Baron Briefs

We are releasing a new WordPress plug-in soon which will allow WP bloggers to host a real estate Q&A in the sidebar of their blog.  The questions are “crowdsourced” from participating web sites and pooled together to create a network of questions.  The answers to the questions are provided by local real estate agents and moderated by RealtyBaron.

The plug-in offers three distinct value propositions for publishers:

1. Free – no cost to download, install, and/or use the plug-in
2. Revenue – a new source of revenue from advertising embedded in answers.  Ad impression, click tracking, and payment collection is handled by RealtyBaron
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – When a blog sources a question, the blog earns a “clean” link back to the blog from all web sites publishing that question.  Plus, there is potentially thousands of new pages of free, relevant content for search engines to index on the blog’s site.

We’re making a development copy of the plug-in available today to get some early feedback:

Download RealAnswers WP Plug-in 1.0

Update: Download from WordPress Plug-in Directory

Let us know what you think!

Today is the public beta launch of RealtyBaron.com’s latest and greatest, a risk management product for real estate agents called ListingHedge™. As the name implies, a ListingHedge™ allows an agent to hedge a listing. Put simply, a ListingHedge™ is used to reduce the financial risk agents accept when spending time and money upfront in exchange for a commission after a home sells. Traditionally, agents do not recover expenditures from an unsold listing. With a ListingHedge™ in place, however, an agent is still paid for work that does not result in a sales commission. The illustration below compares the traditional risk model to this new hedged risk model:

During the beta period, a ListingHedge™ is purchased and settled with BaronBucks™. Any broker or agent with a RealtyBaron.com account is automatically credited with $5,000 BaronBucks™ that can be used to purchase a ListingHedge™ for each listing the broker or agent is marketing.

After the beta period ends and the service officially launches, a ListingHedge™ will be purchased and settled with real money. BaronBucks™ accumulated by agents during the beta period will be converted to equity shares in (pre-IPO?) RealtyBaron, Inc.

To get started, follow these steps:

1. Log in or sign up at http://www.realtybaron.com/agent
2. Complete your AgentRank™
3. Upload your current listings
4. Hedge your current listings

Question, comments, or concerns? Add a reply below and I’ll respond.

This morning, RealtyBaron began posting AgentRank™ activity to the popular micro-blogging platform, Twitter. Specifically, an agent’s sale transactions, client reviews, market forecasts, and new ranking value is posted when captured by the system. You can subscribe to system-wide activity by following AgentRank™ on Twitter.

More importantly, however, agents can “tweet” their own AgentRank™ activity to their “tweeple” by providing their Twitter account credentials.

Twitter is only the beginning. I plan to add other notable social arenas as time permits. If you’d like to request a specific platform, please let me know.

Imagine your parents are retiring, moving to Florida, and have asked you for help with “meeting a nice Realtor®” in Naples. Unlike the client referral I sketched in scenario #1, this referral is very personal. A referral fee is your least concern. Your parents are aging and they need to be handled by the best. However, you don’t have contacts in or near Naples, Florida. Here’s how a ReferralAuction™ can help:

#1 – Like I said above, a referral fee is your least concern. Therefore, all three bids—opening, reserve, and stop—remain at 0%. Basically, the first agent who meets the minimum required AgentRank™ gets your parents’ business.

#2 – But submitting a bid in this scenario is easier said than done. The minimum AgentRank™ in this case is 10—the highest ranking available—which means unless an agent has an impeccable sales history and glowing client reviews, he or she will be unable to bid for your referral.

Any questions?

Imagine you have a client who is moving to Dallas. You have the listing in California but the client has not yet made a connection with a buyer’s agent. The client asks for a referral, but you don’t have any contacts in Dallas. You want to ensure your client is handled properly, but you also want to fully monetize a client referral that will almost certainly result in a sale for the buyer agent. A ReferralAuction™ can help you achieve both objectives. Here’s the play call:

#1 – The auction opens bidding at 0%, but the “Reserve Bid” ensures a bid of 20% is received before the client’s contact information is revealed to a buyer’s agent. If the auction ends with a bid less than 20%, your identity and that of your client remains hidden from any potential buyer’s agent.

#2 – Assuming the “Reserve Bid” is satisfied, the “Stop Bid” ensures bidding doesn’t exceed your idea of “fair value”. When bidding reaches the “Stop Bid” amount, the referral auction immediately closes and the referral is awarded to the highest bidder.

#3 – The “Minimum AgentRank™” guarantees bidding is available only to agents who have a proven history of closing sales and pleasing clients. In the scenario above, only agents with a ranking of 8 or above are allowed to bid for your client referral.

Any questions?

For several months, I’ve been working on a new listing product for Realtors. An important component is listing distribution. RealtyBaron already syndicates listings to Vast and allows agents to publish to Craigslist. But our listing product launching in early 2008 will require syndication to each and every listing destination site that accepts bulk feeds. And while RealtyBaron was early early-ish to the distribution game, we’re certainly not alone.

Listing distribution has become ridiculously easy. In just a few hours, I added feeds for CityCribs, Citylist, CLR Search, Oodle, Propbot, Propsmart, Trulia, Zillow, and Google Base. Once the feed format is known, it takes less than a few minutes to start churning out an XML file to feed a destination site.

All of which has me thinking about a future where listings seamlessly flow around the web. Can any one destination site gain a competitive advantage and win the listings race once real estate listings are ubiquitous? Probably not, me thinks. Instead, big destination sites will likely continue squeezing more search, more filtering, more analysis, and more data (sales data, demographics, etc.) into the same 1024 by 768 pixel space in an attempt to make sense of it all. Additionally, make room for more banner advertising to pay for the development of aforementioned features. Which brings me to…

Many Realtors continue to fear losing control of their listings. However, I can imagine an ironic outcome in which losing control of listings produces an explosion of information which eventually overwhelms and/or confuses the consumer. As a result, buyers and sellers who once went to Realtors for access to information increasingly use Realtors to slog through and interrupt the overly abundant data.