Locale Specific Contextual Real Estate Websites Start To Go Live This Upcoming Week

We’ve been holding off on this announcement as we’ve been focused on other priorities.  However, we are now at the point of having sufficient locale specific content to launch a number of the associated beta websites for that content in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.  Time to get this functionality live and in our users’ hands.

These initial 15 or so real estate website launches will demonstrate the power of the real estate content management web engine that we have built for quickly developing microsites with contextually relevant information (something that we talked about LONG before it was popular).   The content on these sites will include real estate video, property tours, articles, listings, and other information specific to the locale in question. These will also be another channel to quickly sydicate real estate videos to a set of visitors looking for specific types of information. We’ll post the URLs here as the sites go live. 

BTW, http://property-tour.com (english language real estate video site sorted by country),  http://inmueblevideo.com (roughly translated as “property video” in spanish), and http://emvenda.com (“for sale” in portuguese) are live now…Facebook seems to have made a change in their API since we launched the sites launch so we still have some work to do with the Facebook integration.

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?

Linking Real Estate Content With User Context: Putting Better Faces On Contextual Content

In this fourth article, we’ll focus on some user interface aspects to highlight the contextual content found through the methods outlined in the third article.  We’ll need to introduce some new conceptual constructs in this article for our content, spaces, and format.

Contextual Limitations of Current Real Estate Blogs

Lets first think about traditional real estate blogs. Blog content is generally organized chronologically by the descending date (newest first) with only a limited number of “spaces” on the first page. For instance, this blog has 10 spaces for articles on the first page with a prized but transitory first 2-3 postings that require limited or no scrolling. This format works great for site visitors looking for what is new but doesn;t work so well for visitors looking for specific content.

So, if the real estate focused visitor comes looking for something specific, say a condo in Boca Raton, Florida, they’ll have few options based on the format of this blog and what information we know about the visitor when they arrive. If they use a external engine, they likely land on a post’s permalink. On this blog, they’ll only see that article plus whatever fixed information exists in the sidebar menus. Some real estate bloggers have recently started adding a long laundry list of articles that may be relevant to the current article. If the visitor arrives on the front page and whether or not we know what they might be searching for, the blog postings are in the same reverse chronological order.  Site visitors looking for specific content would have to use the search functionality, scroll and/or “next page”, or use the fixed sidebar links to find their desired content and would find content in three formats – postings as part of a collective page of other articles, a standalone posting, and a a condensed format in the form of a hyperlink.

So is there a way to make an entire blog or site manage it’s content in such a way to appear to be national, regional, or local depending on how the visitor interacts with the site?

How To Think About Content In A Different Way

Everyone that text and graphics can be generated dynamically.  Articles or postings are often  grouping of dynamically generated or static content that when associated together form the article.  

So, if the content that makes up an article or post can remain associated and can carry additional metadata in the form of context, then we can move, filter, and sort these articles as independent units even if the articles are composed of dynamically generated information.  It is this conceptual ability to move, filter, and match content into different types of interfaces that is the focus of this article.

Making Contextual Relevant Content More Accessible With The Same Format Limitations

How can you make your site both general and hyperlocal using this approach to content? You have a blog that deals with national real estate issues and some personal postings but is largely focused on posting lots of local content throughout the state of Florida. Let’s say that you know that a new site visitor has been searching online for condos in Boca Raton, Florida.  They arrive by way of a major search engine and have used the search term “boca raton condos” or something similar. In our magically hypothetical content store, there are 3 postings specifically about condos in boca raton, one post about condos in nearby Deerfield Beach, three other articles about boca ration real estate (not condo specific), and 23 other articles about condos in other parts of Florida. The Deerfield Beach article would be found using the geolocation metadata surrounding it without a dependency on the text term “boca raton”.

Let think about the concept of spaces first. Instead of placing related content at the end of the blog posting, lets present our vistor with an interface with seven spaces consisting of at least two full articles and five links. 

You can see in the figure above how the information would be organized in a traditional blog format and one possible alternative for presenting the seven spaces when we know the context of information that a visitor is searching for.  So, when we dont have a contextual match for an incoming visitor to the home page, we can simply present the normal article interface.

Although each article can be presented as a full article, we’ve chosen to only present the first two most likely relevant articles as full articles.  We’ve chosen this approach to minimize the need for scrolling. The rest of the articles are presented within the interface as simple hyperlinks – a different format.  The same articles compressed into a hyperlink for the example may be presented in the format of a full article in a different contextual situation more relevant to its content.

Advantages

There are many advantages to presenting a different interface to users. First, users can actually get multiple relavent articles within a search query as opposed to just a single permalink article. They also dont need to scroll or search to find those articles…the interface itself reduces the work required of the user. Formats for presentation of given content can be diverse and varied depending on the needs of the site and user. We’ve also added some relevant listings of condos in Boca Raton as another value-add of this approach.

The Future Is Today

Our team is busy implementing a number of sites that treat content as discrete units. The true value in this approach is that the heavy lifting for the site is in simply attaching context to the content in the database after the work of interface is implemention is completed.   For instance, 7 articles are filtered in the manner discussed in Part 3 of this article.  The first two are deemed most relavent and presented in the full article format and the other 5 become hyperlinks without any HTML or CSS work required of the poster.

This is where our team is heading in terms of managing our diverse content. The approach provides structure for what otherwise might be a jumble of disassociated local content. It also works equally well for articles as for real estate video, listings, audio podcasts, and other content.  We’d like to hear your thoughts…… 

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Aggregating The Long Tail: Sharing The Local Mojo

**Note: I’m not entirely happy with this article as written, but I had already published it with a misplaced save attempt.  I will leave it up but expect that within a few days, it will be fleshed out better and refined it a bit more (especially with any comments added)

In our first article about aggregating the long tail, we discussed the lack of spatial context with respect to closely located local information. This second article covers the sharing of local and/or micro content in real estate such that it can be successfully aggregated.

Extending The Concept of A Mashup Beyond Maps

This time we’ll start with the concept of combining information from different sources. The term “mashup” seems to have taken on a very limiting definition online.  When most people think about online mashups, they think only in terms of online maps (which require a return to the map to view other data “spatially”).  Why limit your thinking about mashups to such limiting interfaces?  The screenshot presented in the first article is actually a video mashup based off of geocoordinates, isnt it?

Given that we can easily expand our interfaces beyond online maps and stay within the definition of mashup, let’s turn our thinking towards micro-content. In the first article, we talked in non-technical terms about how to associate geolocation data around micro-content. Now we need a way to structure microcontent (about something specific – church, house, school, restaurant, etc.) and local content (about the general area) so that it can be shared and used by others  in imaginative ways…

Issue #2: Local Information Isn’t Aggregated In Any Spatially Relevant Way

Using current search technology, finding spatially related local or micro information requires either prior knowledge of an area or a third party mapping interface.  The analogy would be that if you are looking for running shoes, you wont be exposed to cleats unless you have a separate reference document to tell you that cleats are related to running shoes in some way.

Doesn’t seem like a problem until one realizes that the most relevant content isnt always displayed on the first page of  search engine result. The most relevant content with the most indicators that the particular search uses for relevancy relative to other results are.  The relevant content for you with regards with geographically co-located microcontent has a good probability of not often being found even if it does exist.  So, when I look at the first results on Google for “Birmingham Michigan”, there is some purely commercial content (they do SEO too, right), some organizational information, and some local content.  However, there is no relationship at all among this data so search engines results require some switching between various sites, entering different towns to see different results, and nothing that tells me that one local may actually be quite a distance from another…despite being located in the same city.

Additionally, data from nearby surrounding areas is only included with results that contain “birmingham michigan”

Possible Solution

A possible solution might be in having a way to aggregate and publish subsets of related local and micro-  information and submitted by users in a variety of different formats that could be consumed by the end user.  The output could be custom RSS,  another XML format, or some sort of recordset.  

Somewhat Technical Discussion

We should have some sort of formalized request for content sent to a web interface. The request could consist of as little as the following: type of content, a location, distance, and distance units (it’s my blog so let’s start out thinking about international users from the beginning here 😛 ). A time period might also be useful to filter results correctly but isnt absolutely required.

The resultant output would be a formatted grouping of the local and micro-content that meets the criteria specified in the request suitable for formatting in any type of user interface (not just maps). If local or microcontent exists, the consuming site can format or mashed as needed as defined above (using HTML, plug-in, widget, etc.)  and the result can be presented to the user.

If no content exists in the specified area, the output might represent suggestions for locations close by that have not been asked for by name but are related spatially. We use Birmingham MI as our sample content in the first article, so lets continue with that theme. So, in the case of Birmingham, MI, it might well include results from Troy, Southfield, and Bingham Farms without me knowing to for them or having to return to a different interface.

We’ll post a example of such an interface (we have a working one with our own actual data but we’d prefer to let people beat up on a reference implementation that we’ll make public over the next few days)

Thoughts?

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….)

Progress Report: Communities, New Sites, New Functionality, And Areas For Improvement

We’ve conceptually divided our existing sites into three categories: Listings Websites, Real Estate Video Sites, and Contextual Real Estate Sites.   All of the sites are currently running on the same software component that we are building ourselves.

Listings Websites: Our three principal websites are http://forsalebylocals.com in English, http://casacomprar.com in Spanish, and (for the moment) http://repousos.com in Portuguese.  These sites will have unfiltered property listings and articles of general real estate interest crossposted from all of the current sites that we support. All content will be in the given language. The portuguese language site will be replaced by imovei.com later this week…it’s much more brazilian and portuguese and lets us act on some of the feedback that we’ve received from our Brazilian community.  We’ll also activate registration, the ability to post properties for sale, and geocoder that works outside of the 5 countries that Google Maps supports (finally done!) within the next week on these sites.

Also, if you are interested in writing articles about international real estate for inclusion on these sites, please let us know.

Real Estate Video Sites: This group of sites includes http://vidlistings.com in English, http://bienesraicesvideo in Spanish, and http://imoveisvideo.com in Portuguese. These sites will be focused solely on real estate videos, video and voice interviews with various real estate professionals through our regions of interest as well as supporting information about making and/or uploading real estate videos.  I’ve talked a bit already about our progress in other posts. We’ll crosspost all videos that we produce in conjunction with our TV show (coming in February) and also include videos uploaded through our other network websites to these video specific websites. Users of these three sites will be able to upload their own videos in any language for free.  All text content will be in the given language and all videos will either have translated narratives or subtitles in the given language. 

We’ve recently added some functionality to the three video sites and also ported some of this code to the other sites’ video pages.  Here is the functionality that we’ve added in the past few days to the video sites:

– the ability to filter by area, city, country, or property type just by clicking on the associated hyperlink
– sorting by price, area, city, country
– five most viewed videos and most popular videos for the previous 24 hours in the given language (pretty cool to watch the changes in real time especially when you switch languages)
– automatic generation of tags for multi-lingual categories such as location, country, and type of property (individual tagging will be added shortly)
– improved language tags within the underlying HTML code (still a way to go in this area)

We also know that we need more English language content (especially for the interviews).  We have quite a few interviews lined up in English for our upcoming trip to Panama, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua.  We also have dozens of property videos in English to upload this week and dozens more for which we’ve prepared transcripts and need to finish recording.

There is quite a bit more news in the area of real estate video that we are not ready to release yet. 

Contextual Real Estate Sites: These are groups of highly relevant contextual websites that will present given information in a contextual specific manner. Though we’ve been the using the term “microsite” for more than a year and a half, the best and most eloquent description of the term that I’ve found is here with the best summary quote from that website being that “[t]he idea behind web microsites is to focus the content, function and implementation of a website at a single proposition, market, marketing campaign or promotion.” 

The true power of our custom web engine is in the ability to not only develop and add microsites quickly but also to develop these microsites concurrently in multiple languages. Our web engine allows us to use the smallest possible staff to manage the details of contextual focus across dozens or hundreds of websites as well as across what should soon be 8-12 languages.  We currently have an additional 4 sites ready for launch within a few days and another 13 sites that will be ready within a week or so.  We expect launches of this third category of microsites to start on Monday or Tuesday with the launch of http://construa.com (not live yet) which will be a site in the Portuguese language focused on builders, commercial, and new construction.