Tzetze Fly

Today’s my last day here at eNeighborhoods. An interesting thing happened today that I think sums up the whole five years here pretty well.

In January of 2003, I arrived on the fourth floor of the building - where we had about one third of the floor rented - went into our little conference room, and had my first meeting here. We had one product at the time - the eNeighborhoods desktop product - which made it easy to create neighborhood reports and maps from a CD installed Windows app. The goal of the meeting was to figure out what functionality we could add to the product to increase sales and usage, and we pretty much decided that day that we would add MLS connectivity, CMA, and Buyer Tour.

Today, I went into our beautiful executive conference room, one of the three conference rooms we have here, where we now occupy the entire fifth floor. I sat with half a dozen people from a great team with tons of industry experience. We now have over a dozen products, and the topic of today’s meeting was the release date for the Realogy project, wherein we are providing IDX listing search and lead capture for all of their brands. This is similar to the RE/Max project, wherein we host remax.com and provide IDX, lead capture, lead management, and broker web sites for the second most trafficked real estate site on the net.

From the one product with a couple of features to many products, including enterprise level web sites, in five years. It went so fast…

Image by ((brian))

Update: Greg created a killer video documenting the five year climb.  Love it!!!

To start the new year off right, Mike Wurzer composed a great open letter to all the public sites that expose listing data on behalf of brokers - including Yahoo!, Google, Trulia, and Zillow. It encourages the use of common data standards to make it easier, cheaper, and more efficient for brokers to upload listing data and keep it updated.

Right now, brokers have to spend time and money inputting their listing data into the numerous (and growing) consumer sites. If they develop technology to automate getting their data from the MLS or back office systems into one of these public sites, they still have to write code to interact with the API’s and data formats of each site individually. If you want your listings on a dozen sites, you must write code, test, debug, and keep updated with all dozen, and in a dozen different formats. I know that for RE/Max International (we run remax.com and handle around 75% of their US office traffic), the limiting factors for widespread syndication of their listing data has been cost and effort. Right now, we are syndicating listings for many offices to GoogleBase on their behalf, but that project has not been extended to other sites. Instead, it is left up to individual brokers or regions to handle their own listing syndication.

Over the past couple of years, the Schema Workgroup of RETS has done a fantastic job creating new XML schemas for real estate data sharing. The schemas describing listing data are particularly well developed, having been hammered on by MLS staff, MLS system vendors, client vendors, and other technical staff for over a year. Others in the real estate technology space would be well served to utilize this intellectual property - and help the RETS group improve on it - to accomplish the common goal of providing better tools and lower costs to the brokerage community. These standard schemas should easily fit into their current processes, utilizing simple XSLT transformations to convert the standard XML schema into their current proprietary schemas. This small addition to the workflow of a few sites would amount to a tremendous savings on the input side of thousands of participants - the brokers and the MLS’s - and encourage increased participation.

Only when we have consistent standards do we see an increase in the creation of tools, increases in efficiency, and lowering of costs. The participation of these leading web sites in the mission of the Real Estate Standards Organization will go a long way toward ensuring adoption of these standards.

So here’s what we’ve been working on -

We’ve been running remax.com on our Enterprise Platform at eNeighborhoods for the past year and a half. Starting Spring 2008, we’ll also be running listing searches, lead distribution, and office web sites for century21.com, coldwellbanker.com, and era.com as part of a huge new deal with Realogy. Lot’s of traffic, eh? I’m calculating that the cumulative real estate listings traffic passing through our platform next summer will come very close to the long dominant realtor.com. This deal has been over a year in the making, and I know both Realogy, eNeighborhoods, and Dominion Enterprises are all very proud that it is finally seeing the light of day.

Press releases:

From eNeighborhoods - http://www.eneighborhoods.com/press_11_12_07.asp
From Realogy - http://www.realogy.com/media/pr/show_release.cfm?id=466

Photo courtesy Zap2It.

Just returned from a family wedding outside of Dallas (yeeeeehaw!), so I’m not leaving for Vegas until tomorrow morning. I’ll be there Tuesday around lunch time. If you want to hook up, drop me an e-mail - I’ll get it on my Treo.

I thought the whole CAR virtual headquarters in Second Life story was strange, but weird real estate related news just keeps rolling in:

• There’s a report that Fidelity National Financial is looking to buy fast food chain Wendy’s.
  > Huh?!?
• ActiveRain is suing Move.com for $33M over an acquisition that fell apart right around the NAR mid-year conference in May of this year. The lawsuit alleges that the Move.com board of directors had approved the deal, that it was to be announced at NAR, and that it fell apart hours after ActiveRain handed over all their secrets.
  > Bummer for ActiveRain, but it’s always fun when Move.com is getting sued!
• The CEO of Point2 Technologies resigned, then pled guilty to sex offense charges.
  > Scandal up in Saskatoon!

And the weeks not even over yet!

I would love to know how much this cost each member of the California Association of Realtors. This “technology” ought to really help the rank and file sell more houses.

From the press release September 19, 2007:

Virtual headquarters open for business as CALIFORNIA ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® launches Second Life presence

LOS ANGELES (Sept. 19) – The CALIFORNIA ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® (C.A.R.) today cut the virtual ribbon on its new Second Life headquarters building, accessible at http://secondlife.car.org or through www.secondlife.com. Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its more than 9.3 million “Residents” from around the globe.

“C.A.R.’s foray into the virtual world of Second Life through our headquarters building features numerous interactive and informational items, including the top five reasons to use a REALTOR®; information about the Association’s upcoming trade show, the CALIFORNIA REALTOR® EXPO 2007; and informational take-away note cards for visitors,” said C.A.R. President Colleen Badagliacco. “The virtual building replicates the C.A.R. logo, with an open-roof design to accommodate “fly-ins,” the primary means of locomotion in Second Life.”

Second Life Residents create avatars – virtual representations of themselves – and can buy, sell and trade with other Residents. According to Linden Labs, the creator of Second Life, the site’s marketplace currently supports millions of U.S. dollars in monthly transactions, handled with the in-world unit-of-trade, the Linden dollar, which can be converted to U.S. dollars at the Linden Dollar Exchange.

“The C.A.R. Second Life headquarters also features an interactive 65-inch plasma TV capable of streaming up to five different on-demand video clips from C.A.R., which visitors can watch while relaxing on a virtual sofa,” Badagliacco said.

Visitors to C.A.R.’s Second Life headquarterswill need to have Second Life installed on their computers. To install, go to http://www.secondlife.com/download.

Leading the way…® in California real estate for more than 100 years, the CALIFORNIA ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® (www.car.org ) is one of the largest state trade organizations in the United States, with nearly 200,000 members dedicated to the advancement of professionalism in real estate. C.A.R. is headquartered in Los Angeles.

Del.icio.us is one of the most useful web sites I’ve started using in the past couple of years. At it’s simplest level, it’s a way to move your web bookmarks out of your browser and into the internet “cloud” so that they are accessible on any computer you use. In the old days (that’s three years ago), you’d bookmark important sites on your office computer, then when you were at your home computer and you needed that site, you were out of luck. Now, with all your bookmarks in del.icio.us, you can get to those from anywhere. The site is free and now owned by Yahoo.

At a deeper level, you can tag every bookmark with keywords and add a description. If you have a lot of bookmarks, this makes them easy to find by a simple search box. In a sense, you’re creating your own little personal search engine - all sites you’ve bookmarked are now searchable by tag and by description. Bookmarks are public by default, but can be marked private for your logged in eyes only.

The format of del.icio.us urls are very straightforward - this is where the real power starts to come into play. To find all sites I’ve tagged with “ruby”, just go to:

http://del.icio.us/danwoolley/ruby

Del.icio.us calls itself “social bookmarking” and this example shows that off - all public bookmarks you make are easily accessible to others. Now when a friend asks you for information about web hosting companies, you can just send him a link that looks like this:

http://del.icio.us/danwoolley/web+hosting

and he’ll see everything you’ve tagged “web hosting” during your web surfing over the past year.

You can even access an RSS feed for these public bookmarks. If someone you trust is always uncovering juicy tidbits about real estate that are worth checking out, subscribe to their feed (for example) using:

http://del.icio.us/rss/donaldtrump/real+estate

Now every time they tag a page using those tags, it will appear in your blog reader.

Rather than a specific user’s bookmarks, you can look at those of the entire del.icio.us user base. Remember, these are sites that have been specifically marked by a human being as having useful information. For specific subjects, this can be even more relevant than general search sites like Google. The site has a very usable UI for searching, but here are some sample url shortcuts you can go to directly:

Sites tagged “web hosting” - http://del.icio.us/tag/web+hosting

Popular sites - http://del.icio.us/popular

Popular sites tagged “ruby” - http://del.icio.us/popular/ruby

As a Realtor, you could do something like tag listings that you’d like your buyers - the Robertson’s - to see at remax.com, then just e-mail them a single link - for example:

http://del.icio.us/debbiesellsboca/Robertson

or allow them to subscribe to a feed in their blog reader - for example :

http://del.icio.us/rss/debbiesellsboca/Robertson

Now whenever you bookmark a new listing and tag it “Robertson”, they will see it. You can even tag other pertinent information you want them to read, like articles about mortgage rates, schools in the area, market conditions, etc, and they will all appear in their blog reader.

If you’re using Firefox, there is a very useful extension available here. It puts a couple of buttons in your toolbar that make it super simple to bookmark any page and bring up your list of bookmarks without having to open the del.icio.us site.

Del.icio.us also has very good developer tools you can read about here. I’ll be showing off one of those in my next post.

I had originally titled this “Installing Ruby on Rails on Mac OSX”, but as I typed, it gradually became about this other, more general, topic.

I saw this a little too late, but next time, I’m going to try RM-Install from Five Runs. Looks like it installs a very comprehensive Ruby on Rails stack from one place in minutes.

This is also an interesting look at an open source business model. Notice that they are offering you the free Ruby on Rails stack that you need, in a value added package, in exchange for lead information. You must enter an accurate e-mail address because they are delivering the actual download link to your inbox. To be clear, everything they are giving you is open source and freely available from different sites, but they are combining it into a single package so that the customer can save time and increase compatibility.

Five Runs also currently offers a Rails management solution called RM-Manage (very cool, watch the demo video) for which they charge a monthly subscription fee. From the looks of it, these two offerings are just two pieces in a much larger suite of services they are building out to ride the wave of Ruby on Rails as it washes into the enterprise space.

This model relates to real estate in so many ways:

• What can you package up and offer potential customers, at low cost to you and free to them, that are still valuable enough for them to give you valid contact information?
• What are you doing to ensure you contact that lead ASAP to find out further needs, establish a real relationship, and move them on to your other offerings that will generate real revenue?
• Traditionally for real estate agents, that real income is in the form of commissions, but what can you learn from an open source based software company about generating revenue from suites of related products? Maybe on a subscription or per use basis?
• Note how simple and professional, both the site in general and the lead form in particular, are. They make it very clear, in a subtle yet direct way, that “mickey@mouse.com” will not cut it here. If you want the value, we want the real you.

How long do you think it took me to get an e-mail from Five Runs? Yep, about thirty seconds. Of course it was automated, but if I now proceed with the download and the install goes smooth, I receive true value and I now have a positive relationship established with this company.

How long do you think it will take before someone actually calls me on the phone? I’d bet this week I’ll hear from someone.

Photo credit