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 even one that was launched today not discovered through Raincamp.

Xobni.com – Pretty simple reverse lookup website that’ll let you know if your clients are on social media platforms and other web services.  This tool uses your clients e-mail to locate them on these other websites.  This could be your opportunity to connect with potential buyers and sellers on a whole new front.

Hittail.com – Everyone these days can setup Google Analytics on a website however this website’s tracking code pays more specific attention to the long tail keywords your website is already getting traffic from and then breaks down the data into useful and easy to understand charts.  They offer a 60 day free trial and then the basic membership after that is $10 per month.

Slydial.com – Have you ever forgot about an appointment or for some other unforeseen circumstance have not been able to make a scheduled phone call? Slydial.com connects you directly with a person’s voice mail without even ringing their phone.  You can now leave messages without risking an awkward conversation with that person you were supposed to call but didn’t.

10Minutes.org – A quick and free way to save some time on your hyper local keyword discovery research.  No need to mess around with a spreadsheet application or text document to manually create a list of potential keywords.  Create dozens or hundreds of keywords to explore within minutes of using this really simple tool.

Impact on Agents:

There is definitely a change in the making for Realtors who operate online. Already Zillow, Trulia and Homes.com get top rankings in many areas for real estate related terms. With the now serious entrance of Homesdatabase, it will be even more difficult for an individual agent website to compete, especially since MRIS intends to “partner with the other MLS systems to create a complete database covering the U.S.”

There are some benefits for agents with websites though, on each listing, it does add a link to the Agent’s website, so that will be a beneficial source of links and traffic for Realtors listed in the system. It’s yet to be seen if they will be offering widgets and plugins for Realtor websites to utilize their platform. Anyway you cut it, the game is changing once again, hopefully it will be beneficial for both Realtors and consumers!

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 companies, Zillow, has posted strong gains in traffic, but also has reduced it’s workforce by 25%.

Escaping the Real World

There is an upside in this situation, for agents and for consumers. For agents, it is a reality check, and a call to move forward further into the digital world. This means getting a web presence, making sure your business is listed in Google Local, Yahoo Local, and Live Local. As well as creating a persona online, participating in Social Media. This means far more opportunities for exposure to buyers who weren’t available to them before now.

The advantage for consumers is unprecedented access to Real Estate agents allows them to make smarter decisions, and have more communication through different mediums, as well as access online tools to facilitate everything from a home valuation to scheduling a mover, painter or staging expert. Do you think that the long term impact of the real estate market change will be overly positive for agents and consumers or do you perhaps see doom and gloom?

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 is using video on a consistent basis. In my mind, the PDF is required reading for those looking to understand the potential of video!

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 “We’re not taking new accounts right now — sorry! “. Not sure why they made such a hoopla about opening up the platform to the public…but then not open them up at launch.

Localism Appeal

The platform is much cleaner and “2.0″ feeling than when it was in it’s beta stage.

They had a clunky picture of the united states that served as a launch point into the communities. I do like the way that they’ve added a good search utility to access the geographic areas more efficiently.

What’s this sponsorship stuff?

Active rain and Localism are releasing a sponsored position per area in the range of $7-$15 a month. The reasoning behind it? According to Jonathan Washburn from Active Rain

We realized that the Localism community and city pages would rank much higher with the search engines if they had some component of static content, and after much deliberation we decided that selling sponsorships for this component would be the fairest and easiest way to get this content created.

So what’s included in the Localism sponsorship? Well it will be “static’ content on a specific community page. You get to write and provide the content and pictures. You get your own picture, contact information, link to your blog, and it looks like 3 outbound links. Obviously the value for website owners looking for local relevance can purchase the links and get the juice from the locally relevant page flowing to their site. You can also register a free account (soon I guess) and start posting content under your profile.

The Downside

Real estate agents and the real estate industry is a market of individuals, and in the past, individual agent’s websites dominated the search engine results. However, with more technology rolling out, start up companies with venture capital are making themselves felt. This is an opportunity for a larger company to harness User Generated Content to increase their search engine rankings, and even charge people to write their content for them (Sponsorship). Localism will then potentially start ranking for geographic areas, pushing out the real estate agents who are contributing. It is also to be seen if the links included in the sponsorship are seen by Google as “Selling Links”.

The interface is very intuitive, and easy to setup. I was able to create this Real Estate Marketeers community in under a minute, so there is no reason not to get Mixxing (IMO)!!

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 pitch of providing community information. My fiance recently was given a 10 mega pixel Camera, so I decided to try and use that to take my video…and ran into what was at first a major setback. We don’t have a video card for the camera, so at most I can only take 20 seconds of video! Not to be daunted, I decided to form the entire concept around that limitation instead of letting it stop me. I created 9 videos around different spots in Riverside. Of course, I had to download each video off the camera on the fly before I could start the next one, so it was a bit inconvenient.

Looking online, I wanted to get my video out on the most effective platform, and so I chose Vimeo.com as the platform to host my videos. I started uploading the videos, adding tags, and descriptions of the videos, when I discovered a really neat option.

You have the ability to make a “channel” for your videos. I know that’s not ground breaking, but I think that the other features on the page make it worthwhile. It has a built in shout box, a mini blog feature, a forum, a calendar, and all of it is subscribe able via RSS. I setup a channel just for Riverside — http://www.vimeo.com/Riversideca. Of course, the project is just in its early stages; as I continue to add more videos, we will see if it’s a successful adventure.