The Internet Real Estate Center

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The Internet (Craigslist.com, Oodle.com, realtor.com, eBay, etc.)

It’s possible that the Internet might be the single most valuable invention for real estate investors. Before the Internet, whenever a real estate investor needed to research a property, they had to go down to where their local government was headquartered, and then go from office to office asking civil servants for real estate related information.

But today, thanks to the Internet, any investor with a personal computer and Internet connection can have instant access to just about every type of real estate related record, 24/7, right in the comfort of their own home or office. This is especially nice for investors starting out part time, because they can do searches online during their free time.

The Internet has leveled the playing field between part-time and full-time investors. So take advantage of the worldwide web: sign up for real-estate newsletters, post ads about your business, and of course search for properties (using keyword searches - motivated, must sell, etc.). It’s all at your fingertips.

Your Own Websites

Create your own website(s) to advertise and market your business and what you do. Make the focus of your website be finding and purchasing properties. Be sure to include information about what types of properties or deals you are interested in, and provide contact information so that people can get in touch with you quickly and conveniently. For examples look at http://www.msbuyshouses.com/, http://www.internetrealestatecenter.com/, http://www.markvschwartz.com/ .

Provide a contact phone number and email address, and put your website information on your business cards and hand them out everywhere you go.

To Your Success

Mark Schwartz

Real Estate Technology Blog
All About Washington Real Estate Blog
Submit Your Link Exchange Here

RealSeekr.com, becomes the latest social network devoted to real estate. It appears there’s no end in sight for all of these networks. Some of them are kind of fun to use, while others are a real pain.

RealSeeker.com was founded by agents and it looks like it may be a promising site.  It centralizes many of the traditional social networking tools into one place, thus making it easier to set up and manage.

The following is RealSeekr’s announcement describing their new real estate social network.

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We’re excited to announce the beta launch of RealSeekr^SM - a FREE real estate search and social networking site, built by brokers for home buyers, sellers and professionals that’s Social, Useful & Fun^SM. For the first time, RealSeekr brings together nationwide Real Estate and Social Media in one central location with instant real-time interaction. RealSeekr is the place where home buyers, sellers and professionals Seek, Learn, Share & Connect^SM.

We focused on three important objectives with our initial release:

1. To present a comprehensive property database, with accurate and detailed listing data. Data includes enhanced content such as video tours, audio tours, additional photos, keywords, descriptions and more, with a lightning quick, easy to navigate search interface.
2. To drive traffic to our database of property listings, participating broker and listing agent sites, by optimizing all listings for search engines, for increased views which generates greater home buyer interest and greater results for home sellers and real estate professionals.
3. To provide an interactive community, social network and marketing destination for everyone to directly engage and communicate in real-time with one another using a variety of technologies, in a fun-filled, friendly, informative environment.

RealSeekr connects you, the home owner (Buyers and Sellers), with agents and other service providers in a personalized, trusted environment. We save time by providing content, information and functionality in one inclusive location. In essence, we are a community populated by millions of nationwide listings with the ability to connect and network instantly with one another using a variety of communication channels.

Ultimately, relationships are about communication. The challenge was to embrace the technology of today and open up new ways to interact and build an integrated platform that could benefit everyone. For the first time, we can all utilize a variety of communication tools, functionality and resources in one place.

We are proud to present nearly 1.6 million listings to coincide with our launch, comprising agent listings, as well as nationwide foreclosures and properties being sold by owner (which can be uploaded directly by you), with additional properties scheduled for integration as we create the largest real estate listings and community destination on the web.

To ensure we are building the best site possible, we’ve launched in Beta that means over the next few months RealSeekr will continue to grow and change based on the feedback we get from you, the Seekr^SM Community. While in Beta, we will be adding more and more properties to the search database, which will boost the total properties and also provide the most coverage across the country then you ever thought possible.

Our Beta release comprises of agent listed properties from selected regions within the following 20 States:

Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Washington, Wisconsin. In the days and weeks ahead, additional properties from the following markets will be added: Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, Maine, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia.

By working in harmony with Listing Associations and partnering with Brokers and Agents on a local and regional level throughout North America, we are making sure that the quality, reliability and integrity of the listing data presented to users is of the highest caliber.

RealSeekr also provides you with an unparalleled research capability to accompany property search including property profiles, neighborhoods (coming this summer), schools, blogs, questions and answers, media files, networking tools and agent profiles representing just a sampling of the many opportunities. In future releases we plan to expand on these offerings and include many other innovative products.

Most importantly, we have taken interaction a step further by integrating real-time communication into the mix, powered by Skype™ with the inclusion of Video Conferencing, Instant Messaging, Voice-to-Voice (VOIP), file sharing, as well as Mobile SMS Text messaging, Twitter™ and more. In essence, we have created a highly transparent medium for the first time that now enables you to directly meet, participate and converse online, and in real-time, with other home owners and professionals around the country.

Personalized agent profiles, similar to an online resume, are a great way to locate, research, compare and interview potential REALTORS® to assist you with your real estate transaction(s). Use the RealSeekr research tools to learn each agent’s areas of expertise, specialization, background, interests, languages and experience and use the real-time functionality to interview a network of tech-savvy agents from the comfort of your own home.

As brokers ourselves, we fully understand the important role that Listings Associations and Agents have in the real estate transaction and the valuable opportunity that the web presents for everyone with an interest in real estate. By addressing the needs of the home owner, and to better embrace the internet, as well as a place to meet online, we arrived at a solution that we feel benefits us all.

Seek, Learn, Share, Connect^SM: For example, you can Create watch lists to keep your eye on properties of interest, get your questions asked and answered in real-time, share listing(s) with family and people in your network, and Connect and make friends with others in the Seekr Community.

RealSeekr is your community. The Members Feedback Corner is your place to communicate opinions, share ideas, suggestions and more. Your input will make RealSeekr even better. With an exciting version 2.0 already under development, with your help we will raise the bar even higher and provide even more compelling tools and functionality. Let us know what you would like to see in successive releases, and particularly, what else we need to include and improve upon. Your feedback is important to us, so give RealSeekr a test drive and tell us what you think.

With RealSeekr the possibilities are endless, restricted only by our collective imaginations.

Welcome to RealSeekr - we are thrilled to have you part of the community!
Team Seekr

Socializing Real Estate^SM

To Your Success

Mark Schwartz

Real Estate Technology Blog
All About Washington Real Estate Blog
Submit Your Link Exchange Here

It seems the popular thing to do these days is start a Real Estate related social network.  Here’s one more to add to the fray.  The following is from PropertyShark……

Today, PropertyShark announced the launch of MyDealBook.com, a new professional real estate networking platform. This new platform is intended to provide you with opportunities to build your professional network, market yourself to the greater real estate community, and get more deals and projects done.

At MyDealBook.com you’ll be able to:

• Advertise your skills and services to over 300,000 members
• Expand your cross-industry professional network
• Discover events in your area relevant to your profession
• Join and form professional groups, teams, and discussion forums
• Find out what your colleagues and clients are doing
• Search the directory of services, deals, jobs, and events
• Upload and privately manage deals, projects, and related documents

PropertyShark’s former CEO, Ryan Slack, leads this new initiative, and PropertyShark supports this new venture and encourages you to become an active participant on the new site.

What is MyDealBook and how can it help me?

MyDealBook is a social network. It is a place where real estate professionals, investors, developers and service providers such as architects, contractors, appraisers and attorneys can maximize their professional opportunities. Advertise your skills and services to over 350,000 members Build your cross-industry professional network Discover events in your area relevant to your profession Join or form professional groups and discussion forums Search job listings, property listings, and service listings Upload and privately share deals, projects, and related documents

How much does MyDealBook cost?

There is no cost to join MyDealBook. From time-to-time we will introduce advertising and subscription services that enhance the value of MyDealBook to you. These services may be free to beta users for a period before eventually requiring payment to use. However, the general use of MyDealBook and your basic account will always remain free.

MyDealBook is an ideal self-marketing platform for real estate professionals to reach others across the industry: developers wanting to showcase their portfolios, appraisers seeking lenders, investors seeking investment opportunities, attorneys seeking client referrals, and so on. Creating a MyDealBook profile automatically makes your profile searchable on the most popular search engines, thus increasing your visibility on the Internet in general. Further your profile is searchable by users of MyDealBook by criteria such as profession and location. In addition, you can increase your visibility by creating a Group, hosting an Event, or posting information about the Deals you’re working on or have completed. The more information and people associated with yourself or your company, the more credibility you will have on MyDealBook.

To Your Success

Mark Schwartz

Real Estate Technology Blog
All About Washington Real Estate Blog
Submit Your Link Exchange Here

This is the latest from Redfin as they continue their expansion into new markets and providing more listings on their sites.  Will these new capabilities help them gain momentum?  Redfin now covers, Boston, LA, Orange County, Seattle, Wash D.C., San Francisco and San Diego.

April 30, 2008

All the Homes for Sale (Well, Nearly All)

One Sunday morning last fall, my great friend Conan, a debonair former nose-tackle who often advises me to get in touch with my feminine side, called to ask about using our site. It took half an hour to convince someone who knows I would never lie to him in a million years to run a search on Redfin. And almost all that time was spent on one simple question: “do you have all the homes for sale?”

“Great question,” I said as real estate inventory has somehow become one of my favorite subjects, second only to “how popular I was in high school,” gossip, my many grudges, and what different drugs are like. “We have all the broker-listed homes for sale.”
“And that’s ALL the homes for sale?”
“Well, technically there’s always a few sold by the owner, without a broker. It’s called FSBO.”
“Yeah?” Conan said. “You don’t have those?”
“No.”
“Is that it?”
“And there’s also stuff in foreclosure, that’s been repo’d by the bank, before the bank has hired a broker to put it in the MLS.”
“Yeah?” Conan said. “Is THAT it?”
“And there’s always the possibility that you could sell your place to your cousin, without ever putting it on the market. We wouldn’t have that either.”
“So basically you’re saying you kind of suck,” Conan said. We had now come to very familiar ground in our 20-year friendship.
“Yeah,” I said. “But everyone else sucks too. Many suck worse.”
In the background, I could hear Conan typing in his first search.

A few minutes after our call ended, the U.S. real estate market collapsed, putting more inventory in a gray market of foreclosures. And we soon began working with I-don’t-have-an-office-number-just-a-cell-phone middle-men, data-scrapers and offshore aggregators to get our hands on every home for sale we could find, minus outdated garbage, copyrighted information, stuff that wasn’t really for sale, and teasers where consumers would have have to pay someone else for the address.

This culmination of this effort is the latest version of our site, live since 6 a.m. this morning, which has bank-owned foreclosures and for-sale-by-owner listings alongside all the listings from the Multiple Listing Service (MLS). It’s a little controversial, and lots of fun to play around with and of course we think it’s beautiful too.

Not that even now the new version of Redfin has all the homes for sale – we only had enough money to get data on foreclosures once the bank owns them, but not before, when they’re up for auction. For the markets we serve, we should have more real estate listings than anyone else. And the foreclosure data we do have is unique, because we give the foreclosures’ actual addresses and bank contact information, which other sites require you to pay for. Redfin is the only site we know of that aggregates bank-owned properties for free.

We’ve hit up more than 50 for-sale-by-owner sites for their inventory, with only two major gaps: Zillow and craigslist. Zillow is, we hope, coming soon. Someone offered us a craigslist feed, no questions asked. But when we emailed craigslist about it, Internet god Craig Newmark confirmed this was a violation of the terms of service. What was incredible about his reply was that it took exactly three minutes and it came from The Man Himself (Craig Newmark rocks).

On other fronts, we’ve fixed up our URLs for Google, and juiced up our MLS integration again, in both Boston and Southern California, so that we can get comprehensive inventory updates every 15 minutes (our only laggard MLS integration is now in Ventura County). While we were at it, we grabbed more open-house data, let people search for open houses, and upgraded our email notifications to tell people when their favorite listings change prices or sell. Next up, the data team is hoping to get photos of very-recent past sales.

But for now we’ve also made it more obvious how to search for data on past sales, a sweet feature that Redfin has always had but which no one ever knew about because it used to be hard to find. No longer! For the markets we serve, you can easily see what any home sold for between last week and 20 years ago (the lag is often more than a week, depending on how long it takes the transaction to record).

What does this all add up to? As our press release explains, the new version takes us deeper and deeper into Freakish Depth, which is our strategy to build the best real estate site by getting the best data. Because we’re a broker in the thick of doing deals, we have access to data as it’s being recorded. And unlike lead-generation sites, we want people to use Redfin to go all the way, getting everything they need to buy the home without having to talk to anyone or pay anything.

The strategy started in January with super-low-latency-MLS integration, bird’s-eye views, two new estimates, Excel integration, neighborhood boundaries and comparable listings. Then we got deeper with listing statistics, which analyzes where the traffic for a listing is coming from, and how inventory levels in the neighborhood have changed.

A gratifying subplot of all this is that the MLSs with whom we have sometimes jousted worked with us on this release. One MLS guided us on how we could show different types of inventory without violating the rules. And another provided the square footage data we’d been asking for. It’s still a delicate balance, sharing data among competitors, and working within a common set of rules to protect the different brokers’ clients.

Which makes us all the more careful not to screw things up. For years, we’ve wanted to add inventory to Redfin’s site, but have hesitated out of respect for the brokers who share their listing data with Redfin, many of whom have legitimate concerns about properties for sale directly from banks or owners. In the end what swayed us was:
a. the consumers who want above all else to see all the homes for sale,
b. the market, where in places like San Diego 40% of the sales have been foreclosure-related,
c. guidance from some of the MLSs we work with.

Hopefully, we’ve found a way to show consumers more information without causing any harm to other MLS members. We’re going to roll out flat-fee services in the next few weeks to work with buyers on for-sale-by-owner and foreclosure properties, but we won’t help anyone go around a listing broker if one has been hired.

Many thanks to all the engineers, product managers and customers – a San Francisco focus group talked us into buying the addresses for foreclosures — who came together to create this site. We worked awfully hard on it, some of us through occasionally daunting circumstances, and are anxious to see how you like it. We hope there aren’t too many bugs. And please, spread the word!

*PS: we may add auction properties in the future but in that case we would have to require users to pay an extra fee to see the address.

To Your Success

Mark Schwartz

Real Estate Technology Blog
All About Washington Real Estate Blog
Submit Your Link Exchange Here