Content Is King…And Content Creation Is The Key To Real Estate Technology Survival

Are Inline Video Search Results Really The End Game?

Instead of focusing on today’s benefit of having real estate video inline with search results, I’ll pose the question of “what will happen when potential visitors won’t need to go past Google pages for real estate information?” 

Thinking About Today Is Easy:  Take The Next Logical Step

Imagine an expanded Google universal search with listings presented inline with search results from Google Base for your search term, listings in adjacent areas geolocated with GeoRSS,  real estate video from YouTube, and photos from Google’s photo search.  Are we really that far right now from this scenario and, if we are not, why will people even visit real estate websites in the not-so-distant future if all of the information that they need is inline?

Possible Impacts on Real Estate Technology Industry

The future of running a viable business in real estate technology isn’t too hard to see.  Here are some places where viable business models will be hard to find:

– Presentation mechanisms: what percentage of people will click through to sites once competing listings and videos are presented in line with search results?  If the business model is primarily dependent on a presentation mechanism for listings or video, that business will be disintermediated rather quickly.

– Mashups of freely available data: The biggest issue here is barrier to entry – if the business model isn’t based on some new and not-so-easily acessible data (also qualifies as “content”) then even new approaches will quickly become commiditized.  Example: encoding US address information is commiditized.  However, gaining access to unique and helpful datapoints such as public transportation stops isn’t so easy to gain. Unique and difficult to gather content will always bring users.

If we think about the conceptual process for content as the following:

1) Conceptualization => 2) Access To Unique Content => 3) Content Creation => 4) Metadata Generation => 5) Search/Sort Capability=> 6) Presentation Mechanism

It is then reasonable to assume that the only areas not susceptable to disintermediation in the near term are #1, #2, and #3.  Google for example is hard at work improving #4, #5, and #6 – not much successful business model to be left there…

Unique Content Remains King

So unique content creation will clearly remain king (for a long while at least)…visitors will continue to value and seek out unique content thusly provide the foundation for viable business models.  Content in the form of written and multimedia blog posts, articles, photos, interviews, and local information will become the differentiator among organizations not the presentation mechanisms.  I suspect that NAR understands this with respect to the recent interactions between Move.com and Google (this also strengthens my suspicions as to Google’s motives above).  NAR’s unique content is their listing database with controlled access – far different from the average FSBO listing. 

Legitimate Winners In The Syndication Space May Be Close To Being Crowned

Although there is clearly a renewed call for the creation of real estate video, the syndication winner  in this space might already be in the process of legitimately being crowned (especially if the above scenario were to fully play out). Hint: the winners aren’t real estate video companies but large search companies. (UPDATE:  I have received confirmation that the only results to be displayed inline in search result will be YouTube or Google Video for the moment though this could change.)  The key point is that people have to get to a page to see *your* listing, mashup, or video player – if the visitor gets the info that they need before arrivig to your page, your ranking results won’t matter too much because you’ll never be seen.

Competing With “Free” And “Easy” Doesn’t Make Sense

Without a sustainable independent syndication business model, only the content creators and those with access with unique content will be left standing in the real estate video, mashup, and re.net listing spaces. It isn’t about being a “play” – it’s about building a business. Those that focus on easily commiditized presentation mechanisms will likely fall on hard times; those that conceptualize and create unique, hard to access content will survive. Those that don’t create content and base a business model on simply taking a revenue percentage from content creators are ultimately competing against “free” and “easy” – something that content creators will soon figure out.

Thoughts?

Post script: Here’s an interesting extension of this line of thinking…what if the “price” of a free real estate mapping mashup was that the data presented is stored for later use by Google?  As such, the real estate industry would have become the largest free labor pool for geolocating updated data about real properties and other related content throughout the US….with less effort and more participation than the big “Z”.

Real Estate Websites Of The Future

There is an excellent discussion of broker websites of the future over at TransparentRE.  This article exists only because perhaps I am a bit more ambitious in my hopes for the real estate website of the future. 

Platform Integration: Many of the more popular features currently only available via plugins will become integrated directly into blogging platforms. Some of my issues are just pet peeves centered on waiting for all those darn plugins to load; the other is around little details that these plugins generally didnt get right. Meebo wont let you change pages while chatting for example.  So, if I want to check out something interesting on your site that happens to be on a different page that I noticed while chatting, I have to wait even if the interesting content is on the same domain.  How “sticky” is that?  With the various instant messenger providers (MSN, AOL, Yahoo)  increasingly providing open interfaces to their products, the current plugin players will go away as blogging platforms build messenging capability directly over real messenging APIs back with huge supporting infrastructures. 

Better Aggregation of Local Content: All types of real estate content like articles, podcasts, and video are already portable via RSS, but interestingly, very little local content is aggregated soecifically for use (or consumption) by other external sites. The future will see inclusion of elements of geolocation as part of an automated aggregation process.  This automated geolocation process will be driven by the need to determine the proximity of content generated about one location to content generated about another. You are likely thinking this can be done on Google maps but google maps isn’t innately portable.

Better Portability And Integration of Local Content: So, how can we make the hyperlocal portable so that everyone can share photos, podcasts, articles, interviews, and videos about Elm Street? Unless there has been a recent change, Google Maps is not able to generate any sort of GeoRSS feed based off of data displayed on a specific map (which would be a killer feature by the way). Without that option, the only way to make hyperlocal content portable (and not expect every content generator to be looking up latitudes and longitudes) is to wrap geolocation data around content during some sort of aggregation process.  Users can then easily syndicate information for use on their own websites or blogs say from Redmond, WA along with some radius and get all of the hyperlocal information available at once from different sources without having to specify each town, street, or other feature along the way.  The smaller the radius the more hyperlocal the information (say 1/4 mile to 1/2 mile from a given address for example). 

More Use Of Video: It turns out that 2007  cannot yet be proclaimed as the year of “real estate video” as predicted by the soothsayers. Adoption rates and video views don’t support any such claim from the seller side or the nimbers of real estate property videos watched. But, there are a number of anecdotal indicators that usage of real estate video marketing is beginning to rise. Real estate sites have been using video for everything from property listings to self-promotion but it is the push into hyperlocal that is pushing forward videos centered on “neighborhood drivethrus” and such.  We are even beginning to push in more non-standard directions as evidenced by the industry’s own Andy Warhol of real estate video.

In summary, I’ve focused on infrastructure and platform plays as being the hallmark of future adoption. Anything that requires more than zero work on the part of the site owner may face adoption hurdles unless a huge and tangible amount of benefit comes with it.  I’m looking forward to seeing what’s next….where do you see things going?

Aggregating The Long Tail: Making Micro Useful

There is a lot of talk about micro-blogging in the real estate blogosphere but not a lot of discussion about the issues or how to deal with micro-content in the aggregate.  

To start, I like the idea of local content (hence the name ForSaleByLocals for the engine that drives our sites…created long before “local” was popular) – We talked about microsites almost a year ago and “local” was the idea that started the development of our software. However, local and micro content are not easily managed on a macro level and hence a problem still to solved. “Better late than later”, I always say…  

The biggest single issue for me in the current management of local content (local blogs, micro-content, multimedia content, and single property blogs) are the lack of spatial relationships among the data. Nothing describes the relationship among the data and using those relationships to add value. Said differently, people seem to be thinking about the long tail content for their own SEO advantages but losing sight of the fact that the overall body of varied long tail content in a specific geographic area is where the value is for the end user. There isn’t any site that I am aware of doing it quite right…yet.

Issue #1: Lack of spatial context for micro and local data

With vast amounts of local data brewing on the horizon, we need to start thinking about how this data will be aggregated to provide value. 

Let’s start out at the micro level.  I’m a buyer considering a house on Elm street in Town Y.  No microsite or single property site exists for properties on Elm street but does exist for Shaw street, only two blocks away (likely relevant information for such a search). Google won’t give me that information as it is current configured but shouldn’t I be able to know that there is such data available within a reasonable distance of my search?

Now, lets move up to the town or local level with a site such as Localism.com (I’m not picking on them – I love them, am an active rain member, and am just illustrating my point with a site that actually has a fair amount of local data).  Localism.com lets you select a town and look for content. Let’s take the town where I grew up as an example: Birmingham, Michigan (and also make Maureen from the mioaklandcounty blog happy 😛 ). 

Demonstrating the Problem

Using the localism.com homepage, Birmingham, Michigan has 7 entries in the dropdown box related to Birmingham, MI once you type “birmingham”  but choose the town itself (“Birmingham, Michigan”) and no data shows up and no redirect occurs.  When I select “Birmingham Place In Birmingham, Michigan”, I at least get redirected to a page that indicates no data but has a map with a push-pin in Birmingham.  This may be due either to the beta nature of the tool or because the data elements do not know internally where they are in relation to other.  Additionally, no data appears for the surrounding towns of Troy, Beverly Hills, or Southfield.  If there is data in surrounding towns, I’d suggest that users should be at least made aware that the supporting content exists. Alternatively, wouldn’t it be nice to know where the nearest data is instead of having to search area by area?

Possible Solution

A possible solution would be to aggregate long tail content and wrap some basic geolocation data around each item. This gives the data some internal context in terms of location. Logic can then use the location data to be aware of where content is in relation to any other content. In this way, long tail hyper local data can be displayed within the same UI currently in use without having to rely on a separate search, mapping interface, a 3-5 click drill down, consolidated pushpins or any other external interface. 

Example

We are currently using a similar approach with our real estate video interviews (http://vidlisting.com/interviews.asp).  Interviews have a consolidated interface that they share with the with thumbnails of the 8 closest interviews (by proximity) to the real estate video interview being shown.  You can see thmbnails of the related interviews just below the real estate video intervew being played in the screenshot above.  All of our real estate video interviews share this interface. We’ve demonstrated that this approach works with both US and international data. they are not constrained by city, province, or national borders. This approach could easily be extended to all types of long tail data – the presentation options are limitless.  Users could even choose how far they want to include as a configuration option of the UI (1/2 mile, 1 mile, 5 miles, etc.)

Advantages

This approach brings relevant information directly to the user as part of an existing interface.  No additional user intervention, clickthroughs, or zooming required  🙂

Thoughts?

(We’ll discuss a second key issue with micro content in an upcoming article….)

Online Real Estate Geolocation

As most of you know, the intent of the ForSaleByLocals website is to provide worldwide real estate choices in a user’s preferred language.  A growing number of influential people far smarter than me are working on building the concept of a global neighborhood.  Of course, a global neighborhood needs real estate and geolocation of properties is a key component of a “modern” real estate site.  Others have examined each of the mapping services more in depth than I’ll do here in this article  so I’ll focus on what we hope will set us apart. 

1. Worldwide Online Mapping User Interface: Online mapping interfaces with data from different sources are often known as mashups. Though  integration with Google maps, Yahoo maps or MSN virtual earth, mashups of all types are becoming quite common in the US, the choices for international users is somewhat more limited.  For instance, MSN’s Windows Live Local mapping is (as of this writing) not widely available outside the US and some select other countries.  As a result, MSN was eliminated almost immediately on this point alone.  (NOTE TO MICROSOFT: The instant that you make changes in your international geocoding availability with a decent mapping resolution worldwide, we’ll consider switching to you as our mapping provider. As a former manager in Windows division, I don’t know why MS does not offer a global capability in this area given the massive emphasis on internationalization in other products.)

Even Google has underlying limitations on geolocation even though they make a worldwide interface available.  As background, a “geocoder” is generally used to provide longitude/latitude pairs for fixed points. Basically, a geocoder translates some definition of a fixed point into the actual longitude and latitude. Most of the popular online geocoders (including Google’s GeoCoder API) use the property address to establish geolocation. This makes perfect sense in the US where such address information is generally of high quality. However, viable address information outside of the US is of varying quality and ranges from zero to full availability. Google’s own documention for their GeoCoder API references these limitations in the following statement: “The Maps API geocoder is available in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and United States of America.” 

2. Worldwide GeoCoder:  We also wanted our website users to reasonably be able to geolocate properties or themselves anywhere in the world as well as have a bit more flexibility than just an address to successfully geolocate.  We needed a system that would work in cities/towns as well as out in the countryside in places where perhaps roads dont even exist and even mailing addresses are actually often relative addresses (500 meters north of some crossroads).  We began to think about defining success for international online geolocation in terms of using other feature based geolocation information than just an address or the ability to have users estimate a geolocation relative to a known established point. 

After examining the available geocoding alternatives and costs involved, we decided to build our own geocoder as part of the ForSaleByLocals web engine (hence part of the reason for some of our release delay).  Custom GIS systems were ruled out since we are a self-funded startup and we dont have the kind of dough required for a full blown GIS solution.  Think of our solution as a geocoder for the masses (grin).   Though not completely tested for absolutely all cases, our geocoder seems to geolocate to a reasonable level of accuracy just about anywhere in the world. not bad for a home-built V1 product though we’ll see how it stands up to real users.  The team decided to build geocoding capability directly into the web engine.  This means that the geocoder is a fundamental part of the way that version 1.0 of the web engine processes almost all of the property, member, advertising, and service provider information, regardless of whether there is mapping user interface to support the underlying data.  

What does this mean for you as a seller, service provider, or web site user? The true power of the web engine lies in integrating the contextual metadata of users with a strong worldwide geolocation capability.  I’m not ready to tell all yet but version 1.0 of the web engine today almost always knows where properties, service providers, and members are in relation to each other. 

3. Custom Real Estate Geolocation Infrastructure and Integration: You may be thinking right now, “wow, these guys will have wasted a lot of work if one of the major online mapping services opens up their geocoder for the entire world.” Maybe so, time will tell. But, the challenge for any non-address based geocoder is to make the translation accurate and easy.  An address is easy…other input types in a general mapping site aren’t so easy for most non-technical users. We also will be bound by far fewer terms of use and data restrictions by having our own home-rolled solution.

Another benefit is that with our own custom geocoding infrastructure already in place, we’ll have less dependence on online mapping APIs in general to do the most basic of geolocation tasks.  We’ll also have full access to combining this data with contextual user data to provide some truly value-added services that other sites may not have.  For instance, what if your site’s flash video player knew where you had been searching for properties. The page for real estate video might allow users to indicate a search radius preference of a certain number of miles/kilometers and provide a playlist of other available real estate property videos within that radius without ever leaving the video player page.  (5 Mar 2007 Update: this feature is now available).

Not hugely world-changing…but just one simple example of the ability to use geolocation information without switching interfaces makes for a potentially more gratifying user experience.  We also intend to integrate search tag information with geolocation driven metadata. Besides, at least one of the major online mapping providers reserves the right to provide their own ads on your mapping page – I dont like that at all.  Hopefully, you see why we are trying to have a usable geolocation engine beyond simply using an online mapping interface to filter search results. 

What are your thoughts on interesting applications of geolocation for real estate? Are we on the right track or are we just re-inventing and re-hashing the same old tired geolocation capabilities?

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