Side note:  I did the talk over Skype video, which worked surprisingly well.  It’s great when a 10 minute talk literally takes 10 minutes, versus the two days it would take traveling there and back.  The new Skype v2.8 has noticeably better quality and has added screen sharing.  It’s in beta for Mac and you can download it here.

Buyers

The California Association of Realtors (CAR) recently published their annual survey – “2008 Survey of California Home Buyers”.  In former years, this report was called “Internet v. Traditional Buyer Survey”, but they changed it this year.  I think this is an important point – they no longer see a distinction between internet and traditional buyers, as well over 80% of buyers now start their search on-line.  The study found that:

• Consumers do an average of 6.2 weeks of research on-line before ever contacting a Realtor.
• 90% of those buyers who use the internet also find their agent on-line.

We also know from other studies that consumers are performing their research on multiple sites.

This aligns with consumer search behavior when researching other large ticket items such as cars and flat screen TV’s – consumers will go to multiple sites like consumerreports.org or cnet.com to research, rather than only visiting a manufacturers site like samsung.com or a store site like bestbuy.com.

Sellers

Want to know:

• What is the market right now so the home can be properly priced.
• The marketing plan to ensure maximum exposure of the property.
• Agent is going to take care of them from start to finish.

If the seller goes to a popular search portal like realtor.com or remax.com and does not see their house listed for sale, that’s going to cause a big problem.

Build

Building a successful real estate search portal takes:

• Content
• Technology
• Marketing (to drive consumers to the site)
• Business model (to pay for and sustain the site)

Agents cannot do the above, and very few brokers can.  There needs to be a cooperative local effort, led by someone like an MLS, or there needs to be syndication of the content to companies that have done the above and can drive traffic and exposure to those listings.  Some of the MLS vendors – like FBS – are doing work in this area to enable local MLS search portals.

The Shift

Agents and brokers need to shift their focus from simply providing listing data to efficiently managing and nurturing the consumers search, adding value with things like:

• Local area knowledge (like neighborhoods, schools, community)
• Current local market knowledge (like pricing trends and competition)
• Even broader, macro economic and financing trends (like tax credits and financing programs).

Wrap Up

This is what W&R Studios is focused on as a company, starting with our Dwellicious product:

• Helping consumers to organize, share, and discuss their search for homes.
• Giving agents and brokers visibility into that process and tools to add value earlier in the research process.
• Hopefully this gives consumers a better experience and makes agents and brokers more efficient.

Questions?

If you need the complexity of sharing cookies across a session and handling re-directs from an MS IIS web server, then don’t spend two days trying to get these two to work like I just did.  Jump straight to Mechanize – just install the gem.  It handled the complex re-directs, the cookie sharing, and both GETs and POSTs with a magical ease.

I haven’t gone any further with it, but apparently Mechanize can do a lot of other stuff too, like find fields and fill out forms.  In combination with Hpricot, it would be a natural for some pretty complex web spidering.

Hope this helps save someone else two days.

• every member gets their own space where they can upload their code projects to share with the community, along with the standard profile and RSS feed features you’d expect.
• search for code you need to complete your own projects and sign up to “watch”, or be notified when any project that you’re using changes.
• a seamless way to push version controlled code from your desktop to the hub, into either public or private repositories – public repositories are free, whereas privates ones have a reasonable price.
• and an easy way to fork others code so that you can modify it for your needs or to fix bugs, then push back up to the hub for the benefit of the rest of the community.

Since it went live this year, many very high profile projects have moved to github, including Rails, Merb, Capistrano, Scriptaculous, and Prototype.  In my new project, I am using Will_Paginate, Hpricot, Restful_Authentication, JSON_Printer, and Acts_as_taggable_on_steroids – all downloaded from github.

I was able to add a feature I needed to JSON_Printer, a small project produced by the programmers at TechCrunch, and posted it back to the community.  Just today, I uploaded a new project called NumberTwoPencil which I created to interface with the Education.com API announced earlier this week.  If you have a need for school data in your Ruby app, check it out, make improvements, and share it back with me.  I’m also hosting two private repositories there, code I push every night for backup purposes.

The most popular projects can be seen at http://github.com/popular/watched.  My projects can be viewed at http://github.com/danwoolley.

I use this all the time driving to or from work – anything I’m trying to remember, especially to do lists – I just Jott them and then I have a nice list waiting in my inbox when I get there.  Highly recommended.

1. “That sounds stupid.  Why would I want to use that?  My life is busy enough already.”
2. “Hey – this is kind of fun, especially at this conference.”
3. “Man, the web site is down a lot.”
4. “Cool – using twhirl will solve all my problems.”
5. “Hmmmm – I guess all of twitter is down a lot.”
6. “How can I live my life when twitter is f’ing down all the time!?!?!?!?!?”

View video

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.

Look – this is beta, it might not work, it might not scale, etc, etc, but Amazon has shown a great track record with their web services (AWS) thus far. First was S3 – storage on demand. Next was EC2 – computing on demand. Lately they’ve added FPS – a flexible payment service, and they’ve had SQS – simple queue service – for a while now. Major sites are running one or more of these services in production right now, sites like New York Times and SmugMug. I even read somewhere that Microsoft is using S3 for storage on one of their sites.

SimpleDB sounds very similar to the CouchDB project I’ve covered in the past. It’s a schema-less data repository of name-value pairs with automatic indexing. It scales instantly, it’s pay per use, and it looks like it uses an API based on REST. Initial commentary indicates it’s using Erlang to accomplish this. More details regarding the API, performance, etc, will come out over the next few weeks as people start to exercise this.

I spend more and more of my time procuring equipement, retro-fitting equipment, dealing with power, cooling, and space issues, budgeting for neeeded equipment, estimating expenditures on future equipment – less and less time building cool stuff. Being able to get up and running in a day on these new services, trying out ideas at low cost, then tossing away bad products or expanding successful products – that’s the future – and it’s all coming into focus right now.

From my point of view, all Amazon is missing now is a proper load-balancing service. I’m guessing that is on tap for them in 2008. If they go the extra mile and make that load-balancer allow geo-graphical distribution of traffic to unique data centers, that would push this stuff into a whole other stratosphere.

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.