Category Archives: Company News & Analysis

We know open houses are a fantastic place to meet with potentially extremely warm buyer leads. We know your conversion is going to suck if you don’t gather contact details and follow up. We know buyers want more info (read: data) about the property they visit in person. We know many buyers look at multiple properties in a given day. We also know that many regular folk (read: non techies) think iPad’s are “cool” to interact with. Wouldn’t it be awesome if it was drop dead … Read More »

Real Estate Social “Notworking?” It was getting close to Inman Connect NY, and I could feel the urgency in a text message from Matt Beall, ”did you get my email regarding the social media case study for Inman?” I’m sure somewhere—in the ether that is my inbox—sat an email from Mr. Beall. Knee deep in a Hawaii Life interface redesign, however, my Gmail account was left unmanaged and overflowing its 200G limit. Since integrating social media into our real estate search in September 2011, I hadn’t really thought … Read More »

Zillow launched Neighborhood Advice. As a home buyer, Neighborhood Advice recommends which friends (via Facebook Connect) to ask about the particular neighborhood or city they are searching in. I would bet almost every single home buyer asks at least a few people — either online or offline — what a particular community they are looking to buy in is like to live in. Most web sites that succeed do so by enabling users to do things THEY ALREADY DO OFFLINE more efficiently online. This is … Read More »

Sandicor is now in the business of competing to be a top 20 consumer real estate website in San Diego. Here’s the email that was sent out yesterday to all SANDICOR members San Diego’s four Association of REALTORS® and Sandicor are excited to announce the release of a new consumer website! This website is designed to turn the consumer’s focus back to Brokers and Agents and away from third party sites such as Zillow and Trulia that rank among the top 20 websites in the category … Read More »

+ Wow, the Zillow acquisition of Diverse Solutions for $7.8 million in cash and stock is big big news for this industry. I’ve got a unique perspective on this announcement for a few reasons: At Virtual Results, we work extremely closely with Diverse Solutions. Their dsIDXpress comes standard with every Predesigned Website that Works (dsSearchAgent is optional), and on most of our customs. I worked for Zillow for almost 5 years & worked with Diverse Solutions as an API partner starting back in 2007 (& 2008). I happen … Read More »

WOW. Redfin just pulled the plug on their VERY talked about Scouting Report feature just 5 days after releasing it to the world. Why did they take it down? According to their CEO Glenn Kelman: The basic problem is that the data wasn’t accurate, first because of bugs then ultimately because of problems with the source data in MLSs. I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting they’d take the whole thing down. I thought they’d iterate, change the interface a bit, fix some data challenges, … Read More »

The real estate industry, slow to adapt to new technology, has been experiencing growing pains from outside startup technology companies pushing the boundaries of its comfortable digs.  The latest flavor of dust-up was well-documented by Drew Meyers of Geek Estate.  Redfin’s Agent Scouting Reports change the nature of how formerly-private sales statistics are displayed in a public forum. While most of the discussion has centered on the vast inaccuracies of the reports, the lack of adherence to MLS membership rules, and the lack of transparency in … Read More »

Yup, it’s happened again. Outsiders have out innovated real estate industry insiders. This time it is Redfin’s Agent Scouting Report. Any agent’s entire sale history analyzed and overlaid out on a map. Brilliant. For an example, take a look at Kris Berg‘s scouting report. I picked Kris because I’ve known her for years and know (hope) she won’t get mad. Brian Boero at 1000Watt and Jay Thompson have already written about the announcement, and there are some great conversions in the comments — so I urge … Read More »

When you decide to start a webpage, the first thing you select is your domain name. Although you can get domain names for $5-$10 nowadays, it is hard to get the popular domain names that were originally acquired years ago. One example of an incredibly popular domain name is RealEstate.com. Who in real estate would not want the domain name RealEstate.com? Well, the domain name has just been sold for significantly more than $5-$10. Believe it or not, popular and desired domain names can go … Read More »

Automated home valuations are a growing trend on real estate websites.  While Zillow’s Zestimates are clearly the standout leaders in this field, there are plenty of others. Eppraisal.  Cyberhomes. Trulia has a one-city beta product in the works, while First American has had its own automated valuation model for quite some time.  Even our own Geek Estate Blogger, Justin Britt, has a new Hawaii Life Value Score, taking a different angle with more of a comparative score valuation. The vast majority of real estate professionals I encounter dismiss the value of these … Read More »