Carnival of Real Estate – Diamond 60th Edition

We are honored to host the 60th diamond edition of the Carnival of Real Estate.

The theme of the Carnival this week reflects the changing demographics of real estate buyers in the US and the investors of international real estate. If the NFL and other major television advertisers are interjecting Spanish language advertising into US national television then it would make sense that the Carnival of Real Estate can as well.  Looking from an international perspective, the exchange rate for the Euro just closed at over $1.40 for one dollar for the first time making US real estate even more of a bargain for international investors with Euros.

We received close to 40 Carnival of Real Estate entries this week which made choosing a winner difficult. The overall quality of the entries was excellent and the English language entries had a wide range of topics. Despite the number of entries, I agree with those that believe a winner should be chosen so here are our winners for each language:

English Language Winner: Ben Cotten’s How to Sell a House in Over 6 Months over on the Live.awake blog.  This post had all of the elements that I look for. It was interesting, entertaining, informative, and used a novel approach to demonstrate the point. Excellent work and arguably worthy of winning the diamond edition of the Carnival of Real Estate.

A very close second (and worthy of a hat tip) was Kris Berg’s Buyer Due Diligence – Code Red.  Another excellent blog post by a very accomplished blogger.

Spanish Language Winner: Alicia Yabeta’s Como Aprovechar las Bondades de Cada País Para Hacer Crecer tu Mercado de Bienes Raíces (article in español) where she discusses the growing Latin American real estate markets and how to attract US and other foreign investors.

Portuguese Language Winner: Lila Mendez’s As Imobiliárias Espanholas Constróem Seu Futuro na América Latina (article in Portuguese) where she talks about how large Spanish real estate agencies are developing future business opportunities in Latin America.

So that is our brief view into the changing face of real estate investment for the Carnival. Savvy U.S. agents and investors may recognize international buyers and alternative demographic populations in the U.S. as “diamonds in the rough”. 

Next week’s Carnival of Real Estate host is the Mortgage Insider blog. Submit your blog article to the next edition of the carnival of real estate using the carnival submission form.

See also:

– NAR CEO talks about 50% of all U.S. real estate related transactions to involve foreigners or immigrants

We’ll Be Hosting The “Carnival of Real Estate” This Week

The Blog Carnival of Real Estate stops at our blog this week.  To mix things up a bit, we are accepting submissions in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. We’ll select the best in each language.  Please consider submitting in any of the languages above or passing this information to someone that might be  interested in doing so.

Looking forward to seeing the entries! I’m sure that they will be excellent….

Carnival of Real Estate Is Up

The weekly Carnival of Real Estate is up over at http://realestaging.blogspot.com/2007/06/red-award-goes-to-michael-simonsen.html. There are some fine selections this week.

Enjoy! 

Content Malls – The Road Ahead For Real Estate?

One of the downsides of being outside of Silicon Valley is not keeping up with the cutting edge lingo. A short while ago, people were predicting the death of the web portal as blogging became more popular.  The pendulum seems to be swinging back to more centralized group approaches to information in both the overall tech world as well as in the real estate blogging world.

Robert Scoble is primarily a tech blogger but also VP of a videoblogger content company, PodTech.net and apparently believes that the near future is again to be dominated by portal like “content malls”.   He just posted an interesting article about content malls.  You can read the full article but his approach to content malls is basically to “get 100 or so niche bloggers, [videobloggers, and/or podcasters] together, lash them together with links, hire a sales team to sell advertising, and build value through a good community, both inside and outside the firewall.”

Are the roots of real estate content malls happening in the US real estate blogging community now?  I believe so.  Robert defines some criteria of content malls as:

– sites that link to each other
– sites that group together audiences
– sites that serve a niche well
– sites that have brand quality (meaning others view them as authoritative and adding value)
– sites that have high levels of engagement (participation/linking/etc)

One site in particular (Active Rain) jumps out as the example of a growing real estate content mall of bloggers. Active Rain is a high quality social network of real estate professionals in the US and Canada that clearly meets nearly all of Robert’s criteria.

The engagement piece is particularly becoming interesting with the Carnival of Real Estate (best described by a participant, the MIOaklandCounty blog, here) where a rotating set of real estate bloggers can host and vote on various real estate blog posts.  A great idea that is well executed and obviously has excellent engagement as evidenced by the reservations out through the middle of 2007.

Why is this important? The international real estate community normally mirrors north American developments. Though international real estate has much “longer tail” of opportunity, there is little infrastructure exists to group international sites and audiences together due to language differences. Our web engine has many of the components to build a multi-language content mall (ad engine, management of microsites, translation workflow). However, like many startups, we dont yet have the brand quality or engagement to meet the standard. We are making progress in the video area as we now have 2 additional contracts with different companies for translating approx. 50-60 videos per week primarily from Spanish right now. We also are on the cusp of launching a number of targetted real estate microsites run by the same web engine that manages our three principal sites in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Gaining brand quality and engagement is definitely a high priority task for us over the coming weeks and months…

What are your thoughts on content malls and the criteria?  Are there other growing real estate content malls?