The Lessons Of Redfin, Part I: The Marketing Value Of The Obvious

December 15, 2007

No one can doubt Redfin’s Glenn Kelman is a master of publicity; witness his latest publicity coup: getting on the Today Show to talk real estate with Meredith Vieira. The re.net was abuzz, from Joel Burslem’s neutral coverage to the Bloodhound’s  semi-excoriating review to a withering ActiveRain critique on the “obviousness” of what Kelman said.

The joke, I would say, is on us. To anybody who’s been in the business for any length of time, Kelman’s advice — don’t overprice the home, do advertise on Craigslist — is painfully second nature.

But here’s the point: Kelman is a master genius at generating publicity around knowledge that we take for granted. So it’s obvious to you as a professional Realtor that overpricing a home is the kiss of death? But you’ve never created any marketing buzz around that! You instinctively know to push for a price of $749,000 rather than $751,000? Glenn Kelman just beat you at getting the phone to ring by spinning that message in the right way!

A further irony: this is really nothing more than a repetition of the same mistake we’ve made for decades in this business: assuming that our intellectual assets have greatest value when we hide them from the public and use it as bait to get them to call.  For many years, we hoarded MLS information in book form and made the public come to us to get it.  When the Internet came along, we figured we could do the same thing.  Oops!  Companies like HomeGain figured out a way to use online MLS information to get their phones to ring, and forwarded the leads to us…for a fee.

Then we thought, “Ok, we’ll let the public have information about active listings, but as soon as a listing sells, we’ll hide it again.  Hee hee…this will force people to call us for that kind of information!”  Oops!  This now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t mentality opened up an opportunity for some very smart and deep-pocketed folks from Seattle to start a web site which, among other things, enabled the public to find out what homes sold for.  Zillow realized what we didn’t:  there is great marketing value in letting the world know what you know, rather than trying to hide it.  (See this article I wrote about a year ago on the gold buried in our MLS’s.)

Come on folks, when are we going to learn our lesson?   In the Internet age, you don’t win clients by giving only a sneak preview of your knowledge and data and then crossing your fingers that they will come to you in pursuit of the rest of it.  The game now is transparency — I know, an overused term perhaps, but true nonetheless.  You develop a followership by demonstrating your value, and you do that partly by showing what you know.

What “obvious” thing do you know that may have marketing value for your business?

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Written by Kevin · Filed Under Glenn Kelman, Industry, Redfin 

Comments

3 Responses to “The Lessons Of Redfin, Part I: The Marketing Value Of The Obvious”

  1. Redfin: the obvious maybe not so obvious?... on December 17th, 2007 4:49 am

    [...] We’ve all been talking about Redfin’s debut on the Today Show… Their statements of the “painfully obvious!”…Kevin Boer (Broker/Owner of 3 Oceans Real Estate, Inc.) and author of 3 Oceans Real Estate Blog, raises some interesting points… [...]

  2. Jessie B on December 17th, 2007 10:08 am

    Excellent post. In life & business it’s the little obivious details that make the biggest difference. RF simply took the time to package the obivious and present it to the public.

    In life, buying flowers “just because” has significantly more impact than buying them on Valentines day because the expectation is so obivious.

    A $50 flat fee Tax Preparer knows the obivious tax codes to prepare your taxes but a $200 hour CPA knows the little tax codes that can make a significant difference on the amount you owe, which makes you happy that you are paying a premium for their services.

    Most agents spend their days answering the “obivious”, now in this transparent age, agents just have to package it and present it permanently via blogs or websites which makes it social proof of their business IQ and like the CPA example, clients will be happy to pay for services when they see the value at the end of the transaction.

  3. rudy on December 20th, 2007 7:56 am

    as always, excellent insight kevin!

    for those of you who haven’t read the book “made to stick”, i encourage you to do so. you see, as professionals or experts in our fields, we have a tendency to speak in “geek”. most folks may not be hip to our lingo so we should be empathetic and speak in a manner that people can easily understand what the heck we are talking about. as kevin points out, quite often we overlook the obvious. i call them “duh” moments. others call it “the curse of knowledge.”

    mr. glenn”captain obvious” kelman, is a master at pr and at getting people to understand the obvious. he has an uncanny ability to point out things that we think everyone knows, but in reality may not.

    redfin is not perfect, yet, but they sure do have the big kahunas to try to be.

    time for me to go and jot down some more things that make you go “duh” .

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