Tales from the Techside

Earth to RE, can you read me?

The teams have divvied up.

On one side you have a mishmosh of broker websites, the occasional MLS public website (all hail the HAR experience, and curse having to discuss endlessly how to recreate it on 1/100th the budget), some good (some bad) IDX vendors, and ROOST. Representing billions of dollars of shared interest and knowledge, yet fractured by our divisions.

On the other side, you have Google. Yahoo (and hence Microsoft), Trulia. Zillow.

Personally I would change the channel. Sounds like a mismatch to me.

Wake up or get creamed, traditonal Real Estate industry. I sat in a room today as a man in a $2000 dollar suit told a group of my past presidents that my association needed to develop core competencies at a staff level in blogging, SEO, internet communications, web presence and services, etc.

ummm… let’s take a moment to look under our noses. We have the competencies. We have the skills. What we lack is the vision to get ahead of this curve. Display sold price to the consumer. Let them rate the transaction experience. Embrace the 21st century consumer. Do not make the same mistakes as the recording industry in fighting the mp3 content revolution.

I am 38. After 7 years of feeling locked out of the market, I am a buyer. Traditional RE, meet the new x-gen consumer. My next series of blog posts will detail the real estate transaction in this market from start to finish from my perspective. While I necessarily have more access than the typical consumer to real estate listings, I will of course use a REALTOR professional on this all import transaction. Some time back my president elect, Steve Reiser, stood up to me on an initiative. I still think he was wrong, but his zealousness impressed me, so he is now my agent. In this transaction I will be behaving as, I believe, most of my x or y gen cohorts would behave. I hope that the real estate industry serves me well in this capacity, but I fear that I may turn to external tools in need of deeper information.

I am beginning my search on MyListSearch.com (still beta). Mark and I built this together, which I am particularly proud of. This sort of inter agency cooperation within the real estate industry is precisely what is needed to compete. Unfortunately, getting out of beta has proved difficult, in some ways a reflection of the baggage that the traditional industry carries when it comes to measuring agility.

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