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.

We will be a the SIMA Internacional Real Estate Congress in Madrid-Spain, where professional realtors from all over the world will be gathering to find opportunities and look for ways to recover from the economic downturn.

The conversations will be around the state of real estate investments at an international level.

Yesterdays talks, showed some interesting bits of information about the Latin America market:

• 24% of international buyers that have invested in Florida are from Mexico.
• Mexico has now some competition from South American countries that offer interesting opportunities; in the case of Costa Rica where they have invested in education and health care, also having the infrastructure to support a chip processor facility for Intel.
• The United States is also attracting European investors that are looking for deals in the peninsula of Florida, specially in the vacation home  real estate market.
• There have been some strong investments by German funds in Mexico, so quite the contrary of what many people are saying foreign investors are looking in Mexico to place their money. It is a shame that the goverment has not been shinning some light into these affairs, so the local and international press cover the story.

Even with the fearse competition for real estate investment from the International community, Mexico is still a great place to find excellent deal for housing investments and commercial real estate. But we need to publish more information and news that is relevant for buyers of retirement homes and vacation homes.I have to applaud the effort from AMPI Nacional, that came all the way to represent our market in this event and have stayed in contact with the real estate investment community.

We should not leave those efforts, because it is essential to be seen in and also that International realtors can interact with an official authority for real estate professionals from our country. So if any coordination of efforts is needed with any country there is a clear communication channel to get our of this downturn.

Please follow us on Twitter, so you can get up to date information on what is happening during the expo: @fronteraestates.

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.

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.

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?

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”.

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.

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……..

eCommerce Barcamp Barcelona 2010

The date is for January 28th in Barcelona Activa with all the Barcelona entrepreneurs, webmasters and ecommerce professionals under one roof, all gather around the eCommerce Barcamp Barcelona.

It is an important event for all us that have StartUps  that have SAAS (Software as a service) and sell products or services online. For us that engage with realtors and provide a service that advertises real estate properties,  it will be interesting to see what kind of initiatives we can incorporate from outside our industry and into Mexico border real estate market.

At a closer look, it is not a 100% Barcamp. There is already an agenda setup and we will have to see if the speakers will engage with the audience to create open discusions in their talks. None the less everyone will learn something in this unconference.

But the week does not end with the Barcamp, from the 29th to 30th of January there is a conference focused on Catalan bloggers in Granollers-Spain called Catosfera 2010 under the Citizen Technology Week of  CDigital Granollers.

CDigital Granollers - Catosfera 2010

This conference is focused on the Catalunya Web community, so many of the content will be in Catalan. But do not worry last years event featured many Spanish and English speaking presenters and none of us where excluded in any way what so ever.

So do not think this is a procatalan only event, this is a gathering for different people that are united by their interested for the Web, like writers and artists. So many panels and discussions will be on hand.

I highly recommend that you take the time to go to the event.

2010 is beggining to shape up for a lot of debate on the economic crisis situation, entrepreneurship and the opportunities that are developed by social media on the Internet, but most importantly is their interaction with the physical world.

Real Estate Barcamp SiliconValley

We where there to talk with real estate professionals and service providers about our niche market, but also try to get a first hand view as to what are realtors doing online, how agencies and brokers are working together. So we could pinpoint contact points with their real estate peers at the International border between Mexico and the United States.

It was very instructional for how real estate agents are leveraging web technologies to help them accelerate the process for generating leads. We had the pleasure of seeing some familiar faces like Brad Coy, Andy Kaufman from REBarcamp Seattle and meeting new people like Mike Mueller, Ginger Wilcox, Cindy Lin and many more.

Now that everyone is talking about Twitter and how social media is expanding into the everyday lives of people, enhancing the way they interact and communicate with the real estate industry. Propagation of our message and transformation of our contacts into clients, was a hot topic in conversations. We had a chance to analyse the Mexican real estate industry and we have seen a clear opportunity to start an educating process about these technologies like social networks and microblogging applications to real estate associations in Mexico.

But the great digital divide in Mexico is something that is deep rooted in realtors, because the majority have not integrated 100% the use of the Internet as a channel for marketing para real estate. Lots of real estate brokers and agencies do not have a strong presence over the Web, so many internet users do not have a digital “brand” to go for resolving their housing needs in the North of Mexico.

This creates a “chicken and egg” problem, since there is no central hub of information about real estate in the North of Mexico, more than the traditional media channels of printed magazines and news channels. The real estate industry does not adopt new ways that social media is offering on the Web, because they do not see a clear return of their investment (ROI).

The problem (that Mexican realtors have) is that if their is no “web listings offered and information backing it” on the Internet, it will be quite difficult to emulate the demand that US realtors are creating.

Case in point for real estate at the Mexican international border, it is providing lots of information regarding seaside view properties and beach housing, which is focused on middle and upper class population. Meanwhile housing in urban residential areas is minimal, because most are offered to the working class low income families in Mexico which the majority are handdled via INFONAVIT credit loans. This could be a potential market for Hispanics in the US, because these are inexpensive housing opportunities that could be quite affordable for their US salaries. But little of this information is focused to them.

On the other side we have new generations of potential agents and brokers not entering the real estate industry, because of their close group and difficult network to reach, there are some initiatives by the Asociación de Profesionales Inmobiliarios or Professional Real Estate Associations, to reach out to the general public to generate a better understanding of their profession and a better image of realtors in Mexico. This is to get University graduates interested in getting into the real estate industry.

These will be some challenges that the real estate industry will face so real estate associations, agents, brokers, public institutions and companies offering services to the real estate industry need to work together to have the same message.

We believe that REBarcamp will play a crucial role filling the gaps, that for the moment is not focused for the general public it could be used as a tool to reach our to prospects and future buyers. So we invite you to be part of the 2nd Virtual REBarcamp, that will be held today from 9 am to 4 pm PST. You can register here.

We hope to meet you there are the many sessions, or feel free to contact me. My username is Claudio.