog. July 9, 2010.
It’s over.
R.I.P.
Katherine is my dentist.
Her profession is one that is typically associated with apprehension.
Not for me.
These days, I love going to the dentist.
Cleaning out the drawers last night I rummaged through a stack of real estate business cards. One in particular grabbed me. It featured, in big letters, the following statement:
“I deliver dreams“
I called the number on the card. It had a 404 area code and I got voice mail. Nevertheless, I ordered two dreams. One with onions and mushrooms. The other half pepperoni, half plain. Then I went to bed.
I woke up as expected.
Hungry.
Snapped this photo on my walk today (the writing, of course, is not mine):
Frontdoor.com, the real estate site run by Scripps Networks (of HGTV and Food Network fame) has just released a very nice set of widgets that enable publishers – Realtors, for example – to embed Frontdoor/HGTV content within their websites or blogs [disclosure: 1000watt Consulting has provided services for Frontdoor.com in the past.]
Frontdoor has stayed largely under the radar within the real estate industry. And they seem to be fine with that. After all, when you can promote your website to 90 million households through HGTV on a regular basis, getting love from people like me is really not that exciting.
They’ve slowly but consistently improved the site over the past 18 months. First city guides. Then a rather prescient implementation of Facebook Connect. And, now, a distributed content play.
Last week we announced that we were going to do periodic analyses of real estate brokerage home pages here on the blog. We received a ton of submissions. And, unfortunately, we can’t go through them all in detail.
But we picked one: longandfoster.com.
Long and Foster is a huge company – #3 on the Real Trends 500 in fact. Managing a web site for an organization this large is not a small undertaking. And there are many things done well here. Our focus, however, is on the things that could, in our opinion, stand a little adjustment.