At the last 4RealzEd event, a wonderful real estate videographer by the name of David Toth agreed to film our event as well as some reactions from attendees. My favorite video, for reasons that will probably be obvious if you watch it, is when he captured me talking with attendees after the event:

Here are some links so you can learn more about the people featured in the video:

• Lynda Eisenmann
• Jerry Beiser
• Jeff Corbett
• Cathy Nealand
• Devesh Khare
• Vicki Lloyd
• David Lewin
• Loren Nason

Our next event is in Pasadena on May 30th! And just like the Irvine event, we’re hoping to blow this one out of the water and close registration down early again for lack of space, so now is the time to register!

And finally, I also want to thank Jessie B of ReTrove. He went out of his way to connect us with David Toth so that the videos could be possible! Not only did he capture the testimonials above, but he also edited down our presentation into three pieces to give you an idea of what to expect if you attend (4RealzEd Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). Obviously, if you’re looking to connect with a real estate videographer in Orange County area, you should consider talking with David because the guy knows what he’s doing!

(By the way, don’t be too surprised if I drop off the internet for the next few days as I travel and present in Toronto at RealtyQuest early this week…)

…in Realty Quest.

Here are some of the things I wanted to talk about this week, but haven’t had the chance:

1. 4RealzEd is coming to Pasadena on May 30! The buzz from the first two events has been wonderful and I’m already seeing people sign up without any real marketing on our part! I love it!
2. Move, Inc lost $4.6M in Q1 and not releasing “transformational” product. About the only positive news is that they are “announcing” a beta site that has been live (with a link from the homepage) since December. I feel bad for my previous colleague in marketing who has to spin this stuff.
3. Keller Williams gets Zillow fever. Consider the great relationship between Top Producer (owned by Move) and KW, this must have been particularly painful for Errol Samuelson (runs both Top Producer and Realtor.com)
4. Trulia teams up with the Silicon Valley Ass of REALTORS.  The traditional walls are slowly crumbling.
5. Seattle times reporter/blogger wonders covers conference with Move, Zillow and Google and wonders who will create the real estate destination portal of the future…
6. Todd announces RE BlogWord… A special real estate track for the popular BlogWorld conference in Vegas. My guess is that there will be a bunch of big names from the world of real estate social media so this should be a lot of fun.
7. Had a great, GREAT, meetup yesterday (dubbed: Doctor’s Note Gathering) with real estate and tech folks from the valley.   Linda and Ted had nice write ups!
8. Getting excited about a panel this year at Inman led by Jeff Turner called: Growing Pains: Take Your Blog to the Next Level (more announcments around RE Connect are sure to come!)
9. Krunching.com launched earlier this week. I like everything about the site (from the perspective of a  first public launch), except the business model.  I think they will either need to be a tech provider (i.e. selling tech to consumers/professionals) OR a brokerage (commissions!), but not both.   Otherwise, the site is great and I look forward to seeing more!
10. Niki let me know that he launched Homethinking Mortgage earlier this week.   I feel bad that I haven’t had more of a chance to check out the site, but ANYTHING Niki does is worth checking out.   Some of the things, like the heat maps of average loan amount, are interesting, but I just haven’t taken the time to figure out how they will be useful!
11. BeatYouThere launches (yet) another national real estate search site.  I kinda feel bad for anyone trying to start up in this space at this point, even if they are well funded.   Incremental improvement in the search just aren’t going to be enough at this point.
12. And speaking of things that will be forgotten about in a few months…   I like Louis a lot and he’s definitely doing a great job reaching out to the online real estate community, but…
13. CyberHomes redesigns the site.   I can’t help but wonder when will they start seriously marketing to consumers?

thinks they should be one of the next stops on Microsoft’s buying binge.

… with their latest home price trends.

With the colorful charts and maps, the Zillow team has done a great job becoming the de facto standard for home price trends. The free press they’re getting around this data is incredible.

…using social networking sites like Facebook to generate business.

A HUGE thanks goes out to Jonathan at the Matrix for making the introduction between Stephanie and myself!

According to their press release, they are now commingling MLS, FSBO and Foreclosure listings on one map… and this has me scratching my head!

Are they allowed to do this? Isn’t this type of commingling of listings against MLS rules?

Notice the purple and pink icons… Those are REO (foreclosures) and FSBOs, respectively (green icons are MLS listings).

I have four ideas about how they are able to get away with this:

1. They found a loophole in MLS agreements that let’s them commingle listings (but I would find this hard to believe).
2. They got buy-off from all their local MLS organizations (but I would find this hard to believe)
3. They have reason to believe they can win this battle in the courts… (maybe a DOJ brief in support of this or something similar?)
4. They just don’t care about the rules and believe that consumer support for this feature will be so great that they’ll risk MLS fines.

None of these scenarios seem likely to me. What am I missing?

With that said, I REALLY like how they are approaching the foreclosure data. I’ve received a few press releases recently from real estate search sites that “announce” they are now publishing foreclosures on their site. However, inevitably, when I tested out the feature, the sites were just regurgitating RealtyTrac data that required consumers to pay a fee to get the actual address of the property. Redfin is providing the address.

Also interesting, someone from Redfin let me know that they are going to phase in a flat-fee buying option in order to accommodate these new listings types.

I want to send my congrats out to the Redfin team for pushing the boundaries yet again. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, they’re working pretty darn hard to deliver features and tools that they think will do a better job serving their customers.

UPDATE:

There’s some debate in the comments about whether there are local MLS rules against commingling of data, with some people claiming it’s just a misunderstanding that the data can’t be commingled.  However, someone (who wished to remain anonymous) send me the following email which demonstrates that for at least one MLS where Redfin is commingling data, the rules are pretty clear:

Check it out:   http://www.imrmls.com/centsite/idx_policy.htm

“4.13. Listings obtained through IDX must be displayed separately from listings obtained from other sources, not including information provided by other MLSs.”

What that says to ME (having experience with MLS rules) is that MRMLS doesn’t allow FSBO properties side-by-side with MLS listings.

So far I’ve added a wiki I started building the other day that describes the various blogging options available to real estate professionals as well as links from my internet marketing presentations.

Feel free to add your ideas for what should be added to the 4realz.net Library!

…PageRank status for websites.

RCG went from a 5 to a 6 (no real surprise there since RCG was at a six a while back)…

More interesting, 4realz.net went from a 4 to a 5.   Not bad for a domain that launched at the end of November and includes a bazillion links on it’s sidepanel! 

…that the wordpress.com domain does REALLY well in google searches for the various “tags” that get associated with posts.

For example, the wordpress.com tag for REALOGY shows up just below the wikipedia entry for the company and above the Inman news page on REALOGY:

And because Rob and I are the only people on the platform talking about Realogy, we get an outsized influence in how Realogy is represented on the web.

…Friday. For those of you in the LA area, I recommend avoiding the last minute rush and registering on Upcoming now!

(and while you’re at it, consider joining the RE.net event group on upcoming so you can get updated on all kinds of good events like this!)

We all know that external sources of traffic are off, but what if you guys “quantified” the site so that a third party could transparently track your traffic?

I think that would be a great way to nip the traffic question in the bud.

And by the way, I “quantified” RCG about two weeks ago and, not surprisingly, the uniques from Quantcast are really close to Google Analytics (maybe 5% lower at most).

… I’m really enjoying the results so far.   If you’ve got a webcam, feel free to join us in playing with video conversations.

It’s a great question…

I thought I’d dive into this question a bit so I started writing a killer-post! My thought was to put together a fascinating post that described likely revenue opportunities at both Zillow and Trulia and I was even going to go so far as to estimate the value of Trulia…

However, after multiple iterations and rewrites, I’m simply not happy with where the post was going so I deleted most of the text and thought I’d let you create your own story out of my notes:

• Zillow: uniques: 2.2M, revenue: ?, estimated value: ~$225M
• Trulia: uniques: 1.9M, revenue: ?, value: ?

• Move: uniques (R.com + M.com): 10.1M, revenue: $286M , value: $503M
• HouseValues: uniques: 430K, revenue: $59M, value: $56M*
• ZipRealty: uniques: 1.2M, revenue: $104M, value: $118

…could be huge.

I’ve always enjoyed the niche social networks bought by Yahoo (Flickr, Upcoming, del.icio.us, etc.)… and if they can keep them niche, while making Yahoo more social, there’s potential for some interesting synergies.

(I found this particularly interesting in the context of Yahoo’s desire to keep prodding along…)

…wrong.  Website development is hard stuff, even when you know exactly what you want to build.

And freed.

…of the more odd relationships in the online classified space.  The only surprising part of the recent news is that it took this long for the relationship for a lawsuit to arise.

Text put to video:

Success!

…Joel off?

…put together another great list: 101 Tips & Resources for the Upside-Down Homeowner.

Long-time Rain City Guide contributor, Galen Ward, announced that Estately just got $450K in angel funding!  Congrats Galen!

The Estately team is used to operating on a shoe-string budget, so it will be interesting to see what they accomplishes with this money!

…the name) for the real estate space in a month or so… and early marketing material suggest that one of their big selling points is that they are going to start with tons of users because they’ve bought a list from another real estate site (presumably with tons of users).   This has me scratching my head on a number of levels.

Can you really start a social network with people who don’t know they’re in it?  Would you be upset if you went to a site and they already had an account set up and knew things about you?

I haven’t followed up with them to find out just what they mean when they say they’ve acquired X number of users, but I’m definitely curious.   It’s one thing if they simply bought an email list (spammy but common).  It’s another thing, if users get to the site and find a LinkedIn-style profile already built for them.

…the international buyer.

I talked to the CEO of Properazzi (Yannick Laclau) the other day and mentioned my concern that they were entering a highly competitive space (and it appeared to me) without a plan to get comprehensive listings.   His response was that, at least initially, they would be appealing to a very international audience who would largely be unaware of domestic home search tools.

I’m not sure how much I buy this idea that it is enough to appeal to international buyers, but they’ve got to be the fastest expanding real estate search site in the world, so Yannick obviously knows a bit about what he’s doing!

DotHomes, Trulia, and RealEstate.com (and I’m sure others) have added Google’s Street Views to their home search tools.   Despite all the press releases flying around about this feature, the real innovation is on Google’s site since everyone is just tapping into their stuff and becoming ever more tied to the Google mapping solution.

…I’ve had my head buried in a personal project ever since my last seminar leaving me almost no time to catch up on my favorite blogs. With that said, I’m going to follow up this posts with a bunch of articles that may be out of date already, but I felt the need to clear the inbox!

The likely result from the slew of blog posts to follow is to show just how out of touch I’ve been lately!

…interesting reading.

…influence their purchase decisions.

What an awesome crowd!

People seemed interested, engaged, and enthusiastic about the material.   Thanks to everyone who helped make this event happen!

Also, I just posted a few of my photos from the event on Flickr… including photos from the evening before when a group of us went out for dinner at an unbelievable too Mexican restaurant in Newport Beach.

What a blast!

…hour on Trulia Voices, so I’m playing over there right now!

(And while I’m at it, I want to thank the Trulia folks for helping us build some pre-seminar buzz!   Between yesterday’s podcast and today’s Q&A session, they’re keeping me on my toes!)

Considering there’s a great crew sponsors and attendees traveling to Orange County for 4RealzEd event on Thursday, we thought it would be fun to meetup at Javier’s Cantina the night before.

Jim made a reservation for 16 people…. and considering Rudy, Joel, Jeff, Loren, and Drew have already RSVPed, you’ll want to get your name on the list quickly if you want to reserve a spot!  It should be a blast!

(By the way, there’s still a handful of spots left open for our event on Thursday and we’d obviously love to fill the place up.  If you know of any real estate professional in Southern California interested in getting a jolt of internet marketing education this Thursday morning, we’d obviously appreciate it if you helped spread the word!)

…an all-around awesome guy!

…the listing standards front.   While it will definitely help the big boys lower their aggregation costs, it should also help make the online listing search space even more competitive as I think (hope?) it will help lower the bar to creating a viable national presence for new startups.

Jeff gave me a demo of an earlier incarnation and I was quite impressed. He’s obsessed with bringing more transparency to the mortgage process… and if he’s successful, it should be a win-win-win for consumers, participating professionals and himself.

…submit proposals for a special session at NAR in Orlando!

I have lots of ideas, but I think it could be particularly interesting to submit a proposal for a discussion along the lines of “learning from success.” My idea would be to show a few different examples of how people are generating leads by using (non-blogging) social networks like LinkedIn, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, etc. and tie everything together in some general themes of what it takes to be successful.

I have enough good examples in my back pocket to put a presentation together, but I could ALWAYS use better examples… Are you an real estate agent or mortgage broker who has found a way to tap into a particular online community who wouldn’t mind sharing your story? Let me know!

…video contest! From the perspective of a judge, Mike made it easy by executing on a great idea!

Also, if one real estate video is not enough, I created a playlist of some of the other memorable entries to satisfy your interest in real estate video fix.

And sponsored by MySpace?   How could we resist…  4realz is joining Loren, Jeff, Robert, Justin,  Jeff and Matt to ‘Hollywood’ tomorrow!   Wish us luck!

Please don’t have music start playing when people load your blog!

…full-service.

And Mike is about halfway to meeting his predictions and it’s only April.

…their home search.

I think it is a great move by Trulia and outsourcing the task of collecting and organizing this task to Google has some obviously benefits over doing it in-house.  Collection/hosting costs are huge, but so are the potential legal headaches associated with being the original publisher of this information.