Tzetze Fly

The annual Inman Connect conference wrapped up last Friday in San Francisco.  After some full nights of sleep, a cross country flight, and some meds to fight this chest cold that hit me afterwards, I’ve finally recovered enough to write this wrap-up.

This years vibe seemed to revolve around hope and progress.  Seems the industry is seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and is pretty sure it’s daylight, not another on-coming train.

The night before the conference started was the big Beer With Bloggers bash put on by Trulia Zillow.  Everyone was there and the mood was real up-beat.  Greg and I actually jumped in a car with the soon to be rock stars from Real Estate Webmasters (more on that later) for the ride over.

The first day included the ConnectTech Workshop which I moderated.  I’ve summarized the panels and my take-aways in a seperate post.  In the afternoon and during the cocktail reception, we had a little booth in Startup Alley where we were demoing Dwellicious.  As we’ve seen before, agents and brokers who see it live get it – we’ve got to figure out a better way to get the people signing up on-line to understand what it can do for themselves and their on-line buyers.  I was struck by how many people came from outside the country – we talked to people from New Zealand, Australia, and Canada who were all excited to be there.

The evening included an on stage introduction of the two teams competing in Connect Create.  This was a first ever challenge to create a new web application – anything the team wanted to create, as long as it was real estate related – on-site in only 48 hours.  The two teams were our new friends from Real Estate Webmasters and our long-time friends from Diverse Solutions.  I gotta say, when Brian Boero pitched me this idea and asked for help a couple of months ago, I thought it was real interesting and worth doing, but I wasn’t sure the agents and brokers in the audience would be that into it.  My worry increased over a couple of months as the original six teams that showed interested slowly bailed out and left us with the final two brave teams.  But boy, was I wrong – I really think this event was the highlight of the show.  Somehow it really captured the feelings of hope and progress into a simple idea – how much creativity and innovation can teams of talented people display under the pressure of a limited amount of time.  The two teams really came through – everybody was very impressed and they got thunderous applause.  And it wasn’t just the finale that caught everyone’s imagination – every time I went to a party, the REW guys would show up on a short break and everyone wanted to talk to them and buy them drinks.  Every time I went by their work room, there was a reporter in there interviewing them or an attendee just giving them encouragement.  They were treated like rock stars everywhere they went.  It was great to see an industry come together in partnership – agents and brokers realizing that they need the vendors to make this work going forward – that we’re all in this industry together. Brad Inman later mentioned this same sentiment during the wrap-up discussion.

I definitely see both ConnectTech and Connect Create being valued parts of Inman Connect going forward.  Someone during the wrap up even suggested a creative contest for the future where teams of brokers, agents, and vendors get together to create a new business model for brokerages going forward – I thought that was an interesting idea.

Thursday morning included a new event called Connect Launch Pad.  The idea was that CEOs from five new companies would each have five minutes to pitch their new products.  A panel of three commentators – Constance Freedman from Second Century Ventures, and Zach Scott from Point2, and myself – were able to ask them questions.  I think it was good that the audience got to see some progressive new ideas, but this session seemed a little rushed to me.  Hopefully everyone got some good take-aways from it.

Two keynote speeches on Thursday really stood out for me.  Alfred Lin, the COO from Zappos, talked about “Building a Brand that Matters”.  Mike Wurzer did a good job of summarizing the take-aways from this speech.  He was not allowed to talk about the Amazon merger, but was full of brand building and customer service tips.  Later, Yelp COO Geoff Donaker had an open conversation with Brad about consumers rating business providers – something that is a hot topic right now in real estate.  I really like what they’ve done with the Yelp site and community.

In the afternoon, I attended Mike Wurzer’s panels on MLS.  It’s always great to hear what Bill Chee from Prudential Locations in Hawaii is thinking about – right now it’s about people data, and how traditional CRM does not fit the real estate industry, so he had to go out and create his own.  Bob Hale from HAR and Glenn Kelman from Redfin had a great discussion about bringing transparency and consumer reviews to the real estate transaction – seems to be only a matter of time before this topic explodes across the industry.

The highlight on Friday was the unveiling of the Connect Create projects.  I was on-stage as a judge, again along with Constance and Zach, to ask questions.  Real Estate Webmasters demoed their IDX project which was designed to be lower cost than their usual custom web sites, but still allowed an agent to self control the layout of the search and listings pages using simple drag and drop of the page elements.  They wrote it in PHP with heavy use of the jQuery library and it ran on a traditional LAMP stack.  Very nicely done.  Diverse Solutions then showed their agent rating app.  Their team included a very good graphic designer, and the extra time they took showed in the very beautiful, polished UI.  CEO Justin LaJoie was very concerned that a lot of agents and brokers would not like the idea of consumer ratings of Realtors, but the app got a big applause, and when Brian Boero asked if anyone would like to use this product on their own web site, a dozen hands shot up.  They wrote theirs in .NET, also made use of jQuery, on a Microsoft stack.  Something amazing happened when we walked off stage – several brokers had literally snuck into the backstage area to give their cards to the teams, begging to be the first with access to these apps.  As the teams entered the hallway, you could see a sense of relief that they had pulled it off and created something that the audience very much appreciated.

As always, some of the greatest discussions and most fun occurred outside the official conference at the parties and dinners, but those are stories I’ll keep to myself!

In my opinion, this years event was the best in the last several years.  What did you think?