by powerbooktrance
Geeks love their iPhones. And I tell you what… as soon as I finish writing about a new iPhone application in real estate (see Terabitz Creates MLS iPhone Site), another one lands on my doorstep.
Not that that’s a bad thing.
This time, it’s from Cellsigns - the SMS marketing company. They’ve launched a new product where you can text in to a number (say, on a for sale sign) and receive the video tour of that property on your iphone.
If you have an iPhone, you can see how it works by texting the numbers on the following video
Text VID555 to 79274 and you’ll receive a SMS message with the property information and a link that opens the video up in the iPhone’s built in Youtube player. Pretty slick.
Unfortunately, like other Youtube videos, the experience is crippled by the iPhone’s EDGE connection and unless you’re in a WiFi hotspot the playback is hardly bearable.
Nevertheless, a very cool innovation and one that will surely get better with the arrival of the much demanded 3G iPhone.
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ActiveRain has always had its eye on video. It has dabbled a little bit with its RainTV segments, shot at last summer’s Real Estate Connect conference, and more recently by holding a video contest.
Now, it seems, they are making a bigger play for a piece of the real estate video pie. Through a partnership with Mixpo.com they have just announced a new platform that will more deeply integrate video into ‘Rainers blogs. The plan, which was supposed to be on the d-l, was leaked by some over-enthusiastic Beta participants, prompting this blog post.
You will be able to host and edit your videos directly from video.activerain.com, and then take the videos in your library and embed them directly to your blog posts with the click of one button. You will also be able to embed them wherever on the internet you would like outside of ActiveRain. One of the cool features that fits nicely with everyone’s blogging efforts is the ability to add links directly into your videos. So if you are giving a tour of a listing, to potential buyers, you can include links to the listing on your site, or to surrounding attractions you have written about in your blog.
ActiveRain seems to be making small strides recently to move beyond their early social networking roots towards becoming more of a repository of all of a real estate professionals digital content. Not as a sexy of a business plan, but probably a more sustainable business model.
The platform will cost Realtors $29/month.
This move is also surely a shot across the bow aimed at online provider WellcomeMat, which has been a popular choice for video hosting by Realtors to date. WellcomeMat, which, conversely, just added social networking to it’s video platform (see WellcomeMat Goes Social), has yet to announce publicly its pricing plan.
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Photo by pinhole
I really dig this. New York based broker Halstead Property partnered with New York Magazine to provide its online reviews to the real estate company’s web site.
Check out their neighborhood profiles for Soho or Greenwich Village, for example. Great information that’s very valuable to the consumer. I think this brilliant move for Halstead and it’s an interesting trend for a few reasons.
First, it seems that brokers are increasingly interested in aligning themselves with established publications to bring a degree of authenticity and consumer name-brand recognition to their destination sites. Case in point - Realogy is in the midsts of rebuilding an entire real estate company around the Better Homes and Gardens brand. Why do this? Quite simply, because these brands resonate with consumers.
The reality is that, to many, there is still some cachet to “dead tree
media” - and the brokers may be waking up to that. These sorts of deals
are a natural differentiator in any market.
It also signals to me that more brokers are waking to the reality that they themselves are media publishers and therefore need to start acting like them. Inking content deals for their sites is part of that, but so is exploring trends like syndication and distribution for their own content (i.e. listings).
Secondly, it’s a brand new revenue stream for local media publishers. With the real estate brokers, they have found new customers who are hungry for neighborhood content to add to the on-site experience for their web visitors. I fully expect to see many more examples of this in the future, as media look to mine their archives for syndication opportunities as their advertising revenue scales back; Portland Monthly magazine could decide to license its Best Neighborhoods reports (PDF) to a Portland broker, for example.
It’ll be interesting to see where this all goes.
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As regular readers of this blog know, I’m a big fan of much of the innovation in Real Estate 2.0 that’s happened overseas - remember Igglo, for example? The Norwegian Finnish site that allows people to bid on homes that aren’t even for sale (kind of a reverse Make Me Move price). Read Wikipedia article for more, if you’re interested.
It seems like for much of the last year we have been so busy watching the US market, we’ve been ignoring many of the moves being made overseas.
That’s starting to change. This was definitely one of the themes emerging from Connect earlier this month. Whether it was Canadian investors swooping in on the glut of inventory in Phoenix, or Europeans pouncing on New York apartments or Florida condos; courting international buyers definitely was tops in a lot of people’s minds.
Mirroring this international buying trend, UK search site DotHomes (formerly Extate) has jumped across the pond to launch in the US today. Not really a big surprise frankly; the British realty blog Renthusiast tipped us off to this move earlier last year.
DotHomes was founded a couple of years ago by Artemi Krymski and Douglas De Jager, two computer science students from Imperial College in London, and has to date been serving the UK and South African markets.
As real estate portals go, DotHomes has done some pretty innovative stuff. They were one of the first portals to adopt video (see Extate Launches Video Tours) - even going so far as to allow mobile MMS uploads of video tours to the site.
In August of last year, De Jager announced that they had received their first round of funding from The Accelerator Group (TAG), a venture capital group which has also backed the sites MoveMe.com and Agent Provocateur (at first, I thought was this was the best name ever for a real estate related site - turns out it’s a lingerie brand, which is also pretty cool and possibly NSFW). Presumably much of this funding was designed to help them with this launch into the US.
DotHomes hopes to differentiate itself in the US by acting as a pure search play - and even goes so far as to call it itself the “Google of Real Estate”. Unlike Trulia or Zillow, it doesn’t source broker feeds directly and unlike Roost, it doesn’t have any relationships with the MLSes (see Roost.com Kicks over the RE Search Cart). Rather it relies on its search spiders to seek out the listings wherever they reside on the Internet.
Obviously there are two big problems with this approach. “Crawl” listings and you quickly run into quality and quantity issues. The latter because it’s near impossible to get complete market coverage, and the former because what you do find are often out of date or inaccurate. Nevermind that it has pissed people off in the past too.
That said, DotHomes insists it’s going to have a go at it. It hopes to monetize the site through selling advertising for ancillary services (mortgage, insurance etc.) around whatever listings it can find and pacifying the brokers by sending them some free traffic and not just selling them their listings back.
In any case, I suspect this won’t be the last of the international sites that decide to dip their toes into the US market. Especially if it’s just a matter of cloning pre-existing technology and then tailoring the experience to suite the international buyer (kind of a throw-it-against-the-wall-see-if-it-sticks approach).
If there’s one thing to take away from this; it’s that while the Internet may have not had much of an impact on local real estate yet, it’s definitely kicked the door down for international real estate.
If you haven’t already, watch this Inman TV episode and listen closely to what Simon Baker from realestate.com.au is saying - it’s a big, big world out there with lots and lots of buyers. Now’s the time to come up for air and take a look around.
For more on some of the other U.K. based property search engines check out:
Also check out some other great International real estate blogs:
More coverage:
Technorati Tags: DotHomes, international real estate, Real-Estate, Real-Estate-2.0, real-estate-search
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The Movoxo marketing & technology blog is written by Movoxo CEO Roger "V" Vetruba. We focus on technology as applied to sales and marketing for service professionals.
