A more rested review of Inman RE Connect San-Fran July 31 - Aug 2
Just back from Real Estate Connect in San Francisco. Billed as a “networking think-tank” it was a gathering of Brokerage CEO’s, Brokers, Salespeople, Web Guru’s, Web Millionaires and Venture Capitalists. It’s become a big show - three years ago it was a get-together of 300 hundred individuals. This year, it welcomed a crowd of 1900.
If we weren’t already convinced that we live in a world of real-time, compressed time, it was certainly clear here. No longer should we see the world as a place of next year’s trends…today, reality is – “present trends” are now. Our world moves at web speed. What used to take months and even years to implement grows now in hours, days and weeks. A business that doesn’t, or can’t keep pace is out of business just as fast.
The new “Phenoms” that are shaking the world of Real Estate Sales: Conglomerators. Essentially these are websites offering listings of every kind, providing sales comps, price trends, real estate Broker listed properties, private sale properties – even properties that are not for sale, but where an owner can put their home out with a “make-me-sell” price.
These “private conglomerators” are already working with millions of dollars in Venture Capital and are already offering a complete array of very sharp resources for both buyers and sellers. All wanting to be viewed as Broker Friendly –it was an interesting Conference as NAR and Zillow sat on the same stage trying to publicly figure, “so where is this meeting of needs”.
For Zillow, Trulia, Home Values.com etc. the model is easy – have the most listings, give the consumer the best and fastest access to value estimates, sales charts and statistics. They do recognize that buyers eventually get confused and want to work with a Professional Realtor to get through the home-buying maze. So, a strong part of their revenue model is to sell “qualified” leads to willing “subscriber” real estate agents.
Change is occurring.
Used to be you placed an ad, hoped for a call, developed a relationship and so the story went. As newspaper ads become less relevant, these new websites are beginning to control and decide who they’ll sell leads to, and how many leads, and on what basis. It becomes a game of luck. No relationship, no affinity, it becomes random chance as a computer chooses which Realtors get the leads to succeed. Blind luck.
What’s it all mean to Realtors? As Dr. Richard Flint said at NAR ’06, “either turn your real estate sales into a Referral Based Business by 2008, or perish.” Did he see what’s going on with the web, or did he foresee the “present trend” of the business in general?
