Where Real Estate Gets Its Dirt

Spacio Pro Open House app adds RealSatisfied integration

Melissa Kwan of Spacio got a nice write up yesterday on Tech Crunch. Part of post focused on her killer Open House App, Spacio Pro. If you have checked it out you really should, very well done.

They recently announced an integration with Real Satisfied.

Spacio Pro Plans To Supercharge Open House Showings With A Smart App

“Spacio Pro’s pitch is the “Paperless Open House”. In other words, increasing the conversion of data capture at open houses and helping agents turn strangers into customers. It’s app provides the check-in experience for buyers on the front end, and logs everything on the back-end so agents can revisit leads in the future. Better than pen and paper!

Spacio Pro has now done a collaboration with real estate customer satisfaction platform, RealSatisfied, where their customers can integrate their reviews and testimonials directly on the Spacio Pro sign-in form, improving their first impression with potential buyers by sharing past successes.”

I have to say the RealSatisfied has made integrating agent reviews (survey results) super easy. Smart.

Clareity Security launches all new SSO Dashboard

CLAREITY RELEASED AN ALL NEW SSO DASHBOARD – AND IT’S BETTER THAN EVER

““Clareity’s new dashboard design is modern, mobile responsive and easy to navigate. Launching this new dashboard was a seamless transition for our customers. We’ve received positive feedback,” said Merri Jo Cowen, CEO of MFRMLS.
Clareity brought in design and user experience (UX) experts Iteration Group to ensure the most professional and modern UI and UX. Iteration Group is respected for various clients including Quickbooks, NBC Universal, and Illumination Entertainment (Despicable Me – minions!) as well as popular apps Angie’s List and ChowNow. With Iteration Group’s design expertise and Clareity’s knowledge of the real estate industry, the two teams collaborated to create the “dream dashboard” for agents, brokers and other real estate professionals.”

Clareity changed their business model awhile ago, from an “app store”, to a site where agents can find out information about products then request more information. Those leads are then sent directly to the vendor They call this “Discover”. We have been testing this and getting a good amount of leads.

One quibble about this press release and maybe this is just an oversight. But, if you are going to tell how “modern” and “sleek” your new dashboard is, can you at least including a screen shot?

W&R Studios adds Chief Design Officer

Really excited about this!

DAMIEN HUZE JOINS W&R STUDIOS’ LEADERSHIP TEAM AS CHIEF DESIGN OFFICER.

“HUNTINGTON BEACH, CA (October 29, 2015) – Privately held software company, W&R Studios, announced today that Damien Huze will be joining their leadership team as the Chief Design Officer. Damien has been involved with the company since 2008. He designed W&R Studios’ corporate identity as well as consulted on the UI/UX and identity of their flagship product, Cloud CMA.

Damien grew up in Paris, France. Both his parents were in creative fields. “It wasn’t until much later that I realized the impact of growing up in house where there was always a sketch being drawn, a story being written, a canvas being painted, or an object being fabricated. The trash bin full of concepts gave me awareness of the grind a designer has to go through to do valuable work.” stated Damien. Later, when he was a teenager they moved to Florida.”

Looking forward to introducing Damien to everyone in San Diego.

Pro Tips: Anatomy of a trade show – 2015 N.A.R. Annual Conference San Diego

I get asked a lot whether or not it make sense to have a big booth at the N.A.R. Annual conference or any trade show for that matter.

First off I think the biggest mistake most vendors make is they don’t do anything to help drive traffic to their booth. They basically just show up with some swag and hope agents will pay attention to them. So, here are some simple tips to help you increase your ROI.

1. You need to have a hook.

In previous years I’ve had celebrities like Fabio and Richard Simmons at our booth. Agents loved them. But your hook doesn’t need to be celebrity. Sometimes you need to get creative. This year we are doing a ping pong themed event. We are challenging all agents to beat our CFO, Karl Ziegler, at ping pong to win free subscriptions to our software. Here’s a video that we put together.


2. Ted Turner is credited with the phrase, “Early to bed, early to rise, in-between…advertise!”. You gotta promote your hook. In our case we are doing a lot of social media (#BEATKARL). Plus we sent out postcards to all N.A.R. Annual attendees.

karl postcard

We are also cross matching that mailing list against our email database and following up with an email campaign to those same attendees.

If you can afford it, signage at the event can also help you draw attention to your booth.

***True story, I actually met Ted Turner once and asked him if he said the above phrase. He quipped back to me, “Well son, i would say, work like hell, and advertise!”***

3. Have a goal.
You need your sales team to have a goal. 400 signups? 100 solid leads. Something to keep their eye on the prize and motivated.

If anybody else has any other tips I’m sure everyone would love to hear them in the comments. Have a great show!

Property Panorama releases new broker solution.

Here are some numbers to chew on.

5.3 Million Tours published
753,000 agents
74 MLS providers
21 Million photos
The number one publisher of “non gaming” videos on You Tube.

Can you guess the company? I couldn’t. It’s Property Panorama.

When Mike Barnett took over as CEO of Property Panorama the company was facing some serious issues. Close to shutting down. Now 5 years later with the help of a super smart team, the company is releasing their new “Instaview Enterprise Broker Solution”. And with numbers like those it seems Mike and his team have been busy.

The product Is basically a marketing automation tool that ties in to MLS data. Once an agent lists a property a virtual tour is automatically created and published.

I spoke to Mike today and he said this is truly the only “set it and forget solution, the agent has to do nothing”. Brokers are saying the same thing:

Top Brokerages Launch Property Panorama’s Instaview Enterprise Broker SolutionNew Service Integrates MLS Data and Boosts SEO

“Northwood, the fastest-growing real estate firm in Western Pennsylvania and Eastern Ohio with 1604 active agents, has 2795 current listings spanning two MLSs.
“With the full program, our agents don’t have to do anything to receive these products for their sellers. Everything synchronizes automatically. They only need to add their listing to the mls and in about an hour the full program is up and running, and branded to both Northwood and the listing agent. Even updates or changes to the listing are automatic and quick,” said Tom Hosack, CEO/President/Broker at Northwood Realty Services.”

Although services like Matterport are the new hotness, they require $4,500 for the camera alone, plus hosting and other equipment costs InstaView is $1.99 and requires nothing to set up. No wonder brokers like it. : )

Congrats to Mike and his team on their latest release.

WAV Group publishes secret decoder ring for Project Upstream

82DnkVaGjrLVictor Lund of the WAV Group has published a document entitled “Upstream Revealed“. Basically he has taken Craig Cheatham’s recent statements and clarified them. In the example below Victor’s comments are in parens.

Upstream also is designed to serve as a platform for controlling access to and distribution of the data, along with the establishment of the terms for any use. Participating brokers would designate within Upstream which specific data would be accessed and manage the conditions for use. (Brokers control their data on a dashboard like they do for listings syndication today. The difference is that other data sets like agent records, firm records, consumer records, and vendor rosters are all in the same place.)

Re-reading Craig’s statements with Victor’s comments made the whole thing easier to read. Victor decodes the pretencious “corporate speak” of the original language. I like it a lot. One quibble, I would have preferred they numbered each section.

Having said that, I have a question about how data will be handled with vendors (this is Vendor Alley after all). Here’s what the statement says (with Victor’s clarifications)

”
Application providers, from those assisting with external display/use to those powering systems used inside of brokerages, are set to benefit from the single set of “clean” data directly from Upstream with the broker’s permission. Brokers are hopeful this will allow real estate companies and their representatives to deploy data sets to vendors directly and efficiently, eliminating the need for MLSs to deal with data integration issues and giving vendors one format nationwide instead of hundreds of databases and data layouts. (Micro case study – a broker with 360 listings wants to switch virtual tour vendors. It requires data license agreements with five MLSs and data mapping that takes weeks to implement. The listings that come back are watermarked and low resolution. The only way to improve this is to manually duplicate the data).

I admit that I might not totally understand everything here. And I have to say I really love this concept in theory. But how would Upstream handle different listing statuses? Say a vendor has a product that sends out “Just Sold” postcards, or “Under Contract” flyers. Or a CMA that needs Expired listings? Are those in Upstream on just the MLS? Do they sync? How often?

You can download the PDF here: Upstream Revealed

Reading the tea leaves…

“Greg, what’s going to happen!!?? What’s it all mean??” Is a question I get a lot lately. Everyone is nervous.

Remember when all we ever talked about was “syndication”? Good times…

Seems like Upstream, AMP and the BPP have taken up the vacuum left over from those days.

It’s a big quandary to me, and I’m sure others in the MLS industry. What DOES the future hold? If we are to believe the folks behind Upstream the future will be one where the brokers control all the data. AMP promises a new type of model, “front end of choice”, which can be good for some vendors and bad for others. Huge MLS Providers are evolving. RESO is getting closer and closer. Consolidation is happening everywhere.

Should I get better at selling directly to agents? Should I focus efforts on broker relationships? What products/services will be needed that aren’t available now? Should I sell my company? Should I buy that company?

It’s all a big head scratcher to me. As I’m putting together the budget for next year I find myself asking different questions than I have in the past.

These mental hoops that we all jump through can lead to all sorts of ideas. Some of those driven by fear, some by other motivations.

But here’s what I know. It’s a quote by one of my favorite artists.

“Be so good, they can’t ignore you.” – Steve Martin.

Instead of worrying about what everyone else is doing, worry about what you can control. Make your company and products so great, that no matter what happens, they can’t ignore you.

Get back to work.

NRT hearts Estately

From GeekWire:

Exclusive: Real estate giant Realogy makes strategic investment in Seattle startup Estately

“As one of the largest residential real estate companies in the U.S., Realogy has thousands of agents which could benefit from receiving targeted leads from Estately.

Ward said they already provide leads to some Realogy agents, but very little would change as part of the investment. He said he kept the investment quiet because raising more money “is not that interesting” but also because he didn’t want the company’s agent network to think that things would change due to the involvement of Realogy.

In today’s interview, Ward said that “we love our business model and love our clients,” and he added that Estately is “doing a good job” of competing against large real estate incumbents as well as tech-heavy brands like Zillow and Trulia.

“We are excited about our growth,” he said. “And we see potential in our business model and agent model.”

First off you gotta give it up to Galen Ward, Estately’s CEO, the guy has been crushing it. As many readers know I’ve big a big fan of their site and mobile app (which is my “go to” at the moment). Galen is super smart, humble and I always enjoy catching up with him and talking business.

On another level you gotta be curious what’s up Realogy/NRT sleeve? ZipRealty, now Estately? I’ve got a few ideas what might be playing out here but will hold off on any speculation. Congrats to Galen and his team!

Craig Cheatham interview from CMLS 2015 now posted

Paul Hagey leaves Inman News

“FAREWELL INMAN, THANK YOU

After nearly four years as a reporter at Inman, I’m moving on to work as a content writer, editor and strategist for real estate firms, brokers and agents. My last day is today, Friday, October 2.

Working for such a top-notch organization with a dogged focus on quality and intelligence has been a gift. I’ve learned a lot from my bright, hard-working colleagues Amber Taufen, Andrea Brambila and Teke Wiggin and my two former editors Matt Carter and Glenn Roberts, Jr.

I’ve gleaned tons from Inman Publisher Brad Inman, including where to get an excellent steak in New York City, that adventurous love is possible in marriage (from he and his wife Yaz’s glorious Facebook feeds) and how to cut a sentence to the bone. I’m extremely grateful to have worked for a company with such a passionate, smart owner. Thank you for the opportunity, Brad.

When I first started writing for Inman in November 2011, I didn’t know the difference between a brokerage and a franchisor, whether IDX was a policy or a disease (found out it’s both), that a real estate portal wasn’t a rip in the universe that would transport you to your childhood home or who the readers are that depend on Inman for fast, accurate, insightful real estate news.

I came to know what was what, and the latter — you — well. The desire to provide you with thorough, intelligent, accurate information drove my reporting. You’ve inhabited my brain for years, and now I’m one of you: I sign up for Select on Saturday.

Good luck Paul. I’m sure we’ll be reading you again soon!

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