4realz.net

One of the websites I mentioned at the Inman presentation a few weeks ago was listing number.   One of the most interesting elements of the site is just how trivial it can make tracking ROI of an agents marketing spend… and along those lines, the folks behind Listing Number just published their first set of [...]

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 [...]

…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 [...]

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 [...]

I think I’ve recovered enough now to actually post about it!
Despite our best efforts to be prepared, the day started off a bit rough with a nearby mudslide taking out power in our building in the morning (meaning no hot coffee and no projector) and a 9-car pileup on a nearby freeway [...]

…done even attempted to add value to their brands/websites by capturing the contributions/knowledge of their agents.   I fully realize that brokerages don’t see themselves as publishes (except of listings!), but it would just take one large brokerage to substantially change the game if they could build the right tools and incentives that would encourage their [...]

Inman just published the latest Hitwise traffic data for the month of January: Yahoo up, MSN down in latest Hitwise real estate site rankings
My commentary:

The fact that Hitwise had Move.com bouncing up to #2 last month only only to fall back to #8 the following month says less about Move.com’s traffic and more about the [...]

…and I’m surprised that Greg has such a lowly view of Google’s algorithms. I’ve found that the traffic that comes to RCG from search terms like [moving to seattle] and [agent recommendations] is highly relevant and RCG contributors get more than a few clients out of search terms like these each month. Having [...]

…previous real estate blogs weren’t getting much traffic.
About the same time I started blogging about real estate, Google came out with gmaps.   In order to build a little buzz around my new site, I built a little app on top of the their platform that put NWMLS data on top of a google map. [...]

…that Trulia was able to grow traffic throughout the fall and especially in December.

Joel wonders if the Zillow team is happy to be out of the spotlight, but I say no way.  Momentum is critical at this point to both companies. Momentum opens doors, gets better press coverage and keeps investors happy… [...]

…that WP.com is automatically doing of my posts the other day, but didn’t play with the new feature right away. My loss. This is great stuff.
For any posts, I can now see how many times the article is read in a feed reader in addition to how many times is is [...]

(some names left anonymous to protect the innocent)

There’s a hell of a lot of VC money floating around this industry. I was surprised at how many people there were with lots of VC funding. Joel seemed to notice the same thing: “a whole new crop of real [...]

…I would concur that realtor.com might dominate real estate search in 2008.    But dominate is WAY too strong of a word because no one dominates real estate search today.
To dominate a market, I’d think you’d have to have something approaching at least 50% market share…  Let’s use eBay as an example (the numbers are a [...]