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Last week I attended Raincamp hosted by Active Rain in San Diego.  I thought it a good idea to step off of my own platform of what I know about online marketing for the real estate industry and simply see what others are doing to be successful so I could apply it to my web site. While I picked up a lot of good information, there are a few useful websites that I’d like to quickly share with you that I discovered from Raincamp and … Read More »

Many MLS systems across the United States have been critical of listing aggregator sites like Zillow and Trulia and they now have entered into the arena to try and take back a piece of the pie. MRIS, an east coast MLS (Multiple Listing Service) has rehashed their old public search system to be competitive with Trulia, Zillow, and Redfin style sites. Their HomesDatabase beta test uses Microsoft Mapping functionality, and boasts that “they’ll compete with better and more up to date information”. This interface is … Read More »

Real World Impact on the Digital World The internet doesn’t always reflect the reality of day to day life, especially when it comes to online businesses. For example, Google has posted increased earnings despite the economic woes that we hear about on a daily basis. However, online real estate is being hit a little bit harder by the changes in traditional real estate. We can see this problem hitting not just small agent websites that populate the web, but also large aggregators. One of these … Read More »

After my last post about utilizing video because of the potential audience across Youtube, I stumbled over this brilliant marketing video that actually originated from Zillow. Great Job Guys! My favorite part if the guy at the end crashing into the table.

Youtube Usage 2008 WeeklySEO clued me into a a PDF from Google for 2008 that provides some recent stats about YouTube usuage. It is full of really interesting and detailed information about JUST HOW MUCH YouTube has grown and how much use it is getting. Specific to why you should use video tours, if you review the stats of Youtube users, you can tell that real estate’s prime target ages are actually online in greater numbers than teenagers! This gives Realtors a better idea of who … Read More »

What does the Localism Real-Estate Revolution Mean? As of July 9th Active Rain opened up “The New Localism”, which has been in beta with ActiveRain for a while. The marketing for the site is that it will be a “revolution in real-estate”. In the past, while localism was in beta, you had to join Active Rain to be able to post articles to specific areas. They purportedly are opening this feature up to the public, but as of this morning the Register section says that … Read More »

There is a new article submission site coming up on the horizon. This one hits a niche that is close to home for the real estate tech industry, an article submission site that’s clean and simple. Real Estate Voices seems like a quick clean, easy to use article submission site. It was brought to my attention by Website Review Friday as a resource that looks like it might have a lot of potential, but may needs some more community behind it before it develops.

One of the big social bookmarking platforms has been Mixx.com; it is a very 2.0 platform allowing submission of articles, pictures and videos. They’ve taken the next step in branching out into becoming a full blown Social Media site by releasing their Mixx Communities. This very quickly allows Mixxers to create and participate in bookmark exchanging societies. It was just announced today, so it will be interesting to see how it grows. The interface is very intuitive, and easy to setup. I was able to … Read More »

Video is the next frontier, or so they say. I have been wracking my brains for a way to utilize video on my Riverside real estate website, but since I am handicapped by not having any listings, I couldn’t do a listing tour. I decided that since my website emphasis has alway been on the home buyer, and providing photos and information about Riverside, that I should do the same with video. Drop the straight hard pitch of real estate and go to the soft … Read More »