Zillow and Yahoo Real Estate have signed an agreement so that Zillow will take over the real estate classifieds, handing over the job of promoting and selling of there advertising space at Yahoo Real Estate.

This is a very interesting move because in early 2002 Yahoo gave a strong push in the real estate section of their site, but later went unnoticed with the arrival of Redfin, Trulia and Zillow. Now they are trying to push back again with one of their competitors as a partner and giving an effort to better serve their real estate advertising channel.

In the mean time Zillow is setting up for a possible IPO and is in need of having relevant deals in their portfolio so they can justify an Initial Public Offering. Still I think we will have to wait and see some results from this partnership.

Right now the real estate market is centered in repossessed homes and housing that have been foreclosed by the banks. Both Yahoo and Zillow are not focused in this niche sector for real estate in the USA, so their main assumption is that housing sales will rise; there has been some speculation that the market is getting better, in NY there are some talks of an increase in home sales. But I would leave a few quarters to really see if the market is gaining momentum in the USA.

One possibility is that they will go into the foreclosure properties so they can increase their market share, which right now is the 2nd largest by Hitwise and comScoreon the Internet. The only thing that is not quite clear are the profitability numbers from Zillow, which have boosted to their account nearly 87 million dollars in investment and only an IPO can justify such money poured in to the company. They have seen a big increase in their revenue numbers and a push in their advertising services for display ads but also their Pay per Click service.

I see much speculation on this partnerships on both fronts. Zillow and Yahoo have seen some tough 2 years, where many critics have questioned their ability to generate profits. It doe not not surprise me that they are now working together. Like they say in Mexico – the need for food and hungriness have united them both – the market will tell if this partnership will do them any good.

Mexico sets the base for implementing a National Multiple Listing System.

We are entering a consolidation phase in the Internet real estate market. With the AMPInet initiative from Asociación Mexicana de Profesionales Inmobiliarios Nacional (AMPI Nacional) in creating an MLS for Mexico, Latin America is advancing in the right direction in professionalize the real estate market both online and offline. So that people can advertise their properties and give them a much needed promotion on real estate and home search engines with the help of a local professional realtor in Mexico.

An apology for the sensationalist tittle, just a little bit of sense of humor, we should keep smiling and laughing, so we do not let the real estate downturn affect us. In our team at FronteraEstates, we have chosen as our patron saint since he is the official one for the real estate market.

Real estate traditions and St. Joseph.

In one of our recent trips to the United States for REBarcamp SiliconValley, we had the chance to meet Cindy Lin from Staged4more, who launched a company that sells ecological friendly Saint Joseph statues. The company is called Eco-Joe.

What relationship is there between St. Joseph and real estate?

For more than 10 decades there has been a tradition of burying a statue of Saint Joseph in the yard or garden, to ask for help in selling the house.

We should not take ourselves to seriously, yes we are going through some tough times in the real estate sector and we are living tense moments. But we should not loose our faith, this problem will pass by.

Being proactive in improving the situation for the real estate market, we are going to make a small contribution to the matter.

It is impossible to go around burying EcoJoe statues in all the houses or apartments of the cities we will be visiting. But we told Cindy that we would be taking pictures of the St. Joseph statue where we would be passing by.

First EcoJoe visit to Europe.

It seems that real estate sales have not improved in Barcelona, but EcoJoe at least brought snow in a time of the year where no one has seen it…….Spring.

Eco-Joe Patron Real Estate

Eco-Joe Snowing in Barcelona

We will be sharing some more photographs from our recent trips.

During our visit to the Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2010, we could see first hand how much technology has advanced in the mobile sector and how these will be the new window for information consumption by our clients.

The truth is that everyone of us has a mobile phone, while the majority does not have it connected to the Internet this will change rapidly in a short time. Now that many companies have seen the potential to advertise information and reach out to the masses with this platform with efficiency.

Mobility in the real estate sector.

What role will mobility play in the real estate market? This is a question that we have asked ourselves. It will be an important one so real estate transactions to buy or sell properties can be focused on our “ideal clients”.

I am referring to an “ideal client”, by sending information regarding a property at the appropriate time to an interested party, when they are searching for a house, appartment or land on a specific zone. Many will say – They already do this on the Internet – yes, but not when they are physically near the property.

There are companies that are offering geolocated services to build maps of streets and higways via mobile applications on your phone, because the new generation of Smartphones have GPS on them, opening up the possibilities so services like Waze, Poynt and CloudMade can be offered.

Mobile phones, the start of hyper-local real estate.

The information that you can send through mobile platforms and applications has the advantage of sending the right kind of information, lets say that a person is visiting the state of Baja California to buy a house in Playas de Rosarito, he or she makes a search on a mobile application by typing some characteristics of the desired property like: “beach house in Rosarito Mexico”. The service is able to pinpoint her location, searches for all the local information that is near her position and shows the results on a map or links to the desired results.

Now we can show our real estate listings to persons that are physically near the house, apartment or land; but what is most important is that they have the intention to be our clients.

How close are you to them?

This week the Inman Connect technology conference was held in New York, where every year the real estate industry gets together to discuss trends and the market. This has become more international as the years go by, when in the beginning it was focused for US realtors and now many global companies and real estate enterprises are seen in this event.

Inman Connect

The speakers are from the technology industry, but give their opinions on the real estate market and how they see it evolving for the coming years. So the industry listens to them from service providers, banks, real estate brokers, mortgage brokers, real estate franchises and government institutions, everyone in the same place looking to work together and find partners. We have seen this past years that working with a common goal as an industry we might stand a chance to stabilize the real estate market.

Next tuesday you can find the presentations from Real Estate Connect in the Inman site, during those days REBarcamp NY was held one day before ICNY. Where you could hear most of the speakers from the Inman conference so you could get an appetizer of their talk, but the most important aspect of it was that speakers and attendees could share their experiences in a lay back environment with out paying an entrance fee.

Realtor Social Network

There where parallel events to ICNY, like RainCamp and a workshop held by PropertyPortalWatch. Where the discussions revolved around important events and statistics of the real estate market, but also discussions on new tools to measure your reputation on the Internet or the effectiveness of your web initiatives.

RainCamp NY 2010:

• Twitts from #RainCamp
• A good post from RainCamp.

REBarcamp Ny 2010:

• Twitts from REBacamp NY o #rebcny.
• In the  Facebook Tweal_Estate there is a good ammount of information, nice work guys.

We hope that next time we will be at the event to provide more insights into what was happening during the those days in New York, for now Twitter will have to do…..just for now.

Since May 2009, real estate giant Coldwell Banker has been promoting their video channel on Youtube by the name On Location. The person in charge of promoting and marketing this initiative by one of the main real estate franchises in the United States is Michael Fischer.

We have nothing but to tip our hat to Michael, his job and effort haver really shown on what Coldwell banker is offering to their clients and partners, this is a true must follow by the industry.

What is really interesting in the service are the functionality it offers a person browsing for a home on the video channel. It shows on a map the most basic things when you are searching for a property to buy or rent:

1. Properties listed in the surrounding area searched.
2. Realtors that have properties listed in the area.
3. Real estate agencies office´s in the whole city.
4. Public information of the area.

This is a great example on the use of a viral channel such as video, because there is a lot of information that a user can share to its peers. By far a great execution of a marketing and business strategy by a real estate company thus far.

There a bunch of video sites focusing on providing video channels for real estate like Real Estate Shows and FrontDoor,but this are merely services to upload videos or animations. But this will not have the audience that Youtube can provide.

Vídeo channels for Latin America real estate.

In the Spanish speaking countries we have BienesRaicesVideo, that offers the full service of filming and streaming real estate videos, they are offering an outlet for marketing and promoting real estate in Latin America and Spain, but they are not doing it by user generated content.

The problem is the digital divide that Latin America is facing right now and that creating content is not the “core business” of realtors and real estate agencies.

Delivering content is a fundamental part in providing “Add on” value by real estate agents.

Creating an open tool to publish real estate videos, where realtors can have a way to upload their real estate video listings so they have a digital showroom; would be a great opportunity to motivate the creation of original content from the real estate industry, showcasing the current properties in the market.

Since most people now, know how to use a video camera, it is not like personal publishing on a blog that takes time and practice. Anybody can make a mini documentary on a property.

But for now YouTube reigns supreme for Viral videos and there is no one to stand in their way. For now……..

For the last 12 months I have been checking the real estate sector in close detail and have been indulging in all the happenings over in America and Europe.

Which to my surprise have been one of the worst years, and it seems to be just the beginning. Where in the USA, lots of company’s have gone down the drain and it seems to be happening here in Spain as well.

It is no surprise, that this “subprime” crisis has drag a lot of people projects, either software and housing developments in to standby or thrown all together out the window.

I think there is room for improvement and there are many opportunities in this sector. Many will be pessimistic and they are probably right, the markets wont be stabilizing any time soon. Neither are countries expected to be growing financially as expected, going backwards is the case scenario. Money is being withdrawn from investments in housing, but there necessities to be filled and digital divides to be closed.

By standing aside and waiting for the markets to heal, will not solve any problems, it will just make it worse.

Now that a new kind of media outlet is emerging, the so called “2.0″ era. But if your reading this, you know that era has gone down the drain with the markets.

You know why? Because it did not solve any “real” problems.

So what is era “3.0″……..semantic web and what not. That is jargon….if you tell me. Even thought there are a bunch of great technology’s being developed under this umbrella. For me 3.0 is:

• Solving day to day digital and physical problems for an individual, business, organization or group of individuals.
• It has to be an interactive application, not just read and write, but a morphing system, that learns through the process of communication.
• Data is something to be arranged by the system. I just put it some place, assigned some descriptions and the system takes care of it.
• Every body is the owner of their information and co.authors of the end result of “mashing” together all the data, in proportion of what they have been involved in the process.

How does all this relate to real estate, well for starters in the USA, you have the MLS dilemma, that is just such a pain to interact with and in the less developed countries you have no system at all for cataloging what has been developed.

The central nervous system is either to rigidly developed or none has been deployed.

I will be sharing my views on how we can solve this problem and some initiatives in the software business to tackle the necessities of this deteriorating sector. That by the help of technology and the financial sector not screwing around anymore(hopefully), will come back to life.

The era of “ReFenix” (i am using it in spanish), and like the mythical creature, grows………dies and out of the hashes it is REborn.

I ran into the following video from London Barcamp No.3.

The speaker is a guy from Holland named Reiner Zwitserloot talking about monetization from the “Long Tail”. The video is here.

It was quite interesting to get a perspective on how peoples behaviour of paying for services and buying products is changing dramatically.

This video tell a good story on how the consumers are more willing to pay for a service or product, where they can dictate the price based on the level of service and the quality of the product.

The housing and real estate industry should take a good long hard look, on how they are doing business right now and how this could pose a problem for the younger generation. This new era of prosumers.

It has been through a post from TzeTzeFly, that I got inspired in explaining about our point of view for “web syndication” technologies. All though this way of providing information has been used for quite a bit of time and it is widely used on many websites. How can we know if a site uses it? They will show the following logo:

Logo RSS Feed

The main focus of this technology is to broadcast information through an RSS feed, the internet users select different sources of data that get called through an RSS reader, in the case of real estate web sites it will be our listings for houses, appartments and land in Mexico to potential costumers, this will make any realtors web  site into a data source, an  important aspect for any market that wants to consolidate their market information so consumers can pick and choose from different offers on the Internet.

How do you implement a web syndication strategy?

1. Give an easy to read and understand format to the RSS feed, so the RSS reader application can display the information our users are looking for.
2. Ounce we have our RSS feed in place, we need to make it accessible to our readers. This a critical part in the process, because if they cannot see where they can get your feed, all the effort is wasted. So make sure they can access your source of data easily.
3. Our focus is saving our potential clients their valuable time in browsing our site and searching our real estate portofolio, this may seem negative to some of you, but I will explain this on the next point.
4. We are now part of their digital information stream, that means that we have become a reliable source to them and this is no easy accomplishment, since there are many choices on the market today. They will rely on our information to make a decision and this is a very powerful position to be in, this can create a lead and a possible client as well if we do our job right in providing the information they need.

A recent publication from the California Association of Realtors, published the following paper: “2008 Survey of California Home Buyers – FORMERLY NAMED Internet vs. Traditional Buyer Survey”.

Where they have found this two important details from home buyers:

• A minimum a 6 to 7 weeks of searching and investigating prior to contacting a real estate agent.
• 90% of people searching on the Internet, choose a realtor through this medium as well.

Some benefits of web syndication are:

• We will have a 24 hour service that can be accesed at any moment, so our information stream can be directed to people that are interested in our data, which in our case is our real estate listing in a specific format for home buyers. This may present some early deployment challenges, but the benefits are clear.
• Home buyers or renters will be the final judges of our offers and if we are successful, they will start adding our real estate feed into their RSS reader.
• If we are able to shorten the time that they spend looking and searching for information, we will have a better chance of being chosen by our potential clients over our competition.
• It is very important that we offer them value, this is done by putting all the information in an easy to understand format. So they can distinguish the value that we are providing them.

We have been working for a couple of months in providing an RSS feed service to realtors in the northern part of Mexico. This effort has become a challenge for many realtors to understand the value and a big learning curve for them, but everybody knows that services like this are necessary to get information in front of home buyers, since most of them are already familiar with it and the benefits far outweigh the challenges presented to real estate professionals and agencies.

In the next couple of weeks we will be talking about clever ways to use RSS feeds and the technologies behind them.

We are passing this information directly from the Wikimedia Blog.

It is quite interesting to know about the integration of both these projects, this will add a much needed source of information for Internet users. This is specially true so different companies work with each other without a third party API that belogns to an Enterprise, but to the communitie that is creating value. So everyone can reap the rewards.

This service can be used by everyone, it will be a center for data consolidation that everyone would have access to, unlike Twitter which can be access by everyone but is restricted to most of the people on the street, GeoData information is useful to anyone that is looking for a specific place. Having this with out a company behind is unrestrictive to its potential.

But not many projects from the GeoData sector have had as much publicity as the Google maps API and its great integration to satellite images.

The proposal from OSM is interesting and can become a player inside this space of map creation and GeoData integration on the Internet. There have been several proposals and projects based on OSM, like the Nestoria implementation.

We are also looking closely at the technology behind this project and deciding the best approach to the matter, since currently there are not many options to retrieve information for the Mexican territory. We have been contacting people from this community but have not heard from anyone, this is common on recently created projects (OSM was launch in 2004).

This factor is key for getting a project off the ground, I am only speaking in regard to the Mexican mapping project. If anyone is interested in cooperating with, please write a comment.

On the other hand we are keen on the event that is happening in Amsterdam for the OpenStreetMap conference. Hope to meet many of you there.

All the best.