I missed this news a few days ago that Terabitz…
… continues to move towards a more backend technology play as oppose to a front-end consumer destination site. I think that’s a smart move by them.
Tagged: Terabitz RSS
Carrie T are discussing. Dustin
Greg thinks Top Producer is vulnerable to…
…the Zillow machine, but I seriously doubt it…
I 100% agree that someone could seriously improve on the existing CRM products for agents… During our after-lunch conversation this past week, I mentioned that if Trulia really wants to reach marketing dominance some day, they should offer a free, high-quality CRM to agents. But first, they’d need to start thinking of themselves as a company that provides marketing tools to agents, not just as an advertising platform (and interestingly, I get the impression that Rudy is already thinking this way!).
However, I don’t think Rudy is enough to make it happen for Trulia.
Why? Because to call either Trulia or Zillow a “marketing” platforms for agents would be to confuse marketing with advertising. The core DNA of both companies is to build consumer-oriented products and then find a way to integrate agent-advertising into those products. Other than the (very valuable) service of getting agents in from of consumers, I’m yet to see either company make the mental leap toward thinking what should they do to make the day-today business of agents easier or more efficient.
Just as it is in TP’s DNA to build products for agents, T and Z still live in a world of consumer-oriented products. My guess is that some of the executives at T or Z would view the development of pure agent-centric products (like a CRM) as selling-out the consumer experience of their core sites.
Nonetheless, if T or Z (or Roost!), decided to build some agent-centric projects, I’d argue that they’d likely open up some interesting business opportunities and potentially do a much better job endearing themselves to their core advertisers.
And a quality CRM is only one way they could go… CMS, market intelligence, and transaction coordination are three other (obvious) areas where existing agent-centric products are either seriously lacking features or the market is seriously under-served.
But just because the market is starved, doesn’t mean T or Z have any interest in coming to the rescue. As a matter of fact, inertia suggests to me that they are not even thinking about taking on this market and TP executives are right not to worry about Zillow.
(Are you having a hard time translating this post? A key can be found here.)
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whatley
What about Google?
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Christina Ethridge | North Idaho Real Estate
Despite there being great CM programs out there (Act!, Goldmine, etc), TP has a strong and growing client base. Even though the program is clunky, there are simply too many things that it does well that the other programs do not. It’s so specialized for real estate and when you know everything it does and integrate it into your business, it’s an awesome program. I can not see Z, T or R even considering it and G, well, it’s so specialized with such a ’small’ client base that I doubt they’d consider it either.
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mm
Isn’t this the direction the folks at Fidelity National are going with Cyberhomes.com? Since they have a ton of agent software and services in the their family to begin with (e.g., CRM, MLS mgmt, title agent svcs, etc.), they have the potential to stitch this all together for the agent community and also to have excellent data for consumers. What do you think?
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Jim Reppond
With TP8i coming out at least they are moving away from javascript to be more mainstream. (they even recommend Firefox now!) It’s going to be very hard for any new player to jump in and get a toe-hold in the market. Most top producing agents use TP and are going to be very reluctant to switch. I, for example, have a half dozen licenses with multiple Action Plans and systems integrated into TP. It would take someone (and I don’t have the time) three to six months just to recreate everything we do in another CMS. No thank you.
TP was originally designed by a Canadian RE agent who was a programmer. (same geeky guy as did the old training videos). It was obvious he was more of a programmer than a design or relational database person. And he never even got around to setting up proper import-export or customizable report functionality (which is the basic definition of a real database, IMO).
Still, he threw in everything except the kitchen sink and, if you can live with it’s horrible interface, you can do more that any other real-estate-specific CMS. So regardless of it’s lack of GUI and other frustrating limitations, I think it’s the only viable solution for what it does. It’s here to stay.
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Greg Tracy
Blueroof360 has a powerful lead and client management system built into it.
And, unlike Top Producer, it is very easy to use and understand.
The Blueroof360 product also schedules showings, gets feedback on your showings and every client has a log-in to see all the activity on their file, including showings and feedback.
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Hi Dustin!
Interesting thoughts. Keep the ideas flowing. We’re always listening…..
Rudy
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Dustin
Sorry everyone for disappearing for the day after publishing this post.
Whatley: I’ve always thought Google could do a MUCH better job creating a healthy marketing platform for real estate professionals… hell, they already have a few thousand real estate professionals using their blog platform and they offer NO special incentives or marketing opportunities. However, the entire industry for offering a marketing platform is probably only worth a hundred million a year or so a year (all non-ad stuff), so it wouldn’t likely dent Google’s margins even if they dominated.
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Dustin
Christina and Jim: I think the point Greg was trying to make and one that I’d agree with is that someone could easily offer a free (or nearly free) CRM tool that was specifically for real estate that could capture much of the market. Of course there would always be people who would be stuck with TP because of their years of specialization, but my guess is that 80% of TP users never use 80% of the features… and that a simpler program would not only suffice, but actually be preferable, for many agents!
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David G from Zillow.com
Successful marketing tactics are shifting from selling to serving (at least in Real Estate.) IMO, the real question here is; what role does CRM play in a permission marketing world?
Last week I came across a blogger (not in the RE.net) who referred to the popular hosted CRM software as “forcedsales.com.” That post really got me thinking about the dubious future of CRM. Consumers no longer want to be leads and Gen X and Gen Y don’t want to be “sold.” They want to take control, they want to choose their service provider and they want to be able to contact you when they need you not when you feel like “marketing” to them. It got me thinking that if permission marketing is working for you – on your blog or in the online real estate communities – why would you need to manage leads?
I could be wrong but I don’t think you’re going to see many new players trying to get into the lead-harvesting space. Rather, we are seeing new marketing platforms emerge that focus on earning consumer’s permission and that enable service, not sales. Blogs are such a platform. Zillow’s Q&A, Discussions and even the simple ability to upload Neighborhood Photo’s are all examples of next generation marketing tools (not advertising!) Permission marketing absolutely does put the consumer first – that is how it works – but it is definitely marketing. And advertising compliments social media marketing so well because, unlike sales, advertising has always worked on the permission-based principle that empowers today’s consumer with choice.
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Dustin
David G: You make a very interesting point… as I had never thought about the disconnect between keeping contact with people in your address book and permission marketing. But I don’t think it is a real one.
You’re example of using a blog for permission marketing would only work for a small subset of real estate consumers. For better or worse, many consumers still prefer email… and I’d argue that reaching consumers how and when they *want* to be reached is the essence of permission marketing.
Are you the type of consumer who wants a monthly update on market conditions? A weekly summary of my blog posts? A daily update on mortgage rates? An on-the-fly update of homes that meet your specific requirements? A email campaign from an easy to use CRM would likely be the best way to help any of these clients out!
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Incredible Agent
Simplicity is the key. TP is a dinosaur and those who are stuck with it will be dinosaurs too. Maybe their new version will be something different, but it’s probably only an improvement…not a complete redesign.
Blogs, Q&A, etc are great tools for permission marketing, however I believe it is only the best way…not the only way. Just because a few people like to read blogs, doesn’t mean everyone does. Most consumers don’t have the time and certainly aren’t using RSS readers to keep up (yet). CRM tools are great to keep in front of your client without the effort. Lead harvesting is critical if you are going to spend time and money generating leads. Otherwise you’re letting potential slip through the cracks.
My advice…do it all and let your prospects decide how they want to be converted. They will in the long run anyways.
Dustin
Looks like Terabitz is serious about…
…providing websites for brokerages.
White-labeling a quality broker site is decent idea for a business, but worthy of $10M in funding?
What do you think they charge for a website like this? $10K/year? $30K/year? Do you think they agree to go exclusive for an area?
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Greg Tracy
The ACB site has a lot of information, but it’s a big mess.
Try searching for anything and it’s just a big ball of clutter. You can only cram so much information into a space before it becomes unusable.
Dustin
Completely didn’t see Terabitz going the…
…personalized website for brokers route (example). It’s nice to see that Terabitz is stil around (I didnt’ hear or see anything from them at RE Connect), although with $10M in funding, those had better be some expensive websites if investors are going to recoup their money.
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toddwcarpenter
This isn’t exactly what I was thinking, but when Trulia announced their co-branded platform for publishers, I thought it might be better to approach agents, brokerages, or local MLS’s. Trade listings for a co-branded site.
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Dustin
I completely follow that logic Todd… but I get the impression that Terabitz is looking at this as a revenue stream as oppose to a way to get more listings.
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Scott Rogers
I predict that in 2008 we’ll see even more existing companies begin to offer advanced, but templated web sites to leverage well-developed search technology to benefit brokers, agents, and most importantly — consumers.
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Jessie B
I completely agree with Dustin regarding Terabitz. They are simply looking for revenue now. The Trulia item is done to get listings and links but a possible issue with the idea maybe a fall off from the search engines of T results due to duplicate content from all the partners. Time will tell but I think T is pretty dependant on those organic results so this could maybe do more harm than good in the long run.
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Brian Rothenberg
@Jessie B
Trulia is pretty SEO savvy – I’m sure they will simply exclude search engine bots from crawling/indexing these partner sites in order to avoid duplicate content issues. It’s a pretty simple problem to avoid if they do it correctly.
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2.0 Weblogs
iSee you have a twitter, google facebook addiction… guess mine?
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Jessie B
@ Brian – did a check after my post and yes, they are blocking it out via robots.txt for each sub-domain.
It will be interesting to see if the webmasters of smaller sites do the sub domain with the thoughts they are increasing their web footprint since some are not as web savvy.
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Brian Rothenberg
@ Jessie – I wouldn’t expect Trulia to broadcast the fact that their new co-branded listing pages won’t be indexed by SEs. I’m sure many sites will think they are gaining a web footprint by launching such a site.
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Jessie B
Brian – Totally 100% agree with you.
I have noticed in a few other posts that it seems like even some of the more experienced web individuals maybe under that impression. BTW – good work on Y real estate over the last major update.
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Dustin
Brian and Jessie: I just thought I’d pipe in to say that I thought it was quite interesting that Trulia went the subdomain route for the branded sites. But then again, it is a freebie for these sites, so I guess they can’t ask for too much.
Dustin
A trip down the memory super-highway…
Top 10 stories of 2007 from Inman News (see the article for details):
- Subprime market implodes; housing downturn worsens.
- Blogging runs deeper in real estate’s blood.
- Foxtons closes shop.
- Foreclosure problem worsens; Bush announces rescue plan.
- Redfin and “60 Minutes” of fame.
- Trulia and Zillow get booted from Prudential Real Estate convention.
- Realogy goes private.
- Well-known real estate writer dies.
- NAR’s Gateway project announced.
- FHA goes modern.
All good and interesting news stories. But what would a blog post be without some after-the-fact quarterbacking. Here are my thoughts:
The subprime mess definity earned the list, while I think blogging is in there purely as linkbait. Foxtrons never crossed my radar so I can’t say much about them, but I would have included the foreclosure mess in with the subprime mess (despite the fact that two smaller messes would be easier to clean than one huge mess). Redfin PR got proper kudos while Prudential made a PR blunder. Realogy business structure must be interesting to others and I simply didn’t know the author. I don’t have high hopes for Gateway (although I wouldn’t say the same thing for NAR’s investment fund). FHA… yawn…
And while am at it… here are two stories that would have made my list:
The launch of so many (already) forgotten sites. How about all the sites that launched with great fanfare only to fall off of everyone’s radar. Terabitz comes to mind. Social networks like Zolve (which went from charging almost $1000/year to $0/year in its first few weeks) and Propertyqube also seem to have dropped off the map. And there were many (way too many to name them all!) “local” sites that were hyped by the RE.net at one point or another: MyHouseKey (kinda dead), SuperListingSite (completely dead), Localism, StreetAdvisor, and YourStreet.
Lack of fiscal restraint in the online real estate space. Money flowed into online real estate space: Terabitz with $10M in V/C money… Zillow with another $30M… Trulia got another $10M… Redfin with $12M more…
a reader, -
Jessie B
What is it about the sites you think caused them to fall off the radar?
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Dustin
Jessie: I think it has a lot to do with the conversation that Jeff spurred. Why some sites have fallen off the radar is roughly the same as why I think the vast majority of tools fail… “I’m convinced the reason the vast majority of online tools fail in the real estate space is that companies think they can appeal directly to agents and still find success online. Those tools that attract LOTS of consumers (think: Zillow, Trulia, even Realtor.com) have a much easier time getting adopted by real estate professionals. Online sites that primarily appeal to real estate professionals are almost inevitably missing the magic ingredient of consumers.”
Your thoughts that the next generation site will figure out how to get even more comprehensive listings is definitely one track that could be an improvement for consumers…
a reader
If I may, not to hijack the post… Hyperlocal sites were doomed to fail (I said so at the time) because the key to their business and audience is hyperfragmented. The odds of two visitors to one of those sites finding (or contributing) content about a shared topic in a shared location are almost nil due to the sites’ hyper granularity.
Say there are 100,000 cities, counties, neighborhoods, ZlP codes or whatever geographical subdivision in the US, and an unrealistically high 10% conversion from casual visitor to contributor. The lower bound for having some content everywhere is 1 million visitors.
High-density and tech-savvy metros will be disproportionately filled out, with 99,000 no-man’s-land locations. As your audience expands outside of those early-adopter metros, new visitors come to a site that has nothing to offer to them, and requires them to enter content with the implicit guarantee no-one will read it.
Aggregating content up to larger locations (e.g. combine all ZlP codes’ content into a city) solves the density problem but defeats the site’s hyperlocal purpose.
This isn’t an easy problem, but the initial solutions were demonstrably doomed to fail from the get-go.
Dustin
Talking about Zillow’s neighborhood aggregation got me thinking…
…about how I tried to solve the problem at REALTOR.com back when I was on the product team at Move (May ‘06 to Dec ‘06).
Back then, I took over a mapping initiative because I wanted to create an interface to that could aggregate and display the vast amount of data within the grasp of REALTOR.com, Move.com, moving.com, etc. within a simple mapping overlay. My first (and only) pass at the project involved working with the one engineer/architect at my disposal (a darn talented guy!) to develop a widget that was eventually implemented on each neighborhood detail page of REALTOR.com. (To see an example, scroll to the bottom of the Calabasas page).
The options boxes on this implementation are pretty limited in that they only include a few datasets (i.e. average home and rental price, number of listings and rentals and medium household income) at a few listing levels (i.e neighborhood, zip code, and school district), but you can imagine that if the data is batched in at a fine enough level (census blocks for example), then it is somewhat trivial to add any new dataset and aggregate the data up to any level (neighborhood/zipcode/city/school district/county/state) using this basic design.
The discussion about Zillow’s neighborhood aggregation got me thinking about this because I can tell that a ton of work went into developing their overlays, and yet they are just barely touching the surface of the data they could be providing… It seems to me they’ve over-emphasized the importance of their zindex-type data when, my educated guess, is that relevant consumers (i.e. potential buyers) are interested in so much more.
I’m not going to say that the overlays on the realtor.com neighborhood project are better implemented (they’re not), but I think the concept I put together was closer to providing information that would be relevant to home buyers, which, after all, is the group most likely to be looking for neighborhood information. In writing this, I feel a bit sad that it didn’t make sense for me to continue down the path of improving the overlay widget because until someone provides a much more slick way for consumers to filter and prioritize neighborhoods based on information that would matter most to them, I’m convinced some major innovation will come into this space.
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Michael Wurzer
What I was surprised about with Move’s neighborhood stuff was that the listing integration was not very strong. It seemed like the dev teams for the new stuff were very different and divorced from the dev teams for the listing side.
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joe peffer
Attempts like this are moving in the right direction –toward what buyer consumers want when they go house hunting on the web.
Someday in the coming year, an outfit like Zillow, Realtor.com, or an as-of-now unknown (ESRI Breakaway?) will assemble a huge data warehouse running on an enormous geographic information systems server.
GIS data layering is the best way for the next great search to come together — putting incredible visual data at the potential home buyer’s fingertips.
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Dustin
Michael: Good call…
I’ll keep my opinions on the internal team structure stuff to myself, but you make a very valid point that the listings were not better integrated into the project. Granted there is an option to show “home for sale” on the widget, but the bulk of the listing integration of neighborhood data happens around the Showcase product. (see the neighborhood info tab on any showcase listing for an example.)
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Dustin
Joe:
Because I ran GIS databases for years (as a transportation engineer) before jumping into online real estate, I also have a GIS bias… And as a matter of fact, the Realtor.com Neighborhood widget I mentioned above has a GIS backend. Getting a new dataset to show up on the map is as simple as importing the data into the backend and maping it to a new option to the option box. The overlay tiles are actually generated on the fly, although the tiles are cached so areas that get hit often can display quickly.
The weakness of this approach is that you loose interactivity with the map once the maps are rendered. That’s why I think the work that Zillow put in to get each area to get highlighted on mouseover is really quite impressive. The drawback to that approach is that it appears to be quite front-end heavy and my guess is that it will be a lot more work to get useful heat maps out of that system (especially heat maps that render well cross-browsers).
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Jessie B
Hello Dustin,
Although I love these maps and nice tools (they are all great link bait for a tech point of view), I sometimes question their real usage by actual buyers. Obiviously for relo it’s a great tool.
If memory serves me correctly from the NAR Homebuyers report, the normal buyer purchases a home witin 8-11 miles from were they live currently. If that is the case, then how much usage do these tools really see, as I suspect most are famaliar with the areas they are interested in.
My personal experiance, is that most seem to be interested in finding out exactly what school their children will be going to more than anything else.
Thoughts?
Dustin
Jessie: I’d agree that this type of neighborhood data will only be useful to a small subset of users. I happen to think it wouldn’t be too difficult to make graphical data relevant to people moving even only a short distance, but that is another project for another day.
Overall, I agree completely that neighborhood map data is only valuable to small set of people who are looking to relocate.
Dustin
I had totally forgotten that there is a public view into more data using the same overlay widget (but on a smaller map) to give an idea of what I mean by adding more data options. If you look at this page on the Calabasas neighborhood page, you can see an area where the team opened up even more GIS-based data fields.
David G from Zillow.com
I agree with Michael; the genius in Zillow’s implementation of neighborhood search is that it’s well integrated with listings. I do however really like having access to a map view of the neighborhood on the neighborhood overview page.
It’s our hope that neighborhoods on the map drive traffic to neighborhood detail pages like homes on the map are an entry point to home detail pages. Time will tell if the Zindex is sufficient to attract that interest — but I’d love to hear suggestions for more effective hooks to Zillow’s local pages.
Greg Swann
I haven’t taken the time to comment on any of this, but I’m at a loss to understand why Zillow invested even more money on really amazingly badly defined “neighborhoods.”
Dustin
David: You’re awesome… Despite your implication, I don’t think Michael would agree with you that Zillow’s implementation was genius. Clearly Zillow is not going to have a great neighborhood experience if your existing listing content is the “genius” that makes it work. Zillow’s listing content is clearly not nearly comprehensive enough.
Thinking of neighborhood definitions… One of the other mapping projects I spearheaded at Move was to use the neighborhood definitions given by agents on their listings (many MLS provide this as a field) to develop a unique set of “agent-defined” neighborhood definitions that was inspired by the work done by the neighborhood project. Besides realtor.com, I think only craigstlist is sitting on enough user-defined points to put together a truly unique nationwide set of neighborhoods.
Carrie T 11:03 am on August 11, 2008 Permalink |
I hadn’t heard all this new info about Terabitz. It sounds great, if I had an iphone. It will be awesome for those that do have them. I have been using a site called property maps that matches up the MLS with Google Maps and I found more properties and foreclosures with property maps. Their site is http://www.propertymaps.com. It may be something you want to look at.
Dustin 3:06 pm on August 11, 2008 Permalink |
PropertyMaps team: Stop trying to fool us by pretending that consumers are providing links back to your site in comments. Next one on either 4realz or RCG goes in the spam box.