A friend of mine sent me a link to the video below asking me if I had ever heard of them before. He said the idea is brilliant and would invest in Redfin if he could. He is planning on selling his home soon and indicated that he would also list with them if they served his market.
This video is very compelling from a consumers perspective. I am curious if any of the major traditional real estate companies are putting out anything as compelling?
1. Zillow marginally increases the accuracy of their Zestimates. Consumers don't notice or care. They only care that they are able to watch the value of their home decrease on a daily basis.
2. Two top level mortgage executives are indicted for fraud. One of the CEO's indicted has a very strong tan.
3. The top five real estate websites ranked by traffic are: #1 Realtor.com, #2 Zillow moving from #8, #3 RE/MAX holding steady, #4 Yahoo Real Estate up from #7, and #5 Trulia with the biggest increase from the #18 spot.
4. Fox TV creates a new reality television show called "Online Stars Compete for a Shot at Love with Blogging Bertha". Kelly from this video eventually wins.
5. Although the real estate industry continues to stink (lots of real estate brokerages will consolidate or go out of business), and the media will continue to remind everyone how bad the market was, life will go on and the amount of foreclosures really won't be that bad.
6. Towards the end of 2008, Realtor association economists will still be saying that "we miscalculated the severity of the housing crisis, but we believe that the worst is behind us". (They will go on to state the same thing in 2009 as well)
7. Realogy announces a major restructuring.
8. Greg Swann does something really crazy and is temporarily held in custody.
9. Redfin announces a new "fuller service upgrade" option, then is sold a few months later to a major lead generation company, (and soon after assumes the RealEstate.com name) Glenn Kelmann goes on to cure cancer or discover time travel.
10. Out of pity for the real estate industry the DOJ drops all antitrust complaints.
11. Dustin Luther is hired by Curbed as Lockhart's "#2".
12. In the midst of many more mortgage company closings, an obscure mortgage lender emerges and gains huge market share.
13. The stock price of the newly publicly traded arm of InterActive Corp's real estate division starts off the year horribly, and ends just as badly...
14. Shackprices.com Estately continues to be the best home search site on the internet. Large real estate tech companies finally realize it and gobble Galen and his team up in a business partnership/acquisition. Galen forgets his Seattle eco friendly ways and ditches his bicycle in favor of a new Austin Martin used volvo.
15. As all media attention turns to the presidential elections, the government forgets about the mortgage crisis and ends up doing nothing to "help". Everyone breathes a sigh of relief.
16. Warren Buffet buys billions of dollars in under-priced mortgage securities. He single handedly resuscitates the credit markets confidence and turns around the real estate market.
17. As a result of Point2's resent management changes, Point2 drops off of the radar and becomes mostly irrelevant.
18. Joel Burslem gets promoted to Vice-President of Inman News.
19. "ActiveRain Members" are named Time Magazine's Person(s) of the Year. (Shortly after Jeff Turner is named sexiest man alive)
20. ActiveRain surprises the entire industry...
ActiveRain's own Sharon Simms was featured today in the "country's oldest newspaper in continous publication", the Hartford Courant. They referenced her ActiveRain blog post about a new marketing concept called a sleep over; it is similar in concept to a test drive for a car.
Usually we don't feature posts that are just copy and pastes of other people's content, but... I liked this video a lot and wanted to share it.
Good work Joe and Rudy!
Joel Burslem from the Future of Real Estate Marketing blog has a great post today about using static search results for long tail seo success. This is a strategy that Brio Realty pioneered 5+ years ago, Trulia successfully uses now (notice the url address), and it looks like Zillow will start to use in the coming year.
(It is also interesting to consider that much of the AR seo strategy was built around this long tail, every page indexable concept.)
As many Rainers know we occasionally experience the growing pains that accompany rapid growth. This morning our servers went down for a bit and needed a reboot. (Jerry should be posting a follow up shortly on his blog with the cause of the downtime.)
Coincidentally, Royal Pingdom released their list of major incidents on the internet for 2007. In November we were affected by the Rackspace Truck incident, the primary AR servers are located in Rackspace's Dallas data center!
Inman News published their annual top real estate stories of year article.
The graduation of real estate blogging from "sport" status to "business plan" status was listed as the #2 top story. As could be guessed the housing downturn headed off the list...
1. Subprime market implodes; housing downturn worsens.
2. Blogging runs deeper in real estate's blood.
3. Foxtons closes shop.
4. Foreclosure problem worsens; Bush announces rescue plan.
5. Redfin and "60 Minutes" of fame.
6. Trulia and Zillow get booted from Prudential Real Estate convention.
7. Realogy goes private.
8. Well-known real estate writer dies.
9. NAR's Gateway project announced.
10. FHA goes modern.
