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.

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”.

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.

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……

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.