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.

This past week there has been a lot of talk about augmented reality on the web, it is not to be surprised since every developer involved in maps, GPS systems and geo-tagged technology, but also University researchers have gathered in San Francisco. The excuse is to attend Where 2.0 organized by OReilly. If you want you can check out the twitter stream at #where20.

There is also taking place an informal gathering at the Google offices where many of the participants of the Where 2.0 conference will follow through on the talks and initiatives started earlier in the week. The event is called WhereCamp. You can also check out the twitter stream for #wherecamp with a lot of insightful commentaries from the attendees.

It is a shame we could not be at the event so we sould do a better post about the events that took place during the whole week, but we still grabbed some good pieces of information for you.

One of the most interesting topics that is relevant to the real estate market is:

Augmented Reality.

There has not been a technological proposal with more potential to add value to real estate professionals and brokers than the innovations behind Augmented Reality (AR) . In the beggining this might sound out of context for the business process of selling or renting real estate, we see it as a way to open new opportunities so companies and individuals that adopt it before the rest of their competitors can fully leverage AR to its full potential.

We will show you an image captured by a desktop application with Augmented Reality(AR) software.

Example of an Augmented Reality (AR) Application

This can also be used on the latest mobile phones called smart phones, it is with this devices that we see a clear use for selling real estate properties, because this will give the user the following advantages:

• Deliver unobtrusive information to the potential client, because he is using an application that is providing extra information that she wants.
• The user is the pulling the information that is relevant to his needs, this can also be used to monitor the habits of the interested parties so you can tailor made the experience as you learn more from them.
• You can show the property in any weather station or on a specific time of the day; I am imagining a sunrise or sunset on a beach house with a sea side view; maybe an equestrian ranch or house on the mountains in winter or spring.
• But also you can show case virtual tours when the potential clients are in front of the house or apartment that they are interested in, this could be a strong incentive to call the realtor or broker for more information.

Why use this technology?

This thought always comes to mind – will this be another innovation with no future and just a trick to “buy something new”? We doubt it, because there is a natural human instinct to enhance how we interpret our environment. There is an excellent post written by Jeremy Hight – Writing within the map.

We have a necessity to explain with as much details as we can, what we have to offer our peers, in the case of selling and buying of real estate it is quite obvious of the need to give more information to the potential client or tenant of a property. it is one of the most important decisions a persona makes during his life. I will leave you a phrase told during the conference:

Desire and need to augment is as old as cave paintings.

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?

I am going to take some words from Chris Brogan blog, which will help us set the tone for the next following posts that we will be providing to you in regards of the tools on the Web for real estate agents and agencies.

a) I would create a blog about the community where I am selling and renting properties.

We all know by now that publishing on the Web is easy, but what is challenging about it is how to write and where to publish, answering the ¿How? requires practice and persistence because this will be just another task in our daily marketing effort for our real estate listing. The ¿where? is not that easy to define, you will soon find that there is a lot of sites to publish on.

So you need to consider two things:

1. who do you want to reach? You have to mentally create the type of audience that will be interested in reading your blog and foremost the information you will be providing them, so make it relevant.
2. where do our potential customers gather? There are forums, social networks, network of blogs or portals on the Internet where they get together to solve their problems, exchange ideas and socialize on the web. They are not difficult to find and remember always give more than you receive.

Most social networks today give you an opportunity to publish content, but this is not the same than having your own blog on WordPress, Typepad or Blogger. Being part of these platforms makes you a member of the community and you will have the chance to interact with very specific niches.

b) Publish many photographs on the blog.

A very important aspect of publishing is keeping the intellectual property of your creations, I know that by now you would have publish many photos on different social networks, but you need to know that you are giving up the rights to exploit the photos to those platforms, which means that you are sharing the rights to use them. You no longer have control over that content.

The following services can easily be integrated into many Blog platforms, like Flickr, Picasa, iPhoto, Photobucket o Photo.net they are easy to use and have different type of accounts, many have a free service and a paying service. The main difference is the storage capacity they can provide.

c) Create walk through videos of the communities where my real estate agency is selling homes and appartments.

This will provide information that is relevant to the interested party in renting or buying a property from a realtor, because your are providing a virtual visit to the neighborhood.

It is not very complicated to create, now the majority of photo cameras have the capacity to film video and many of us have digital recording cameras as well, maybe laying around the house inside the closet. This is a great opportunity to get some return on that investment, besides filming your kids or parties.

On the Internet we will find the very well know service from Youtube where you can upload the video tour of the neighborhood and also the real estate property you are promoting. There are alternatives like Vimeo, MetaCafe and Ustream. they provide great service, but Youtube is still the most popular and it is crawled on most search engines, so it has some search engine optimization advantages.

We also have a post about  video services on the Internet to sell and rent properties in Mexico.

We are not finished.

The list that Chris provides us is quite big to finish it in one post, so I will leave you with the link to the Blog called  “If I were a realtor”.

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……..

The weekend of the 20th and 22nd of November 40 entrepreneurs got together in Mexico Distrito Federal to create a mexican StartUp. This event is called iWeekend.

What is relevant to the real estate industry is that the proyect is a location based services mapping website called Mapatlan and it has the idea of bringing together day to day stories of a city with the most significant places and corners of the place.

Mapatlan.com - iWeekend Mexico DF

In their own words:

Give life to places by telling the stories of the people.

This is what the entrepreneur and his team are setting up, by spreading the word about what is taking places in the city. So it does not stay on the imagination of the citizens but on the popular culture of the Internet. The concept is to identify on a map the different stories of persons relating to a location, tagging it with a date.

Location based services like FourSquare and Yelp have seen an increase of their use by realtors and professionals in the Internet real estate sector. I think that there is a great opportunity for commercialization of real estate as an addon service, but also to interact with local buyers in their area.

An example: A person that is trying to find real estate near the international border in México and USA, could visualize which recent stories have been published near the property he is interested in renting or buying. Therefore we give the interested party a chance to get more information so he or she can make a decision, by crowdsourcing the local citizens that live by the location.

Many people will be exceptical about the benefits of this service ounce their location has been tagged with “bad reputation”, but this can be used so local authorities can do something about the problem that many citizens have expressed in their stories. This happened in Barcelona, where one of the most popular streets was filled with prostitutes and with the help of traditional and new media the local goverment reacted promtly to take them out of the streets, so neighbours could enjoy their streets.

We will pay close attention to this project and its evolution, because we know that this type of services are in much need in Mexico, so everybody can know what the population thinks of the places they live close by. Real estate professionals should be using localtion based applications to enhance their communication with local buyers and sellers of homes, but also commercial properties. The influence they will have in real estate transactions will be very important in the not so distintant future.

This last months have been very active with good new from the real estate sector and for the venture capital scene in Seattle. At the start of the year we talked with the people behind Redfin & Zillow when we visited for REbarcamp Seattle 09. there you will find our perspective of the event.

Nos let us go the matter at hand:

Redfin has reported their first earnings for 2009, there are several posts from techcrunch, washington post and others.

I have to share with you the following link to the latest book from Chris Anderson “FREE”. The only problem is that you have to be located in the USA to downloaded, but nothing that a few emails cannot solve.

The information portrayed in the book regarding the Freemium Business Model, is very relevant to the story behind Redin´s earnings, there is an interesting discussion between Fred Wilson, Malcom Gladwell & John Gapper, their perspectives can be quite enlightening, so have a read.

I am signaling these three stories because they are proposing several ways newly created services can provide profitability, not only for StartUps on the Internet but for anyone willing to try a different approach to doing business, because there are many companies that are not living directly from advertising which is Redfin´s case, on the other side of the fence we have Zillow which have had some trouble staying a float.

The result is that these opposite business models from both companies have had different outcomes, Zillow decided to sell ads and Redfin chose to go against the tide and became a digital real estate broker, which in the begging stirred many arguments from inside the broker industry and real estate alike. But at the end of the road everyone came out profiting from their services, the reason for it was that the agencies and brokers received a very efficient channel to provide a better services to their customers which translates in sells. They now have a way a partner so they can do the outsourcing of their management for their real estate leads.

So the benefit is for real estate agents that use these types of services that integrate information technology to real estate transactions can provide added value to their customers, they will see the benefits in:

• Reducting in advertising costs for their real estate listings.
• Enable better customer for specific needs, such as renting an appartment on the beach or buying a house in the mountains (sorry the lack of niche examples).
• Increase the interaction with their local and international market under one comunication channel.
• They can measure the effectiveness of their offline and online campaigns.

I hope this points out a couple of areas where you can exel at and that will help you develop more business for your real estate agency or brokerage company. So you can use all the different social media outlets that you can incorporate such as Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter and instant messaging services like MSN, Yahoo, GTalk and a long list of etcs.

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 have just finish reading a post from Joel on software.

It is a recommended read for anybody that wants to understand how to distinguish IT vendors that are down to earth or Astronauts. This is the post.

He talks about the big Microsoft and there way of selling a synchronization service for all our devices…PC, mobile phone, laptop, etc. How they tried to sell this technology way back in 99, calling it “Hailstorm” and how they are renaming it to Live Mesh.

This is typical in the software industry, where companies want to reinvent there re-engineered software or platform, so they can make it easier to sell. For people that are not inside the industry it is very difficult to know this.

But following a couple of steps, will make it easier for non-tech people to differentiate an innovative technology from a remake:

1. Search Engines. I know this is what everyone says, but it is the best way to know what it is out there, what are the nearest competitors, but also when was this technology developed or talked about. Just type “XXXX(year) bla blah blah (technology)”. Try to start searching from 2000 and forward until the current year, you will be surprised on your findings.
2. Open Source. There will be plenty of open source projects that might do the same thing as the software that they are trying to sell to you. You can find plenty of projects in SourceForge website. You can also find that there might be a community behind the application, that you can get some feedback from.
3. Blogsphere. See what bloggers have to say about any given subject, it might not be accurate and it could be misleading, but it is a clear message on what the majority of the users opinion is. Do not take their point of view for granted thought, as any persons point of view might change in the long run. This can be a good measure on how far the technology has been deployed, how deep inside your market it has penetrated and the user adoption.
4. Peers aka “SocialNetworks”.  This could be the first source of information. But since we are dealing with technology, I am supposing not many of your contacts are tech say, but you never know when the “6 degrees of separation” might kick in.
5. Users. Every “decent” software company should have at least a support forum or a wiki. Where there users can gather around certain topics or issues. Make sure you check those and see the response times from the software provider. See how they react and response to every kind of subject, that you might be related to.

I have found that these are the best ways to get to know a technology before implementing it or buying/subscribing to it.

Still there are many options out there to choose from. Note every solution is suited for everybody. Some might be more developed and implemented than others, but that does not necessarily mean that it is the best choice. Use to your advantage the many free trials out there. Since diversity is what makes things evolve and improve. Dont stick just to the solutions that everyone has. Explore……

We got this information from WebPronews. Yahoo has released a news portal for Small & Medium businesses,which is an important part of the economic backbone for any country and it is setting up a place for them to get information, building a community of entrepreneurs/business owners.

This seems like an interesting proposal from Yahoo, making the use of a “Wisdom of Crowds” technic, with great ideas and good answers to the challenges that businesses face during this credit crunch; at least that is the objective of the site. To make things more interesting they have joined Bank of America to offer a $20 000 in Yahoo Advertising credits. Which is not that bad to start a marketing campaign if you already have one or if you are starting it is the perfect excuse to develop your online advertising presence. The only problem is that this price is only available to USA businesses as well as the service, which we are hoping will be available in other countries soon.

It is clear now, more then ever that SME owners in the real estate market are having a tough year  and have been cutting down costs, personnel, as well as traditional marketing efforts. The Internet will play an interesting role in the recuperation process and will most likely be the best alternative to kick start the efforts from realtors and agencies in the USA and Mexico. We can pinpoint why an online advertising can be effective:

1. People that are unemployed, have more time in their hands. They use it mostly browsing on the Internet and it is their tool of choice to look up information. This benefits us, so that we have more eyeballs looking at our online campaign and we have more referrals for our real estate listings. Also this people are always browsing on how to get a better deal on rent or restructuring their home loan, any information that can save them some money.
2. Real estate professionals and agencies can save some advertising money from traditional media, to promote their property listings online, there are a number of classified services (OLX and craigslist) and real estate websites that are offering tools and real estate web applications with no cost for the basic account. These are all viable ways to get leads for your properties in a quick way, but you have to spend some effort in part of the Realtor if it is there first time.
3. The Internet´s reach is far greater than traditional media,it has the advatange that you can change the way you promote your properties, according to the results you have been getting and instantly adjust yout campaign with a few clicks of the mouse. You can target the advertising depending of the type of clients you are looking for and have more people see your information.

Yahoo´s initiative is very compelling on these points and it is a clear example that Big Purple is opening services based on opportunities it has found in this credit crunch.

Now we are seeing such opportunities in the real estate market, even though the sale of homes and appartments has dropped dramatically, there is plenty of people looking to invest in it that are taking advantage on the low price and on developing countries.

This is just a matter of making information readily available to the seller and buyer, creating a thrust worthy channel for communication is the biggest challenge we face in this economic climate of uncertainty.