Location awareness is one of the killer features in the new iPhone. Especially in real estate apps, like Zillow’s app, which recently broke ½ million downloads.
We all know the old axiom with property, right? Location, location, location.
Now that can be translated to your desktop, in addition to your phone. The new version of Firefox (3.5) has added location awareness as one of the new features in this release. From their website:
Now Firefox can tell websites where you’re located so you can find info that’s more relevant and more useful (for example, getting directions or finding restaurants near you). It’s all optional - Firefox doesn’t share your location without your permission - and is done with the utmost respect for your privacy.
The is potentially huge for online real estate sites, which in the near future could query their visitors, ask for their location and return the most relevant results quickly and seamlessly to their desktop.
Granted if you are searching from home, you (hopefully) already know where you are. But if you were house hunting in a city in an unfamiliar State or pulling out a 3G-enabled netbook in a coffee shop on a Sunday morning open house tour, this could be a killer feature.
So the race is on - which will be the first site to implement this feature? Any bets?
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They have just launched a new product called Outside.in for Publishers - what they’re calling “an out-of-the-box hyperlocal news section for your website”.
Features include:
Customized Neighborhood News Pages for every neighborhood in your market.
Rich, interactive maps, headlines, and excerpts.
Access to aggregated stories from all local blogs, news sites, and other sources—including Twitter!
Tools to curate the stories, sources, and tags that will appear on your site.
The product is free but does come embedded ads from Outside.in. There is an ad-free version that can be licensed however.
I think this would be a great product to integrate with any online real estate research tool. A way to quickly mashup listings, neighborhoods with a real-time view of the events happening around you.
Combine this with the ratings from Walkscore, a proximity search filter like Estately’s, market data widgets from Altos Research and, of course, listings drawn hopefully from the MLS and you start to have a very compelling tool for consumers to dive in to.
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Boxee is a revolutionary application that lets you pull together all your media together in a single browser that you can access from the comfort of your couch. I truly believe that Boxee - when combined with a device like my AppleTV - is the future of television. It lets me consume all the media I’ve gathered on my local network as well as hook in to all kinds of web-based streaming content; including breaking news, music and, of course, video.
Recently, the company launched a contest for developers to get companies to write applications (”plugins”) that can be added to a Boxee installation.
The folks at WellcomeMat obliged and built a wicked cool app that let’s you browse and search for local videos on your TV. Check it out.
So why is this all important? As we move into this brave new world of web marketing where everyone becomes a content producer, it’s important to consider where the new distribution channels may lie. Whether it’s new devices like the Kindle (see FOREM now on Kindle) or new platforms like Boxee - figuring out your syndication strategy is going to become as important — if not more so — than creating the words, or video, in the first place.
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Technology | boxee | Local Video | Real-Estate-Marketing | WellcomeMat | comments | ↑top
A nice demonstration of a visual navigation app being developed by Occipital. The app searches for what you’re looking for, plots it inside geo-space and then provides you with directions and a preview of how to get there.
This will be the fifth Connect conference that I’ve been been part of and I’m proud of having been able to contribute to the program over the years.
But more importantly, Connect is something that I personally look forward to attending every summer. It’s a great place to meet up with all my friends in the industry and catch up; but I also get a ton out the conversations that spin out of the conference.
Here are 3 things that I’m personally really stoked about seeing this summer’s Connect:
Connect Create - The first-ever online real estate developers challenge. 72 hours to build a killer real estate app.
I’m also speaking this year again on a panel called How the Amazon Kindle Will Change Your Business on Thursday, August 6 at 2:00 pm. So I hope to see you there!
Full disclosure: Real Estate Connect conference is produced by Inman News, which owns the Future of Real Estate Marketing blog.
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Industry News | Inman-News | real-estate-connect | comments | ↑top
Realestate.com, the online real estate destination owned by the online mortgage giant LendingTree, rolled out a new sitewide redesign last week.
The new design is clean, fast and eminently usable. And while not as tricked out as some of its competitors, the site is a very capable competitor. Results are returned in a very easy to understand fashion.
Realestate.com is not a pure search play though. Like its online counterparts Redfin and ZipRealty, it also maintains a number of local offices and a “boots on the ground” (call it a “signs in the yards”) brand in a dozen or so states.
In addition to the redesign of its search tool, Realestate.com has also launched a community section on their site, which they’re calling Town Square.
Town Square will bring the worlds of online and in-person real estate together in an interactive social community. By visiting Town Square, consumers can access valuable insight from agents, share their experiences, learn about emerging real estate trends and search an A-to-Z encyclopedia about all-things-real estate. For real estate professionals, Town Square offers an opportunity to connect with interested homebuyers and sellers, network with other agents, share tips and best practices and blog about the latest real estate news and happenings in their area.
Frankly, they’re probably a little late to the party to get Realtors to engage in yet another platform; ActiveRain, Zillow, Trulia, Homegain and Realtor.com all offer blogging platforms.
That said, many of those platforms are already saturated with participants and so for folks looking for a new place to stake a claim, Town Square might very well be virgin territory. Especially if Realestate.com can drive some real traffic to those conversations.
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Friday Fun | Industry | Internet | Real-Estate-2.0 | real-estate-search | RealEstate.com | comments | ↑top
Estately has been playing the slow and steady game, but it’s one that I’m increasingly convinced is working out for them.
Today, they announced the addition of their tenth metropolitan market as they bring Atlanta under their fold. Adding 127,000 listings from two Georgia MLS databases, it now brings the total number of properties for sale on Estately.com to over 459,000. In addition to Georgia, Estately covers California, Illinois, New York, Oregon and Washington.
Estately’s search tool is a very robust and impressive product, as I’ve noted a number of times in the past. It’s one of my favorite search destinations on the web. I especially like their transit search tool which calculates a property’s distance from a particular transit line (see Estately Comes to Portland). In Atlanta, you can now do these kind of searches in proximity to the MARTA line.
Estately works on a referral basis - matching pre-screened Realtors with leads coming off its site. When a client who comes from Estately completes a successful transaction, the agent is charged a 20% referral fee. If you’re in any of their markets and want to work with them you can find out more at Estately for Agents.
At this point Estately’s closest parallel is probably Roost (see Roost Redesign Radically Changes Experience) and it’s interesting comparing the two MLS driven sites’ traffic patterns. Seems like there is quite a horse race developing there!
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The main advantage? Tweetlister takes all the listing details you input in to the site and automatically creates a 140 character “tweet” for you and gives you a landing page for the property.
Dewald writes…
With all of the variables and attributes in a real estate property listing, trying to get it shortened to the 140-character limit of a Twitter post can be a challenge. One thing which TweetLister does well is shorten the listing information for you.
You enter the broad-stroke information via pull-down menus and a few text boxes. You can also select a repeating schedule with start and end dates. TweetLister shortens it all into a classified-ad-style Twitter post. Nothing fancy, no snappy copywriting or anything. Just short and simple.
I’m a big fan of any service that makes life easier - but like Nik Nik at MyTechOpinion I had a hard time wrapping my head around Tweetlister initially. Certainly, using Twitter to promote a property can be an effective way to launch a listing into the conversation — as long as it’s not the only thing you’re tweeting! — but as NikNik said, much of this could easily be accomplished with a URL shortener and link tracking service like Bit.ly.
Also I think I was reacting to the idea that I’d be using my network to drive traffic to a third party destination. Personally, I’d want to send any visitors to my own website. I suppose if I were a Realtor that didn’t have a personal website that showed off my listings or already own a single-property website for the home, Tweetlister might make an quick and dirty alternative. But I’m betting most readers of this blog are doing at least one of the former however.
That said, combine Tweetlister with service like vFlyer that already does some of the heavy lifting of syndicating listings to multiple destinations online (including social networks like Twitter) and you’ve got a really interesting product. Especially if you roll in all the back end analytics functions that something like vFlyer offers.
As traffic to social networks continue to soar, they do become viable syndication destinations in addition to the real estate portals - but as Gahlord also writes in his piece, “don’t confuse automating your listing promotion via TweetLister with being an engaged social-media-expert real estate professional”. Engaging on Twitter or Facebook or any other social network is a big responsibility - and there are no short cuts there.
Unfortunately, it undid a lot of what I thought made the old site great. But hopefully we only seeing the first iteration of this next generation site and the site will continue to evolve.
Here are a couple things I picked up on:
Speed. The old Roost used to blaze — it was one of the very fastest search tools out there. Search a zip code and the results would pop up very, very quickly. Now it takes a great deal longer for the results page to return and when changing search filters there is a noticeable lag. Hopefully this is just a hiccup in the database that can get optimized over time.
Photos. In the old Roost - photos thumbnails were inline with the results and you could expand the listing to see more images. Now the photos have been moved off to the side and buried below the map. I like the new slide show option but I really couldn’t get over how they seemed to be so hidden on the page - I kept forgetting to look down there as I clicked through listings. To my mind they would be much better above the map in that right rail.
Listing Details. I love that Roost now hosts all the details themselves and doesn’t push you off to a broker site like it used to (see Roost Changes Up Their Game) but the new pop up windows don’t work for me. In fact, I couldn’t even see the listings until I disabled my pop up blocker. Again. hopefully this is only temporary until they can do some kind of inline display like Estately. Also I found it very hard initially to find the View Details button for any listing until I found it at the very bottom right of the page.
Refining Search. Roost’s blades (see Roost Redesigns Search Results) were not universally loved. But they were a novel way to quickly adjust the number of listings you were looking at. Now it took me a few minutes just to figure out how to change the price range, before I spotted Refine Search link next to the search box. Personally I found the green on white text very hard to see.
On the plus side. I did really like the new map search view. You can access that by clicking on the Expand Map link.
In addition to a revamped Roost.com, the company is now offering its search tool to brokers and agents, co-branded of course. So participating partners can benefit from any traffic generated at the main site as well as offer a greater experience to visitors to their own sites.
If they can clear up a few of those nagging issues I mentioned above, I think it could become a very competitive offering to other IDX solutions.
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