“In 24 months Localism will have more traffic…
…than Trulia and Zillow combined.”
Can’t wait to check back in 2 years!
Tagged: local RSS
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Dustin
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Dustin
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Dustin
Localism2.0 Launches
I got an early tour of the next version of Localism and I like much of what I saw… It’s a clean design that will give real estate agents plenty of opportunities to promote themselves (including by buying and/or creating new local communities). My guess is that this release will be very popular within the ActiveRain community.
Here’s my main criticism: When I put my consumer hat on, the purpose of the site doesn’t jump out at me at first glance. As a new user going to Twitter, I know what I’m suppose to do (i.e. answer the question: “what am I doing?”). As a new user going to Facebook, I know that I’m there to connect with friends and family. With localism, I’m asked to “go hyper local”… but I’m honetly not sure what that means… and it’s not particularly compelling when I get there since, as a consumer, there’s not a lot of ways for me to interact on the site… yet.
So here’s the good news. The ActiveRain team mentioned that (1) they did their SEO homework and they’re convinced these sites will rank really well (only time will tell) and (2) they’re working hard to add more consumer interaction points (text, photo and video upload for non-ActiveRain members). Assuming that at least some of the communities starts to get some serious traffic and the agents involved start to get some leads from the site, then I think they’ll have another winner on their hands.
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Jonathan Washburn
Dustin, Thanks for the review!
You make a very compelling point about giving the consumer clear direction about what they should be doing on the site. We will make sure to address this blocking issue before we open registration up to consumers.
As you alluded to above, it’s all about iterating the site forward.
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-Rob
Hey Dustin,
Nice review mate. But uh… aren’t you kinda skipping over what probably is the biggest flaw of Localism from a consumer standpoint?
Namely that all of the posters are real estate agents.
As a consumer, my early warning radar goes up immediately when I notice that. And you can’t help but notice that.
Yeah, as industristas, you and I might know that most real estate agents are honest, knowledgeable people, but as a consumer… do you really think people are going to trust a TV review site with reviews written only by TV salespeople?
Maybe once the popular image of the real estate agents has been changed, but in the current environment, color me skeptical.
The strategy needed to have been, from the start, consumer-centered, consumer-focused, and then use agents sparingly as “experts” — kinda like raisins in raisin-bread.
My $.02 anyhow.
-rsh
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Dustin
Rob: I’d agree that the consumer (or lack of consumer) interaction is clearly the weak point. However, from the point of view of meeting the needs of their core (i.e. agents), they really only need to provide a website that is going to attract consumer eyeballs… not necessarily consumer content. Looking at the site, it doesn’t scream “realtor” to me in the same way that AR does… so I’d give them the temporary benefit of the doubt to see if they got enough of their SEO, design and content right to get consumers to show up.
However, it’s also quite possible that I’m a bit biased in that RCG is run by agents, for agents, and yet is still a valuable community resource that drives considerable leads, so I see a lot of parallels.
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Joe Zekas
Great SEO will kill Localism quickly, as great marketing always kills bad products.
Consumers will go there, see that it’s a hill of Realtor-generated garbage and never return.
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Eric- New Orleans Condos and Lofts
We will have to see how it works. I have my own blog and site so would have to wonder if it would do much for me. I was an early member and moderator and am glad I got my start there. I know it works from people finding the blogs rather than localism home page. Most of my blogs are local. I think its got a great future and wondered why it took so long for the owners to figure that real estate is indeal local for the consumer.
Lets hope it does not compete with me.
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Jim Reppond
Not impressed. All the blog and website links go back to their own internal site. So you get no SEO juice for your own website. In fact, you become your own competition.
All the good cities (in Seattle area) are tied up with just a few people. I doubt if this will go very far. From what I’ve heard, Trulia intends to take them down at all cost. Should be easy for them.
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Dave
to educate some of you, localism is only in beta at the moment and still competing with realtown’s entire site. Don’t forget that it’s PARTOF Active Rain, not meant to be used as a standalone site. Last but most important; part of Active Rain’s idea is to allow realtors to provide content to their niche (community) but once localism comes out of beta, then the site will be open to everybody. So please don’t spread around garbage that the site is only intended to be used for realtors, that’s simply not true. Here’s a direct quote:
“It’s where neighbors and local merchants share what’s happening in their community.”
To the Trulia fanatic boasting that it will be SOOOO easy to bring down localism. First of all trulia can’t compete with localism in terms of content as it’s primarily a hub to find properties. If anyone will do it it will be Zillow who is just now starting to integrate similar features BUT neither of those sites have content that is reviewed for authenticity and i don’t think i need to remind anyone here that Zillow’s homeprice predictions are completely wrong and tha’ts putting it nicely.
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Dustin
Realtor.com Turns up the Heat and…
…I really like how they’ve mapped it out!
The Realtor.com team recently turned on a “heat map” option within their home valuation tool. Here’s a heat map of Ballard in Seattle where you can really see the detail of the more expensive areas (in particular the areas around the water!):
It’s clean, fast and well implemented. On my version of firefix (v 3) on a Mac, I’m not seeing the legend that others appearently can see, but that is the only hole I can find in the implementation.
To get an idea of just how detailed these maps are, it’s worth comparing to the previous implementation that exists on on the neighborhood page for this same area on realtor.com showing average neighborhood list price:
I think it is also worth noting that neither Zillow or Trulia have done much to bring the same level of detail to the maps… For example, Trulia’s heat maps are limited to the neighborhood level with boundaries…
And the option to display heat maps on Zillow no longer seems to be available (although I did find this page which shows what they used to look like on Zillow).
Anyway I love maps and think they can convey a ton of great information about neighborhoods and homes, so it’s great to see someone pushing the boundaries even if I’ve been giving the team a hard time recently for other issues (see realtor.com home values and realtor.com blog hack articles).
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Drew Meyers from Zillow
Dustin-
You caught on to the fact that we lost our heatmap functionality — it happened when we switched over to Microsoft aerial imagery a couple months ago. We do think it’s a cool feature and will try to add the feature back at some point; it’s just a matter of prioritizing that work against the other features our development team is working on. -
Dustin
I’m glad to hear it is missing because I spent at least 10 minutes searching for it… I liked the heatmaps when you guys first launched but think the recent realtor.com implementation is even better so you guys might take a few queues from them when you go to rebuild the functionality!
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Jim Duncan
Dustin – I never thought I would read that line – “take a few queues from (Realtor.com)” – Ever.
And I like the maps, too; ‘course it’s ridiculously and irresponsibly inaccurate for my market, but still … that’s why it’s “alpha” I guess.
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Dustin
Jim: I couldn’t resist!
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Bruce Breger
Dustin,
Never thought I would say this but Realtor.com nailed it. Best I have seen out there. They are starting to get it and with their hands on relationship with Realtors, their information will be accurate. Great post.
Bruce
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estewart6
Anoteh
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estewart6
Oops, shoot for backspace and you get Enter…
What I meant to say was another great tool that I’ve been using for real estate searches, etc. is the website by PropertyMaps. It has been an incredible tool. Another good thing is that they teamed up with RealtyTrac for foreclosure information.
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Jonathan Washburn 7:04 pm on July 27, 2008 Permalink |
It will be a lot of hard work but I think we’ll get there. Check out this graph: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/zillow.com+trulia.com+city-data.com/?metric=uv&months=12
City-data.com is a site similar to Localism in the way that it generates traffic from long tail search queries. Localism will have an advantage over city-data in the way it uses UGC.
Dustin 7:20 pm on July 27, 2008 Permalink |
I’ve been liking quantcast data even more lately and their chart is even more striking.
Nonetheless, you’re still running a site that gets substantially less traffic than any of the sites mentioned…
Joe Zekas 7:58 pm on July 27, 2008 Permalink |
If my brief sampling is any guide – I hope it isn’t – a fair portion of the Localism’s traffic will be from copyright lawyers making notes on pirated articles and photos.
One of the popular neighborhoods I looked at in Chicago had “Top neighbors” in Florida nad a suburb 50 miles otuside the city, and no relevant content whatsoever.