Baron Briefs

vFlyer has assembled an excellent view of Real Estate 2.0. Twenty-six “representative” companies are spread out over thirteen different categories. Zillow tops everyone with four category appearances while Trulia and ActiveRain tie for second with three.

vFlyer was kind enough to include RealtyBaron in the “Reviews” category along with Homethinking and IncredibleAgent.

In a matter of hours today, I lost $10 to Zillow with nothing to show for it. I used the same ad copy that costs me $1.27 per conversion on Google. I guess visitors were too busy asking about the paint job on Joe’s house to glance at the ads. My dismal results below:

UPDATE: Zillow’s David G. emailed last night. His comments:

Your ad should not have served that rapidly. We’re working on it and I’ll get back to you with an update and a solution as soon as we figure out what’s up.

David

Note to bootstrappers: don’t sit on a new feature announcement too long or someone with much better funding will grab headlines with a similar feature.

So, rather than appearing as a quick and nimble entrepreneur, I get to appear as an “us too” and prematurely announce our new answer service, RealAnswers(TM), with a side-by-side comparison to Zillow’s new Home Q&A. That’s right. RealtyBaron quietly launched an answer service alongside our home search, RealSearch(TM), way back on January 5th. The purpose is to—you guessed it—answer questions about homes.

Here’s how it compares to Zillow’s new Home Q&A:

Way back in 2004, I launched a free ad generator to help homeowners publish their FSBO listing to Craigslist. The press release read “add color, stylish formatting, and unlimited image hosting for real estate ads on Craigslist.” As it turned out, the tool was used almost exclusively by real estate agents. Unfortunately, I yanked it from the site in late 2005 when RealtyBaron.com underwent a major re-design.

Since then, RealtyBaron’s mission has become clear: “help affiliated real estate agents get to the closing table as much and as quickly as possible”. In other words, if an agent is signed up with RealtyBaron, I want to help that agent close as many deals as possible because it only strengthens our platform to have closers associated with us.

As a result of this mission clarity, I re-launched the ad generator yesterday. Like the old version, the new ad generator automagically provides “color, stylish formatting, and unlimited image hosting”. The new version, however, does not require the agent to copy/paste any code. In other words, the tool allows for seamless ad creation and publishing to Craigslist. Other online classified sites such as Backpage and LiveDeal are in the pipeline.

Here’s an example ad:

The magic appears to be gone from most real estate markets around the country. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still explore your real estate fantasies. Fantasy real estate games will be hitting the web in coming weeks. When Drew Meyers called for a virtual housing stock market game based on the Zillow API, both Realius and Realivent replied saying development is already under way.The first battle ground for Realius and Realivent? The rights to the trademark Fantasy Real Estate™. (See the comments to see what I mean).

Trading of housing “binaries” returned to HedgeStreet today with three additional cities: Las Vegas, Denver and Washington, DC. That brings the total number of cities available for hedging and speculation to ten.

HedgeStreet’s website describes their hedging instruments as a way consumers can “speculate the degree to which their home will appreciate, or conversely, hedge against depreciation in the value of their home”. But I’d be willing to bet (no pun intended) they’d increase trading volume rapidly if they pitched to real estate agents as a way to hedge asking prices. For example, Joe Realtor could suggest a slightly higher asking price for a listing and place a bet against rising prices using HedgeStreet.

In any event, I think HedgeStreet is a cool idea and hope it gains more traction this year whomever the traders may be.

A new Google patent application surfaced this month with the title ‘Agent rank’:

The techniques include receiving multiple content items from a corpus of content items; receiving digital signatures each made by one of multiple agents, each digital signature associating one of the agents with one or more of the content items; and assigning a score to a first agent of the multiple agents, wherein the score is based upon the content items associated with the first agent by the digital signatures. 

It’s their next generation ranking technology for organizing web content and is entirely unrelated to RealtyBaron’s AgentRank™. However, I can hear myself in the not too distant future: “No, not that Agent rank…”.

An anonymous real estate agent in the comments of Realty Thoughts’ blog pens three things you should avoid doing when selecting your real estate agent:

1. do not choose an agent because they have 8 on a widget on their blog.

2. do not choose an agent based on what strangers have said.

3. do not choose an agent based on how much commission they give back to you before you even enter into a transaction.

Put another way:

1. do not pay attention to the real estate agent’s website or blog. Especially avoid any type of message that summarizes the agent’s track record and differentiates him/her from the hundreds of other agents in your market.
2. do not speak with any of the agent’s previous clients about his/her performance during a transaction. Because they are strangers, their input has zero value.
3. do not negotiate with the agent regarding how much of your own money you get to retain before you hire him/her.

- The first MyAgentRank™ badge appears.

- MyAgentRank™ first day in the Widgetbox gallery.

- MyAgentRank™ receives its first kudos from RealtyThoughts:

…kudos go out to AgentRank for their brilliant widget! What an outstanding way to spread the word about their product by helping their agents show how good they are.

…not bad for day two.

In the spirit of “2007: year of the widget“, I released MyAgentRank™ over the weekend, a product that will take AgentRank™ to a new level. MyAgentRank™ is a “snippet” of HTML code that displays an agent’s AgentRank™ when inserted into their website or weblog. Visitors see the agent’s AgentRank™ in real-time plus a snapshot of the agent’s experience, sales, and endorsements. The visitor can click through to AgentRank.com for a detailed report of the agent’s track record. I’ll add the newest AgentRank™ components–Market Forecasts and Weblogs–to badges soon.

Ultimately, MyAgentRank™ is a lead generation tool for agents…albeit for their own website or weblog…by making a stronger case for visitors to complete a form or pick up the phone. Best of all, MyAgentRank™ allows the best agents to differentiate themselves from the competition because only a select group can display a “9″ or “10″ regardless of MyAgentRank™’s popularity.

To prevent gaming the system, MyAgentRank™ allows rankings to be flagged for review by staff. Community review is a new dimension for AgentRank™ which has been totally data-driven until now.

If you’re an agent, you can get your free MyAgentRank™ badge by completing the AgentRank™ setup.