The Future of Real Estate Search?
June 17, 2009 by Emma Sorensen
propertyportalwatch.com welcomes a guest opinion post from Greg Robertson, the co-founder of W&R Studios, a software company dedicated to creating the next generation of web-based software solutions for the real estate industry. Their first web app is a social bookmarking site called Dwellicious. Prior to co-founding W&R Studios, Greg was the General Manager/Vice President of eNeighborhoods and also one of the founding partners of IRIS, a real estate software company started in 1992. Both eNeighborhoods and IRIS were featured in Inc Magazine’s, “Inc 500” list of the fastest growing privately held companies in country. Still active in the MLS community, Robertson currently sits as a director on The Council of MLS, an MLS industry trade organisation.
You can read more from Greg at his blog: blog.wr-studios.com.
Sometimes when I get asked, “What’s Dwellicious?”, I jokingly reply, a “it’s new way of searching for gingerbread houses on the web.” Sometimes this draws a laugh, but most of the time they think I’m somewhat serious. Actually, the name is a mash up. Like a lot of Web 2.0 applications, we took the name of an existing web service, delicious.com (formerly del.icio.us) and added the word, Dwelling. Delicious is one of the web’s most popular “social bookmarking” sites. So when you speak with someone who is familiar with Delicious (most likely a geek) and you tell them the name of our new site is called Dwellicious, they get it right away, “ahhh, a bookmarking site for real estate, cool!”
Still, most people don’t understand social bookmarking. I want to describe what social bookmarking really does, and how it might just be the future of real estate search.
The very first bookmarks.
Anyone who surfs the web a lot has most likely created a bookmark or saved a website to their “favorites” folder at one point. Typically this is a site you visit often, maybe your MLS, your agent website, or a News site you read often. I’m sure the first feature added, by the engineers who created the original Internet browsers, were creating bookmarks. The engineers, like us, got tired of typing in the same letters so often.
But, having all your bookmarks on a browser also has it’s disadvantages. Number one, you can only access your bookmarks from your personal computer. Not good-what if I’m at my friend’s house or on my iPhone? Also, what if you have a lot of bookmarks, say over 50? Your favorites toolbar, or the drop down menu on your browser would be too short to display all your bookmarks. A free account on delicious.com gives users a “Bookmarks Page”. Delicious also has a great identifying and sorting tool called “Tags”.
One of the best features of delicious is sharing. Delicious allows you to search everyone’s bookmarks. This is where the “social” aspect of social bookmarking comes in. Before I go on, lets talk about how people search on the Internet today.
Who do you trust, the computer or the pitchman?
When someone searches for something on the Internet today, they most likely start on a search portal such as Google or Yahoo! Once they submit their search, they get back two results.
1. “Natural” web site suggestions based upon a computer program/algorithm created by the search portal.
2. “Paid” web site suggestions that are based on “key words” in your search request.
So which result is better? The search results generated by a computer program? Or the search results paid to show up by the highest bidders?
Granted, Google’s natural search results are sometimes very accurate. But on the surface, having to choose from what a computer program tells me and what an advertiser says doesn’t seem like a good deal.
Social bookmarking
Now, lets imagine you are interested in motorcycles. You love motorcycles. You “ride to live and live to ride motorcycles”, as the saying goes. As part of your passion for motorcycles you scour the web for the best motorcycle websites out there. The best ones you “bookmark”, but since you are using a social bookmarking service instead of just “add to favorites” on your own browser, your bookmarks are shared with everyone using the service.
Now lets say another kindred spirit, who also loves motorcycles, joins the social bookmarking site you belong to. He types in “motorcycles”. Now all the bookmarks that other motorcycle junkies (like you) have made, appear on a list. The motorcycle websites with the most bookmarks are on the top of this list. This is very powerful. What you have in front of you is a list that other humans beings put together about the best websites about motorcycles. Think about that, OTHER HUMAN BEINGS, not a computer, not an advertiser that paid to be on top, not a fancy mathematical program, but other REAL PEOPLE who love the same things you do!
This type of human based computation is just the beginning.
Mass collaboration and real estate search
The National Association of REALTORS(r), in a recent survey reported that 84% of all homebuyers start their search for real estate on the web. And we know from other industry statistics, and just plain old human nature (everyone is curious!), homebuyers search across multiple real estate sites.
Now lets imagine you’re interested in buying a 5 bedroom house in Costa Mesa, CA. Listings are everywhere so you have a lot of options. You can search all the popular search portals like Realtor.com, Zillow, a local broker site and countless others. If you use a social bookmarking site to bookmark your favorites, others can also search upon your favorites.
Think about the possibility of searching a real estate website like this:
* Would you be interested in knowing what the top 10 most popular 5 bedroom homes for sale in your city?
* How about finding out the most popular home for sale in your neighborhood?
* What about the most popular home below $500,000?
Everyone loves talking about real estate. But before you can share this information with everyone (Facebook, Twitter, etc) having all your favorites in one place is key. Bringing that off-line conversation on-line could bring the whole concept of “crowd sourcing” real estate search to reality.
Engagement
To engage with someone is to occupy, attract or involve their interest or attention. But how is the usurped agent or broker, whom the consumer has bypassed on their way to the Internet, going to engage these new homebuyers? New tools are being created to help put agents and brokers back at the beginning of the search process, where they belong. Agents and brokers need to be involved early because no “street view”, list of schools, or neighborhood demographic report is ever going to replace the knowledge a good real estate professional can bring to the kitchen table.
Where do we go from here?
There are big challenges. Real estate listings tend to be transient, and they also change (the price can go up and down, new photos could be added.) And, of course, the biggest challenge would be usage. Some level of critical mass would have to be generated to give this sort of web service any legs. However, services like Alexa still provide useful information without having a huge footprint. As the Internet begins to enter a new phase of social networking it would only be natural that new tools would emerge to leverage the world’s fascination with real estate.
by Greg Robertson
co-founder of W&R Studios
woolleyrobertson.com
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Real estate search…well well hos s its future?
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Since I talk to RE agents all over the country on a daily basis, I thought I would put my 2 cents in. Some of these agents are not even trying to increase their internet presence at all. So just creating one will make yourself look different from the others out there. If I had an agent that told me that they didn’t have a website & wanted to sell my house, I would show them the door quicker than they could ask why. With all the educational tools out there, there’s no excuse anymore to not know how to turn on a computer. Your either a 2.0 agent or you’ll be out of the industry w/ the quickness…
This article enlightened me so much, I can only say Thank you, Thank you for writing it! I didn’t even know about bookmarking being a social act.
Eric, I am one of those you would throw out of the door for not having a presence on the net, but I am working on it…
Real estate business is based on some tricks. It will get us through experience.
Your presentation and language is very good. Beginners in real estate field can also understand.
The emergence of internet has seen the radical change in conventional trends of commerce. Today, online marketing has become the key word for numerous businesses. Real Estate is one of them. Of late, Internet has become the first place most of the potential homebuyers in their search for a home.
I think real estate business will be the number 1 online business in future.
I think a good real estate professional should have a blog on it.