Over the past few years speaking to agents all over the country, I often get asked how to build a local blog that consistently generates leads over time (and hint: it’s not easy nor is it fast). Rather than continue to field those questions one off, why not just build a local real estate blog from scratch — publicly? This is an idea I’ve been brewing in the back of my mind ever since I ran across the Million Dollar Blog Project. And then the comment thread on Daniel Beer’s a Brutally Honest Case Study turned the idea into a real initiative. If you so desire, you can follow along and build a site yourself. Of course, to do it yourself you’ll need the design and development skills (or money for them) — but we’ll get into all that later. First, let’s be clear what we are setting out to accomplish.

The Goal

Build a real estate website from the ground up, sourcing input from the tech-savvy Geek Estate community, with the following goals:

• Maximize lead generation (signups, blog or IDX)
• Maximize lead conversion (phone calls, requests for showings, specific property requests, track closings from site long-term)
• Maximize time on site, page views/visit
• Minimize bounce rate

How it Will Work

Let me start by saying I don’t want to finalize any details of Geek Build 2012 without the help of the Geek Estate community. There are some amazing talented individuals that follow this blog regularly, and I certainly want your feedback. After all, this project is owned by the entire community — not just me.

I’ve spoken about the Geek Build 2012 project with several individuals, including Daniel Bacon, as a result of the discussion on Daniel Beer’s post – and here’s what we’re thinking makes the most sense:

• There will be between 2-5 actual local real estate sites built (or rebuilt).
• Sites will be built on top of WordPress.org.
• Everything from the branding to the domain name to the title tags to the design to the IDX solution to the calls to action to the the wireframe to the content strategy will be discussed publicly and all decisions will be voted on by the Geek Estate community.
• There will be a steering committee that will make final decisions after reviewing all the feedback from the community. It will consist of several experienced technologists and at least two active real estate agents/brokers who make their primary living from selling real estate.
• The development and design will be crowd sourced to the Geek Estate community (a few tech-savvy passionate participants, and who ever else is willing and able to help), and participants will be expected to pick up the cost of design or development that they cannot do themselves (or cannot be shared across all sites).

What We Need

• Participants – so far, Daniel Bacon is the only confirmed participant who will be building a website. The details regarding what is required of a participant are not totally final — but unless you are able to handle both design and code yourself, there will likely be some cost to participating.
• Coders/Designers – in a perfect world, we’d have one PHP/CSS person and one designer to volunteer some of their time to help on this project. Whether or not the right person is out there and willing to help? I’m not sure.
• Steering Committee Members – if you’re interested in serving on the steering committee, shoot me an email with your qualifications and include a note as to why you want to participate.

**It’s probably goes without saying, but all participants, volunteers, and steering members will get proper recognition throughout this project – you’ll be in the spotlight

Want to get Involved

Leave a comment here, or email me at drew at esmexecdesigns dot com with the subject “Geek Build 2012″.

Look forward to hearing from you…this is going to be a very fun, collaborative process that we’ll undertake together over the coming weeks and months.

More updates to come soon!

No one disputes the need for IDX on a successful real estate website. With that said, what are the absolute BEST IDX platforms for real estate agents and brokers on the market today?

Diverse Solutions dsSearchAgent

vs

rewIDX

vs

Displet

vs

Real Geeks

vs

IDX Broker

vs

iHomeFinder

What do you use? What do you think? Does it work? Do your client like it? What’s your conversion rate? Are there any other providers that deserve to be on this list that I missed? Do any of these providers deserve to be axed from the list?

Would love your feedback as to what works and what doesn’t in the land of IDX.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is going to be an ongoing discussion for most of 2012 I would guess, as brokerages and agents around the country decide whether or not listing syndication makes sense for their businesses (I think it does).

[via AGBeat]

Best

Here are two of the best in my mind.

MSQRealty.com

What’s not to like? My prediction — this will be the best site in the entire industry within 6 months. I’ve seen some of the new stuff Dominic has been working on the last few weeks (such as new “building” pages) — and they are wicked cool.

Disclosure: Dominic Morrocco, a partner with M Squared, and I are good friends, and he is a client of Virtual Results where I used to work.

SueAdler.com

I simply LOVE the design of this site, and the focus on the commute information to Manhattan. Further, if you use BoomTown – check out the integrated BoomTown search experience into her primary site.

Disclosure: This is a site by Virtual Results, my former employer.

Worst

What do you think? Do I dare call out some bad ones? In the name of radical honesty, I will call out a few subpar (to put it nicely) sites I’ve come across…

Crye-Leike

In all honestly, I’m just beyond confused as a user as to what they want me to do when I get to the home page. It’s too cluttered with irrelevant information. So..instead of try to figure it out, I’d just go back to Google and look for another site with a simpler user interface.

Z57 and Advanced Access

Any of the thousands of sites built by Z57 (like this one) or Advanced Access (like this one) could be on this list.

Your Thoughts

Note that I’ve seen a lot of agent and broker websites, but no where near all of them. These were the sites I liked the most, and least.

What are your favorites? And what horrible sites have you seen lately in dire need of an overhaul?

The history of a home includes a lot of things, depending on the age of both the home and the community it resides in. In the case of my parents home in Sammamish, that includes but is not limited to:

• Photos of the outhouse from 50 years ago
• Photos of the hideous red carpet that used to be in my bedroom
• The transaction date and price from the 1920′s when my great great grandparents bought the property
• Stories and photos of my parents water skiing in the summers with the neighbors.
• Photos of my neighbors and I playing “ball tag” on the docks.
• Numerous remodels.
• Photos of Monahan (spelling?), the small community around the old lumber mill right down the lake
• Photos of my mom and I rebuilding the deck when I was in 8th grade. And my step dad rebuilding it again a year ago.
• The fact that the ceiling in my room looked like a disaster from the time I tore off the ugly tiles in 7th grade until sometime mid way through high school when we refinished it with new drywall
• Stories of the tenants that rented the property over the years
• The fact that one of my best friends was born in the very house I moved into in 4th grade
• Stories of the journey’s my grandparents took to the cabin (now house) from Seattle more than 40 years ago when Issaquah barely existed
• The fact that my dad and mom lived there in the late 1970′s when my sister was born

You get the picture. Now, some of these photos and stories should only shared between family — or close friends. But others could certainly be shared with anyone who wanted to see them. So of course there are privacy considerations to be thought through. The important thing to note is that every single home on the planet has a story — and that’s what home owners want to know (but few will go through all these steps to figure it out). And the “story” is what listing agents are marketing while a home is on the market to make it stand out from the thousands of other properties on the market.

What got my started on this topic you may ask? Well, it was this paragraph from Rob Hahn’s post about ARG’s decision to stop syndicating their listings:

Second, given the number of times that Mr. Abbott talks about how valuable the listing information is, just how important it is as “intellectual property”, and talks about how major publicly traded companies like Zillow and Realtor.com/Move could not survive without that intellectual property… am I the only non-REALTOR out there listening to that and wondering, “Hey, so all that information about my house is that valuable eh? Should I get any piece of all that valuable intellectual property action?”

So I think you know my answer to this question. No, Rob, you are not the only non-Realtor who has thought about this. And yes, there is intellectual property value that home owners are right to share in for their own homes.

How exactly? Read on…

The Opportunity

Give home owners a way to “own” their own home online. And I mean truly OWN — not some page on some 3rd party platform.

Tell the ENTIRE history of a home & its surrounding community.

What if, as part of the home purchase, the home owner was given control of a website entirely about their property? Essentially, some sort of “carfax for homes” that detailed everything you could ever want to know about the home.

What It Would Look Like

Well, I’d argue strongly that a “timeline” of a home, very similar to your individual timeline on Facebook, would make for a pretty compelling user experience.

Give home owners the ability to post photos, and tag those photos with dates (and, in a perfect world, people too). Give owners the ability to post stories from past tenants, family, and friends. Give owners the ability to post details of remodels, and the dates that they occurred. Give owners a way to post garage sales. Give owners a way to post family reunions, Christmas gatherings, and birthday parties for their kids. Give family members & close friends a way to post their fondest memories about a particular house. Give anyone the ability to post a photo or story on any house — but give the owner control as to whether to veto/approve them.

Include property facts. Recent sales history. The buyer and seller agent for each transaction. The brokerage for each transaction. Nearby recent comparable sales. Local parks. And of course a listing price if the home is on the market.

I, for one, would love to browse through a timeline of every single home on my parent’s street (about 15 homes). The home I was born in in Bellevue. The home by Phantom Lake in Bellevue where I lived for 2 years. That of my grandparents home in Redmond, OR. My bosses home. My best friend’s home. You get the point.

The Challenge

Every aggregator on the planet wants as many photos about a particular home as possible. They all want unique stories about a home that can’t be found elsewhere. They want remodel details. But virtually none of them have any of that (at scale).

Why?

It’s damn hard to aggregate — and the data is only found in the minds, attics, photo albums, and scrap books of individuals scattered all over the country.

Just think about the time that has gone into your family tree. It’s probably taken hours and hours for someone in your family to compose the tree after talking to many many family members over many years, and stored at your grandparents house…only to be looked at every few years at a minimum. Sites like Geni are trying to replicate this online — and make a business out of it. Think of how much TIME you’ve spent putting data into Facebook. All those photos, all your friends, status updates, comments, etc. And think of how valuable that data is making Facebook as they approach their IPO.

Which is exactly why “ownership” is so important in my mind. Personally, I’m not going to spend hours and hours and hours building a history of my parent’s home (or my own home in the future) on someone else’s website for that website to make money from. But I would spend the time IF I (or my family) owned the property and had 100% control over how it was used/displayed online.

Who Can Pull it Off

I don’t for a second think that a large real estate brokerage will pull this off — at least not with their in-house staff. But perhaps a smaller, tech-savvy, innovative one like M Squared can. In my mind, the only reasonable bet is going to be a technology vendor of sorts — even if that tech vendor is hired by a brokerage to build it. Whether that’s someone like Zillow (former employer), Virtual Results (former employer), Trulia, or an entirely new startup — I don’t know. And agents are the ones that will get this product into the hands of home owners. At least, that’s the most likely scenario in my mind since I don’t think the number of home owners who would proactively buy this product on their own is that high. But if the beginning is part of the marketing materials for a home on the market? It’s a good value add — particularly if the agent is the one that fills the site with a foundation of data for the owner to build upon.

You might be wondering how Zillow or Trulia could do this given their advertising-based business model. I think there is a way, and I’ll quickly explain. Zillow has SOME of this data now, but they certainly want more of it — and they want it primarily for the page views it could generate. However, I’d argue that if they built the right platform — one that home owners can buy control of — they’d get adoption. Certainly not everyone, but from many. Home owners (or real estate agents) could buy and control the website. The property details (beds, baths, sq footage, etc) would be sucked from the Zillow API and then could be modified to be correct. Zillow and the owner would jointly own this modified data, and either of them could do with it as they wish. The photos, stories, etc. would be owned entirely by the property owner — with an opt-in check box that says “share everything with Zillow”.

There, Zillow just created 100 million websites to sell for $39.95 — or whatever price point they want to put on the website product. That’s some decent coin for someone to go after.

Conclusion

This is an opportunity to for an agent/broker to build a lasting relationship with a home owner. I believe SOMEONE will get this opportunity right (any my bias hopes its’ Zillow). It’s just a matter of who, and when.

Anyone already working on this? Who thinks this would work?

A few comments from buyers/sellers/home owners:

Andrew M

Why Does Abbott view it as the intellectual property of the real estate company when it’s a series of picture of MY house and details of MY house (which are all publicly available) that I’m trying to sell to the largest audience possible?

Christopher S:

Talk about completely going the wrong way. My wife and I just bought a house and we had a buyer agent only represent us. Bottomline, from a buyer’s perspective Zillow, Redfin and Trulia are invaluable tools that save time and inform the buyer.

Yes, you DO need a skilled agent but what Abbott is completely missing is that Zillow, Trulia and RedFin are merely tools that the buyer and the agent need to leverage. They don’t replace the agent, they enhance the agent to client experience.

Also, who’s he kidding with the multimillion dollar ocean front property as an example successfull house marketing? Not all, not even a fraction of sellers can afford a TV ad to sell their house.

“To our industry colleagues, please find our listings as you always have, through our cooperative, sandicor MLS…” Again, consumer’s don’t want a site that’s clunky and antiquated like sandicor. Even the new sandicor is a poor experience in comparison’s to the zillows, & redfinds of the world. The raw data is meaningless without the ability for the consumer to sift through it and make sense of it (neighborhoods, schools, comparison’s, historical tax, etc, etc).

I’m sorry but this kind of thinking reminds me of the candle manufacturer legistlating law’s in France to force people to close their blinds due to stiff competition from the sun.

Brandon G:

If I was a rival broker, I would love this. How is ARG going to explain to their customers that their listing will only be seen by half the people it was seen by before? Hopefully the word will get out, if you want the most potential buyers possible to see your house, don’t list it with ARG.

Geoff C:

Way to go. I am looking at purchasing in the future, and it will not be through ARG now. Sorry guys, but you just closed down a whole lot of options for yourselves.

Sarah M:

I agree with you… my husband and I recently bought a house, and both Trulia and Zillow were integral to our search. And yes, they sometimes have inaccurate information, but the benefits outweighed the problems, for the most part. They are shooting themselves in the foot this way.

Pretty telling, don’t you think?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Since regular readers already know what I think on this topic given the Edina article I wrote, just head over to Jay’s blog and read his take. It’s spot on.

Who’s next?

You want to know how agents and brokers are really making money from social media?

It’s not from the engagement. It’s not from the connections they gain.

It’s from SEO.

Most of those making money with social media are doing it by floating their SEO efforts (which means more traffic/conversions). I obviously don’t have access to the hard numbers, but I know someone like Jay Thompson is making money from the SEO juice his site, PhoenixRealEstateGuy, has gained as a result of his social media activity over the past 5+ years. How does that happen? A number of ways. For starters, posts like this link to his site constantly because he’s one of the most well known real estate brokers in the country in the social media world. Secondly, he’s met LOTS of people via social media. And anyone that knows search engine optimization knows the way to win is to know LOTS of other individuals who own websites (and can link back to you). Well, Jay knows a ton of them. Anytime I think of or hear “Phoenix”? I — thousands across the country and world – think of Jay. That’s worth it’s weight in gold when it comes to SEO. Why? Because anytime a conversation about Phoenix comes up, there is a good chance I’m going to link to Jay. Oh yea — and all those conference mentions he gets? They don’t hurt either.

You likely already know getting a site to rank well is hard work if you’re going after even a somewhat competitive keyword. But to succeed on the web, we all know you have to spend time or money on it. You should already know the cost of neglecting SEO. It goes without saying that SEO is certainly a long way from dead. It’s just shifted away from strictly links, links, links as Facebook Likes, Tweets, and Google +1′s are transforming into the more common voting mechanisms of the web. It’s hard to measure precisely, but I think it’s fair to say anyone with a strong social media presence knows their social media efforts are massively helping their own SEO efforts.

Don’t get me wrong. Yes, certainly use social media to increase engagement with your current sphere and find new contacts to increase your sphere of influence, but the real money is made by leveraging your social media to improve your own SEO.

What do you think? Agree or disagree?

**Photo via MarkVitorillo

Sure, regular voicemail works. But we all know it can, and should, be better for real estate agents. For starters, when someone leaves you a voicemail, you’d like to know what property that person is inquiring about so that when you follow up (within minutes) you’ll already be privy to further details on that particular property.

I spent some time speaking with Steven Knapp at BetterVoicemail.com a few days ago, and it seems they have a solution that could help you improve the voicemail experience and usefulness of agents. In the words of Steven:

As for comparison to other services, where Google Voice, YouMail, PhoneTag and VoiceCloud all offer transcription services, that’s where our similarities stop. Better Voicemail is built specifically for the needs of real estate agents. Visually, our app displays what property the caller called about, if they requested a showing, and if they left a message – all before you even read the transcript. For lead capture, we display the Caller ID name, city, and state for ALL of your missed calls, not just the ones who leave a message. And for the caller, none of the others let your callers find information on your properties when you can not answer.

Sound cool? Read on…

Regular Pricing

Regular pricing is $15 per month for up to 50 messages, and $25 per month for unlimited messages.

Special Offer for the Geek Estate Community

Coupon code: geekestate

What it will give you: 3 free months of BetterVoicemail to the first 50 people to sign up. This is a limited time exclusive for the Geek Estate community — the discount code will be deactivated one week from today.

You can use the “geekestate” coupon code from the signup page located HERE.

Here’s to better voicemail in 2012…

Wouldn’t it be awesome if it was drop dead simple to gather buyer’s contact info as they walk in the door at your next open house — all from your iPad? M Squared, a brokerage in Washington DC, now offers this to all agents in the form of an “app-less” iPad Open House Management interface. From the Press Release:

A record of every check-in is automatically emailed to the M Squared consultant for easy follow-up. In addition, open house visitors are automatically added to the consultant’s contact database so price updates, status changes and future listings can be quickly shared. Once an open house visitor registers at an event, they immediately receive an email with detailed information regarding the property they are viewing, nearby comparable properties and additional open houses taking place in the neighborhood. Best of all, the content is delivered in a mobile-friendly format for quick access on-the-go.

Sounds like a winning combination to me. My hunch is what M Squared has released is going to be a standard open house tool — in 2 years once the rest of the real estate brokerage community catches up to the technology leaders.

Are you using your iPad at open houses yet?