Real Estate and Web 2.0 - Why It Hasn't Quite Taken Off

Posted At : July 18, 2007 12:21 PM | Posted By : name
Related Categories: Real Estate Technology

Real estate technology is a big business with a lot of players. There's office management software, MLS services and their technology, RETS (what a joke), dozens (at least) of real estate agent web site providers, hundreds of FSBO sites, ad infinitum.

But, as Marc Davison laments, no one has created "the next big thing" in Web 2.0 for real estate. Nothing sticks. Why not? Isn't Web 2.0 great?

Well, here's my take:

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Congratulations on the launch of your new product. Web 2.0 technology in general is being adopted slowly by everyone. I am not so sure that Real Estate is any slower than any other industry. One thing that makes real estate rather unique is that agents themselves typically pay for technology out of their own pockets. So, there's going to be a lag in adoption simply due to delays in the news reaching the typical agent.
Just looking at the registrations for our products, it looks like roughly 1/2 are still using free e-mail addresses and have not registered their own domain name. So, there's a ways to go, for sure.

# Posted By Scott Schmitz | 8/14/07 5:13 AM

I'm also sick and tired of traditional real estate sites which are so 1990s, so static, so Web 1.0! Created in the late 1990’s, most of real estate websites are stuck in the Web 1.0 age. I can name only a few web 2.0 resources, one of them is definitely Zillow.com. I took note of this problem when creating my own real estate site. I should say it’s simply smart business sense to use current technology. And it also happens to make buying and selling a home a lot easier! I hope I managed to create a modern, new, shiny, dynamic Web 2.0 for sale by owner site. At Fizber.com, we combined AJAX components with some other tooling, and made everything dynamic.

# Posted By Julia Foster | 8/14/07 9:53 AM

Scott, that's an excellent observation. Most agents are paying for technology out of their own pockets. But, sites like Zillow and Trulia, the main Web 2.0 players in real estate, offer services for free and rely on advertising for their revenue. Maybe that by itself makes the expansion of Web 2.0 companies more difficult.

Julie, your site is great. I see that you don't have too many listings in my area, but I'm sure as you grow there will be plenty. I'd be interested in finding out how you got connected with MLS services in order to provide flat fee listings. I've had difficulty getting many MLS's to respond when requesting data integrations with them...

# Posted By David Medlock | 8/14/07 11:10 AM

Yes, Zillow and Trulia are pretty cool. I have even seen Web 2.0 mash-ups that take MLS data and merge it with crime data - the data I saw was for Chicago area and it was a real eye opener. It's fascinating what you can do now. Just the Google maps alone is quite amazing - there's something pretty amazing about seeing a neighborhood from satellite imagery.

So much of innovation seems to be coming from companies that are bringing these resources to individual buyers and sellers rather than the agents themselves. That's very empowering, but I think it also has its risks. I say this because real-estate is not like buying a car or stereo. There's an inherent information asymmetry. The seller is going to know all kinds of things that the buyer can only guess at, or try to learn about. There's no substitute boots on the ground - the real estate agent.

# Posted By Scott Schmitz | 8/14/07 12:17 PM

Very nice site, Julia! Very nice idea with blogs - this seems like to be one of the brightest and hottest idea for new way of selling homes. That would be nice, if you make possibility to use .com-s - user definied domains for blogs and mini-web-sites about the house

# Posted By Gene Monseur | 8/15/07 4:51 AM

David,

you wrote that you would be interested to know how Fizber got connected with MLS services in order to provide flat fee listings. We also used to have difficulty getting many MLS's to respond when requesting data integrations with them and hired an MLS manager who does all the job through CRM.

# Posted By Julia Foster | 8/15/07 11:09 AM

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