Congratulations To Our Friend, Jim Duncan – The Newest Bloodhound

Jim Duncan has been selected as the newest contributor to the Bloodhound blog.  You can read the news about it from Jim himself as well as from the good folks at the Bloodhound blog.
 
Greg Swann concisely sums up Jim’s strengths: thoughfulness and integrity. We are glad to see Jim expand his thoughtfulness and integrity to a national forum. 

Our Spanish Language Real Estate Blog Overtakes This Blog In Total Pageviews

In a testament to the growing spanish language real estate blogging readership, our Spanish language blog http://casacomprar.wordpress.com has jumped past the total page views of this blog.

My colleague Alicia Yabeta runs that blog and has worked diligently since spring 2006 to build a spanish language real estate community around her blog which now consistently runs between 150 and 200 views per day and still growing.  For some, that may be less than an hour..but the spanish language real estate blogging community hardly existed a year ago. When she started she was lucky to get 5 page views per day.

Congratulations are definitely in order.

Next Stop: Profitability In The Real Estate Video Business

 Soooooo  Close…

I’ve had the blog post in draft for several months now – we’ve been frustratingly close but not yet at net profitability. We’ll likely *just* miss again this month primarily due to travel costs to Europe at the end of the month as well as costs associated with spinning up our office in Central America that will serve Panama and Costa Rica. We also have some new narration and editing hires in Bolivia to bring on in the next week in order to process the increased volume of incoming real estate videos. In short, May isn’t going to be the month.

Profitability Within A Month

That said, I’ll go out on a limb and predict that our real estate video operation will likely be profitable for the month of June (and July as well).  This is based on new signed contracts for licensed video narration in South America, individual property videos reserved for June, and some reasonable percentage of sales in our foreseeable sales pipeline actually closing within the next two months.  For the record, I’m not including any inbound revenue from anticipated new business from Europe, online advertising, sponsorship, real estate video training, or any other secondary income not directly based on providing co-branded or private label real estate video services directly to customers but I am including the costs of such activities in order to calculate net profitability.

It Is Still Early In This Business Space

Some are already anointing their pre-determined winners and also-rans in the real estate video business based on flash players (of all things).  There are many excellent companies on that list but I’d respond that there is still a loooong way to go and many adoption hurdles left in the fledgling business space of real estate video. At some point, the flash player might become a key differentiator but, at this point, it is hardly the critical piece of the business issue at hand – if it was, then our real estate video network wouldn’t be getting nearly 60-70,000 monthly video views and the most popular embedded players like YouTube would be getting far more traffic than they actually are.  

Here is the reality: we’ll release our embeddable video player shortly and our real estate traffic will see some increase from where it currently is. However, this will translate into little or no direct incremental revenue until the market matures which is still a year or more off.  Additionally, in the coming months, you’ll see a growing number of agreements announced in the real estate video space but remember that there is a big difference between announcing agreements with known organizations and converting those agreements to a non-trivial amount of cash in the short term. So, what is the better indicator of success in an immature real estate video market – having a relatively commoditized flash player or having people actually watch property videos, brokers selling properties as a result, and achieving corporate  profitability?   If nothing else, profitability from operations is a established indicator of doing *something* right and will ultimately be another step in gaining respectability.

Back To South America

I’ll be back in our offices in South America on Monday.  We have more properties to film today and I fly out on Sunday so likely no more blog posts until then….

The US Real Estate Video Roadshow Coming To A City Near You

Training Curriculums – Check! 

We’ve just finished putting together two training curriculums around real estate video.  The first is focused on the business value of real estate video marketing and with an audience focused on brokers and agents; the other is a hands-on course designed to help you improve your own property videos and provide a wealth of video filming techniques to the particpants.

US Road Show – Check!

We are proposing a road show during the month of July 2007 to various cities with the first phase being focused on cities with large bilingual populations on the east coast. The intial cities include Maimi, Tampa, Fairfax, Charlottesville, Raleigh, Houston, and Orlando.  We are soliciting feedback at this point to determine levels of interest. The complete proposal can be found on our activerain blog (http://activerain.com/blogsview/94198/Learn-More-About-Real) . 

Your Feedback – Check!

This trip has been in planning for months and was simply waiting for the curriculum to be finished. If you have any thoughts or would like to participate in any of these or future real estate video training sessions, please let us know at tony@vidlisting.com and we’ll respond with details.  There are also limited sponsorship and real estate video interview opportunities available for each stop and the entire real estate video roadshow.  Contact me for more details.

Update: Great feedback via email – keep it coming – we’ve even picked up our first sponsor.

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?

Real Estate Blogs Change When The Internet Is Scarce

I’m one of those people that always in self-analysis mode.  Nothing surprises me more than when my own behavior surprises me.  As I explained before I stayed in a hotel that will remain nameless in a part of Latin America that is extremely popular but outside of my normal stomping grounds. No internet in the rooms…ugg…down to the lobby/bar area to check emails.

Flash back to 1992 in hard hit earthquake area south of Limon, Costa Rica to illustrate my point. All of the permanent bridges south of Limon had been destroyed in the 1991 earthquake and replaced with temporary military style bridges. I decided to stay what seemed a short walk outside of a town with some friends.  Life was returning to normal several months after the earthquake and I was starting to check out properties around the area and talking to local residents while on vacation.  One day, the rain started falling so hard that you *literally* could not see your hand in front of your face. This happens on occasion and normally only lasts a few minutes. This time it rained that hard or almost that hard for 3-4 days with letting up. A wall of flood water from the Sixiola river washed away most if not all of the temporary bridges in the area, not to mention houses and people. Suddenly, I found myself smack dab in the middle of a real emergency and the place where I was staying became a small island onto itself. Every day for almost two weeks, I helped the local residents to haul water that had been helicoptered in just for basic necessities.  What had been a short walk before now seemed like a marathon when loaded down with the scarce daily ration of several gallons of water for drinking, bathing, and cleaning.  When I returned home, I came back with a renewed appreciation for water and the ease with which we had access to water in the US.  My habits changed – I stopped letting the water run while brushing my teeth.  Many of those habits have stayed with me until today as a result.

What does this have to real estate blogging? The internet certainly isnt as much of a necessity as water but it is a requirement in order to run my business while traveling. Having to make myself somewhat presentable and lug my portable computer down the hotel lobby added an element of scarcity to an important resource that I rarely thought about.  The internet had become my “water”. 

Almost by definition, scarcity requires prioritization and choices. As I self-assessed the situation, there was a decision making process required around the few minutes of free time on the hotel internet that required some hard choices about what blogs to read. I started pushing several well known and respected real estate blogs that are normally daily reads to the side only because they really provided little value-add and represented an opportunity cost for blogs that did provide value.

Prior to the hotel experience, I likely would have categorized blogs that I read as follows:

– blogs essential to my business
– blogs essential to personal development
– personal interest blogs

After the blog scarcity experiment, I would add the following category: blogs that everyone else reads (whether there is perceived value or not)

In a scarce Internet environment, many of the real estate and technology blogs that I had been reading and thinking of as being essential really weren’t. I unsubscribed from several for obvious reasons (to me anyway). For example, why waste time reading someone that is basically yelling at me about SEO in almost every post? SEO is important but life is too short to be yelled at by someone that has never seen my pages. Result? Unsubscribed.

Fanatics are often described as people that argue incessently about a single topic and never change that topic. Where is the value in reading 6-7 blog posts over a few day period about an already clearly stated point of view on a fairly unsubstantial topic and insinuating that people that might not agree actually are somehow not enlightened?  Some may cloak such shilling as “liberty”….I’d prefer to call it: unsubscribed.  Is it fun to read a “keyword rich” blog designed and geared to strategy more beneficial to the writer than to the reader? Life can be rich as well; unsubscribed. Do I really need to be told the N best ways to write blog posts Y different times with links to each article? Unsubscribed.

Don’t get me wrong. Readers are the value to real estate blogs but not every article can have value to every reader. There are dozens, hundreds, thousands of great blogs out there. If you wringing value out of your blogs, perfect….but how many do we read that bring little value over time?

Thoughts?

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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Maybe We Do Understand Zillow After All

Its been amusing watching Greg Swann for whom I have a great amount of respect twist himself into knots trying to convince us that we just don’t understand zillow’s latest release.  I read a seemingly unending slew of articles designed to convince everyone that Zillow 5 almost requires that you’d best get on board now in order to be successful. The Zillow marketing team couldn’t do a better job convincing the good folks over at the bloodhound..that’s what marketeers get paid to do and they’ve done it well.

Kissing Cousins: Zillow 5  & Wikipedia

I dont share Greg’s willingness to go to the mat so quickly about the new Zillow features (perhaps I just dont have the same incentives).  I do share one key area of agreement with Greg, however – the comparison of Zillow 5 to Wikipedia. It’s likely the closest conceptual match to what zillow has proposed with their latest release:  a site where users are enabled to edit an almost unrestricted variety of content for which the user feels knowledgeable that ultimately ranks well in search engines.

Are Communities Different Than Groups?

Web 2.0 as defined by Greg:

“Web 2.0 creates an ongoing community of active users by integrating a user-modifiable database through an interactive, as opposed to static, web-based interface.

Let’s start by thinking about the community that surrounds Web 2.0 sites. We’ll stick with four conceptual logical groupings for all of the sites :

1) Active updaters that make lots of changes
2) Active users that make less frequent updates
3) Active users that make no updates
4) Infrequent users

These are all users – but maybe my idea of community is somewhat different than Greg’s.  If there is any definable community for Wikipedia, it would be largely within the #1 group of 5000 or so editors that diligently provide the vast majority of edits (according to wikipedia’s data, 2500 people make about half of the total edits). An exponentially smaller percentage of participants in said community might come from group #2 or #3. I think that you’d find the same groupings and likely same broad brush percentages of those that feel some sense of community at other popular social web 2.0 sites. I’d argue that no such tangible community exists within groups #3 and #4  (anymore than there is a  “community” of people with, say,  driver’s licenses.)

Most Want Answers From Wikipedia Not Community

Never mind all of the active interface stuff, the vast majority of users never interact with the interface to know the difference between active and static interfaces.  They searched for something, found the [insert name of site here] website and now just want an answer/some information. Despite Greg’s arguments to the contrary, wikipedia *is* simply a collection of encyclopedia articles from a public standpoint. In many cases, thats exactly what they want it to be – semantic enough to get the darn answer or information that I want 😛 Anecdotally I’m sure that some group of users is like me in that they do a search elsewhere, click over to the wikipedia link prominantly displayed in the search results, and then back to Google.  It’s simply one of N resources that exist in the internet.

Page Views Do Not A Community Make

But powerful resources with true communities often are near impossible to replace. Greg rightly points out that the difficulty of unseating any of the major web 2.0 players in the marketplace has little to do with the technology.  Most of these technologies are rather simple…and he uses eBay and wikipedia as his prime examples.

Herein lie the issues for me. Ebay and Wikipedia simply don’t share the same types of dependencies on their user base for their sites’ success. People often spend time on eBay (or Digg) poking around for things that are not in any way associated with their original intent. Sites like these have a dedicated user base that often returns to the site to consume new content. Wikipedia on the other hand has a dedicated content generation base. When was the last time you “just went to wikipedia to spend some time” like…umm…never? I can only speak for my own experience but I feel no sense of community at all on wikipedia as a user.  People generally dont blog about wikipedia…they view it as a resource. 

Zillow 5, like wikipedia, is being built on user supplied information. Therefore, Zillow 5 features by definition need to be conceptually much closer to Wikipedia’s model than eBay’s.  Given the differences, I’ll extend Greg’s observations therefore and say that in the case of Wikipedia and unlike eBay, unseating its market position has very little to do with community that has establised itself on the site. Wikipedia’s barrier to entry seems to be more in replacing the sizable body of information that they have established to date rather than having to convince some set of users to move from one site to another (see Greg…we do understand what Zillow wants to do).

There is definitely some critical mass of that assembled information that once passed becomes a barrier to entry for others. Zillow is working to get there. But, despite this critical mass already being achieved by Wikipedia, the death knell has simply not been dealt to other information brokers – simply put, wikipedia has become another resource used while searching. 

Will It Be Users That Form The Real Community Around Zillow 5?

 Zillow will be successful in building a community.  Blogging A-listers like Greg will blog about it, comment about, and be quoted in newspapers and thats all good. But I dont believe that the zillow 5 features will do enough to break the model established by its content-rich kissing cousin.  I foresee a similar trajectory there will likely develop a community of very active real estate service providers that mainly ne representative of group #1 above. They’ll be the ones like Greg adding their hundreds and thousands of photos. The “draw” or reason to be on the site in their case is the opportunity to sit in the driver’s seat until the owner of a property comes by and also by the advertising opportunities. Viewing the competition of other service providers within given zip codes also could be a sufficient draw. 

There will also be some set of people looking to buy or sell properties.  We know that most studies suggest that buyers will likely use search engines to find real estate. Zillow content will be found and viewed much like wikipedia content is today.  Only time will tell how often will buyers specifically go to Zillow to see if their dream house is for sale or if new information is available if they are not in the market remains to be seen.  Will it be more often than they go to a domain name sales site to see if their dream URL is available?  If so, how often is that? 

The most controversial draw is homeowners somehow believing that they’ll have to claim their property at the Zillow site to avoid having someone else provide information about the property. Though it makes for great marketing chum, it seems to necessitate about the same level of urgency as the need to check wikipedia (or any of the major search engines, for that matter) to see if anyone is posting your personal information.  Joe and Jane Consumer aren’t doing that on any sort of regular basis now. Why, then,  would Zillow be any different in terms of this particular “draw”? More importantly, why would the legal process and subsequent remedy for posting untrue or derogatory information on Zillow be any different than for any other website? In short, if the information is correct, folks will likely leave it…if not, they’ll seek whatever remedies required to have it removed.  The Zillow guys are smart guys..my guess is that they’ll announce some update to this feature to “better support the user base” after wringing out all of the marketing value….ths particular feature is kind of like the Jerry Springer show encapsulated in programming code.

Role of The Service Providers:  Provide Activity And Page Views

Much like wikipedia, the largest community will grow around the active service providers.  There is an issue here as well. For the community within eBay and wikipedia any industry disintermediation is viewed as a  benefit to the entire user base. Ironically, Zillow will be relying on many of the very people that it seeks to disintermediate in order to build its base of active content providers.  Granted that Drew and company are working hard to be REALTOR-friendly in the blogosphere, but disruption is clearly in Zillow’s business model and their key marketing differentiator. Note: no value judgement here, just my own observations. 

This is where the pay-per-impression model is, in my view, a long term master stroke by Zillow. Using wikipedia (or even Digg) as an example, we know that popular user generated content sites have an active core group of content providers that generate a large number of page views. So, it’s equally likely on the Zillow site, that an active core group of real estate service providers will generate a high percentage of page views as well..particularly zip codes that have a high service provider participation rate.  The difference being that the page views at zillow are subsidized…well…mostly by other service providers.  The Zillow revenue model assures that they dont even need to worry about the fact that service providers have a low probability of clicking on other service provider ads.   This will be particularly interesting when the most active service provider zip codes have rates that increase with limited supply of EZ Ads.  Those are the future blog posts that I want read when this all plays out…when the 1 penny crack hits go away….and it’s time to pay the dealer.

Oh…a quick inclusion of the Zillow api into the discussion…looking down the road, what would be the reaction if, at some point, other people’s EZ Ads were rolled into the API output?  Likelihood?

Where Are We Now?

– Zillow isn’t in the market position of an Ebay or a wikipedia right now and, in my opinion, it’s bit premature to decide that they are based on this specific feature set. Perhaps in the future they may be, but we also have real life examples of companies that thrive in such environments.  History is against Zillow establishing such a dominant position but their disruption marketing is a strong aid in the attention economy.

– Just because online content generators have some sense of community doesnt mean that general public that consumes content will feel as though they participate in communities. Wikipedia has shown us that just because we can edit content does not corollate to large numbers of regular users actually doing so.  The likeliest community will be formed by service providers who ironically have the most seemingly to lose by making the site successful.

– In terms of personal content being generated by others, we have a model in Wikipedia to anticipate what will happen with Zillow’s new features.  My thinking is that Zillow’s content will be found and consumed much like wikipedia’s is today by the general public but to a much smaller audience.  Process and legal remedies will continue exist for false, derogatory, or other such information.

In all, I’m fairly neutral…honestly, a bit underwhelmed by the uptake.  I’m certainly not ready to gamble my credibility on pumping services that haven’t proven to be the inflection point of real estate as we know it.  Zillow may well be on the road to such an end state…but there is still a long journey.

Disclosure: This is likely unnecessary but in terms of full disclosure, a representative of Zillow did contact me about employment as a senior software manager just as they were getting off the ground in Seattle a little over a year ago.  We exchanged several emails with interest from both sides but ultimately I was thought it best to go off and do my own thing.  Our commercial web engine gets 1/10 of their traffic, I dont believe that I personally know any of the team, and Zillow does not operate in our geographic focus areas.

The Real Estate Attention Economy, Relevancy, And Content

We found an excellent article on the attention economy: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/attention_economy_overview.php. Go ahead and read it as background.  We’ll be waiting here when you are done.

So, with that primer of the attention economy under your belt, let’s talk a bit about how the attention economy affects you as a real estate professional or service provider to the real estate industry.  The next few years will speed the growth of real estate internet content and the ability to share that content (listings, property data, blogs, podcasts, real estate video, etc.)  

Whether you have a blog or not, you’ll see many new blogs, vlogs, podcasts, videos, and other new technologies specifically tailored to the real estate industry. In short, whether you realize it or not, you’ve become a content provider just doing your day-to-day job, filming for your vlog, or writing to your blog.  List a property in MLS? That is content sharable by others. Write a blog post? New content. Sell a property? Yup, you guessed right…somewhere new content is generated based on the sales data and accessible to someone else as a result.

This year’s mechanism du jour driving the attention economy in the real estate world is the real estate blog. Real estate blogs are exploding in popularity and becoming a central collection point for much of the new content. What is happening to drive this information centralization? Agent blogs and single property blogs can now apparently can be set up in minutes with photos, text, and virtual tour slideshows. Interesting real estate data services such as IDX, Zillow, and Google Maps have public programming interfaces that make a plethora of plug-ins, widgets, and services instantly available on far-flung websites and often hawked by prominent, popular real estate bloggers. Real estate video sites will put videos instantly at your readers’ fingertips. The ease with which these methods and data become accessible directly drive and grow the attention economy.

As the article points out, relevancy in such growth is the real challenge. Relevancy is much more than just PageRank and links. So, what are some ways to capture your share of the attention economy in the face of stiffening competition or to retain your relevency during the growth curve? Here are some suggestions: 

Create Original Content: Many sites rely directly on automated reuse of the content of others. As technology improvements make content sharing trivial, users will seek out the source of original content. Don’t be afraid to take credit for that content and help others to redistribute it.

Provide A Tangible Value-add to Existing Content: If you are leveraging existing content, find a way to add additional value to the content whether a blog link, listing, real estate video, or other form of content.  This value-add could be as simple as focusing a general topic to real estate (much like I am doing with this blog post) , adding information or media to otherwise shared content (“the MLS link for the property but you can click here to hear a podcast/watch the video/read more about the property”), or getting different perspectives on the existing content.

Leverage Scarcity: People will choose to spend their attention on content that has some form of scarcity attached to it. Scarcity generally raises attention value for users.  The more difficult the content to get or generate, the more value users will generally attach to it. Real estate blogging is a great example – people read the Real Estate Tomato, Greg Swann, or Sellsius because not many write like them (I certainly cannot).  Their style is what keeps the attention level high on their site….not many top 10 lists or other formulaic approaches on their site…in short, breaking the rules makes them different.  We use real estate video to create content around subjects not often covered in English and in some cases Spanish. We also make property videos available in English/Portuguese that is generally only offered in Spanish.  Scarcity is something that almost EVERYONE can leverage in some way if people think about their own unique value proposition.

Find A Niche and a Voice For That Niche: I would describe an internet niches as a well defined area of interest with underserved content.  This is related to but different from the “Long Tail” which I believe refers more to making existing content more accessible. Key point: Google will only tell you if content exists – you need to decide if the existing content is underserving its audience and create content that serves the interested “community” better. We built our initial audience around a niche that people told me didnt exist at all. In some cases, you may find yourself defining the niche yourself and becoming the voice for it. Others that find commonality with your definition will soon find you.

So, now you know about the attention economy and the empirical evidence that shows that it will only get more difficult to maintain attention in an era of geometric internet growth (mirrored in real estate blogs and soon to be happening with real estate video).  The four areas above can help you stay relevant as the attention economy around real estate grows and the ease of content creation continues to improve.

Thoughts?

100,000 Real Estate Videos Watched In Just Over Three Months

We just passed 100,000 real estate videos watched on our site today.  As of this post the update to this post, we have 100,053 100,193.  Given the numbers that we’ve discerned about other sites, we aren’t at the top of the heap but we sure are burning right along for where we are in site development.  Additionally, the recent competition springing up in the real estate video space tells me that others think that there may be a business to build around the technology. Validation of the business opportunity is always a good thing.

I’m very proud of the entire forsalebylocals and casacomprar teams for making this important milestone.  The interesting part is that the vast majority of the interviews and property videos that have been posted to this point are from Santa Cruz, Bolivia and Brazil.  It will be interesting to see the speed to which we add 100,000 more views once we have all 30 hours of real estate video interviews from Costa Rica, Panama, and Nicaragua posted on http://forsalebylocals.com and http://vidlisting.com

The three video sites (http://vidlisting.com in English, http://bienesraicesvideo.com in Spanish and http://imoveisvideo.com in Portguese) have been our recent focus.  Now, we are turning our attention back to our three principal listing sites (http://forsalebylocals.com in English, http://casacomprar.com in Spanish and http://repousos.com in Portuguese) as well as the corresponding country specific sites.

We have done so much work over the past few months and have so many new things coming up.  We are a small team and this has been hectic but fun and, every day, we receive emails saying that you guys, our audience, think that it is definitely worth the effort. Thanks again for sharing the ride with us.

Tony