Symantec, the Internet security firm, today released what they described as a “code red” security patch for all real estate bloggers currently using the now-infamous “Google Juice Sucking” Trulia widget.

Tipped off by an anonymous Active Rain’er who had come across this discussion thread, which in turn had been prompted by good investigative sniffing [sniff one, sniff two, sniff three] by the pack at Bloodhound, Symantec’s elite Taskforce Realty Internet Permission Experts (TRIPE) worked through the night to come up with a patch. The head of TRIPE, Dr. Francois Viande-Fichu, released the following press statement:

With thanks to the ever-vigilant Active Rain-droppers for tipping us off, we were stunned to find some pretty damning evidence of foul play in Trulia’s widget, which unsuspecting Realtors have been deploying on their web sites in droves. Trojan Horses are one thing, but what they’ve come up with is something far more nefarious: a Peloponnesian Unicorn.

The Trulia widget does the following:

• Sucks out the hosting web site’s Google Juice, especially the Raspberry flavor.
• Decreases the hosting web site’s Google Page Rank to negative 5.
• Installs a little Trulia MarkerMan on the desktop whose eyes follow you around as you surf, and they roll sarcastically whenever you visit Zillow’s site.
• Automatically and instantaneously rises Trulia to the top of the Google rankings for all searches related to the host site.
• Makes the web site owner/blogger start chanting Gregorian hymns in the original Latin.
• Refers all incoming traffic to the hosting site’s owner’s fiercest competitor, in exchange for a 25% referral fee.

When challenged to provide evidence of the above, Dr. Viande-Fichu displayed the following code embedded into each Trulia Widget.

;
While {5>1 DO:
Trulia.PageRank = Site.PageRank*2 / Slurp.Giant.SuckingSound;
Site.PageRank=-5;
Install.Icon = http:/trulia.com/images/trulia_markermen_icon.gif; option bug eyes=”true”;
If Site.Visit=”Zillow” Do {Icon.Roll.Eyes And Sigh.Loudly};
Google.LocalSearchRankings.Site.City = “Truliawful”;
Trulia.LocalSearchRankings.Site.City = “TopOfFirstPage”;
Launch Latin.hymns.InstanceGregorian;
End Do}
?end Php>

Agents who’ve installed this widget are advised to uninstall it immediately, then put the following badge on their web site to protect them in the future:

To install this widget, do the following:

1. Download this file to your computer.
2. Open the file in Notepad or some other text editor.
3. Copy and paste the contents of the file into a sidebar Text widget.
4. Rinse and repeat.

Full disclosure:

1. I did a consulting project for Trulia last year.
2. Trulia out-ranks my site for many Google searches.
3. My site outranks Trulia for many other searches, including, most significantly, peace corps volunteer botswana real estate palo alto.
4. Trulia’s no-follow policy applies, as far as I know, consistently across all broker’s listings, including mine.
5. No animals, Realtors, or SERPS were harmed in the production of this post.
6. Void where prohibited.
7. Do not ingest.
8. This blog is not a toy. Keep out of reach of children.

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Tags: Humor, Industry, Trulia

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Maybe it’s the frustrated business school professor in me, or the memories of sitting in Professor Barry Nalebuff’s classes during business school, but what has fascinated me the most about the ongoing debate about Trulia’s no-follow outbound listings links (started here by Galen Ward, then continued here, here, here, and here) is not the arcana of the no-follow tag, not the dissection of SEO intricacies, and not really even the question of what is or is not appropriate to do with listings online.

No, what really fascinates me about this debate is how it accentuates co-opetition in the real estate industry.  Co-opetition is simply the notion that companies compete and co-operate simultaneously.  Arch-rivals Northrup Grumman and Boeing go mano-a-mano to get a lucrative government contract … and the winner often subcontracts part of the project to its rival.  Microsoft and Oracle have competing database platforms but often sell eachother’s products.

In our industry, co-opetition reaches nearly incestuous levels.  For instance:

• Brokers John and Betty compete for the listing at 123 Main Street.  Betty wins and puts the property on the MLS.  The very next week John brings potential buyer clients to the property.  Sure, he would rather have won the listing, but that’s in the past.  Now he’s working with Betty to consummate the transaction.  No hard feelings.
• Realtor Bob hangs his license with ABC Realty.  He puts an ABC Realty sign on the front lawn of all his listings, and the ABC Realty logo is prominent in all his media ads.  He’s co-operating with his real estate brokerage to promote their brand, and he in turn benefits from that brand awareness.  Co-operation.  A phone call from a prospective buyer of one of Bob’s listings, however, may well go through to the agent on “floor duty.”  That agent turns this phone call into a client, who goes on to buy a different listing, not Bob’s.  That’s competition — Bob would have loved to get that phone call and turn it into another client, but his competitor — the other agent, and to some extent his own broker — snagged that client.  Co-operation plus competition = co-opetition.
• A thousand local brokers — each fierce competitors — co-operate to run a local MLS.  They put their competing listings up on the MLS, and they compete to bring buyers to each of the listings.  At the close of each transaction, we again have co-opetition — competing parties co-operating for the sake of the deal.
• Broker Tom snags a listing and puts it on the MLS.  Via the wonders of IDX, that listing spreads its tentacles onto a thousand other sites, including that of arch-rival Broker Sarah.  As long as Broker Sarah indicates that Tom is the broker of record, it’s all good.  Her site is much better than Tom’s, so she gets more traffic and hence more clients online.  The fodder that draws in those visitors?  Listings … not only her own, but also Tom’s.
• Broker Rachel gets the listing at 789 Elm Street and puts it on the MLS.  She also puts it on Trulia, which, like the MLS itself, exposes the listing to a much broader audience than she could reach on her own.  She benefits from the increased exposure, and Trulia gets more inventory to display.  It’s a win-win — co-operation at its finest.  The next day, a prospective homebuyer passes 789 Elm Street and Googles the address to find out more.  Who’s on the top page?  Trulia and Broker Rachel’s listing site.  Now they’re competing — for web traffic.

There really is nothing new under the sun.   This business has always been a co-opetitive one, and we’ve always simultaneously co-operated with and competed against not only every other broker, but many of the third-party advertisers, aggregators, and media companies.

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Tags: Industry, MLS, Real estate, Trulia

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Trulia! Zillow! … and now Roost! Where do they come up with these names?

Roost, a new startup in the increasingly crowded real estate search space, launched last week to a cacophony of commentary from the re.net. Joel Burslem covered its feature set, its performance, and noted that Roost has the complete MLS inventory because it gets its listings from MLS’s, albeit indirectly. Greg Swann fawned over its business model and complete inventory.

If I understand Roost’s business model correctly, it intends to make money in a way that’s clever, unique, and possibly illegal non-MLS-compliant.  [1/30/08 update:  I’ve been thinking about my choice of words, and “illegal” is definitely not the word I should have used.  “Illegal” is mugging somebody, or stealing something.  What Roost is doing is 100% legal and above-board.  It may — and I emphasize may — be viewed by some as being non-MLS-compliant.]

The unique aspect of its business plan: it offers brokerages the opportunity to sponsor search results and get the resulting click-throughs to their own site. A search in Sacramento, for instance, reveals that the current sponsor is Sacramento heavyweight Lyon Real Estate.

The first three listings I see are from VM Group, Gold Financial Services, and Prudential CA Realty, all clearly identified in compliance with Sacramento’s Metrolist MLS services.

Here’s the tricky bit…if you want more information, you click on “View Details on Featured Broker’s Site.” When you do that for, say, the Prudential listing, you get information about the Prudential listing on the Lyon Real Estate site:

This sleight-of-hand is accomplished through a too-clever-by-half url manipulation, much to subtle to be noticed by the average consumer, but apparently kosher enough to pass muster from the Sacramento MLS — at least for now. What if Prudential gets upset that the click-through on one of their listings on a public MLS-ish site goes through to one of its competitors?

Here’s how (I believe) Roost and Lyon defend themselves: Look at the url. When you search in Sacramento, you’re not actually using the Roost site at all; you’re actually using the Lyon site (GoLyon.com). For as long as Lyon is the sponsoring broker, the search is being conducted at golyon.roost.com — a (sub)domain under the control of Lyon Real Estate — and hence in compliance with those silly old arcane MLS rules.

Watch what happens when you go back to the site. In my case, I ran another search, and this one was sponsored by Intero. Same results, same look and feel, but the search is now running at InteroRealEstateIDX.com…and sure enough, the click-through goes to Intero’s own site.

Very, very clever. I really like this part of their business model, for reasons I’ve explained before: The current real estate business model heavily favors the listing side of the equation, and I’ve been clamoring to the likes of Zillow and Trulia to think about buy-side advertising offerings. If I’m a small brokerage in Sacramento, and I currently only have, say, 5 listings, I could decide to spend, say, $5000 sponsoring X number of real estate searches in that market. The number one bait that still seems to draw eyeballs in real estate is listings, listings, listings, and if I don’t have many of my own, why not leverage those of my competitors?

Now for the questions of MLS legality compliance …without going into all the details, I tried something like this trick about 2 years ago. It involved subtle manipulation of a url so that searches on a heavily-trafficked site were done — technically — using a url that was under my control. A good lawyer could easily have argued that this was in strict compliance with all the MLS rules. No dice. Within hours I got slapped down — not just by the MLS, but by my own broker!

I certainly wish Roost all the best, but I’m afraid they’d better put a sign on their front door that says, “Couriers please deliver cease and desist letters here.” Any business model that requires MLS compliance involves by definition an order of magnitude more headache. Why do you think Trulia and Zillow decided to get their listing feeds straight from the brokers?

Further commentary:

• TechCrunch, predictably, gets a few facts wrong. It’s not clear they understand the difference between a broker (e.g. Redfin) and a listings site (e.g. Roost.) Also, if I understand this bit of fine print on Roost’s site, they don’t get their data directly from the MLS, but by piggybacking on broker IDX sites. Subtle but important difference.
• Dustin notes that piggybacking off IDX feeds is a great way to scale your listings database quickly, but it puts some pretty onerous restrictions on what you can do with the data.
• Michael Price explains the url sleight-of-hand.
• Jay Thompson notes that, once again, the business model is about brokers providing listings, then paying for traffic.
• Sellsius praises Roost’s comprehensive and accurate results.

And still more commentary:

• Brian Boero* notes the irony that Roost is built on fairly antiquated technology — IDX — but provides a pretty rich user experience.

* At the last Inman, Brian and I finally answered that great conundrum: Did his ancestors add on “o” or did mine drop an “o” at Ellis Island? The answer: neither. His ancestors are Italian, and mine Dutch. So no, we’re not related — except of course, through Lucy.

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Tags: Alternative business models, Industry, MLS, Real estate, Roost, Trulia, Zillow

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Curbed.com, the spicy real estate blog serving up rich tidbits of new developments, sold-out penthouses, celebrity real estate, Eichler porn, and other Gen-X and -Y delectables, just raised $1.5M in funding.  (Source:  the New York Times and WebProNews.com)

That’s right, folks, a blog — something unheard of in real estate a scant 18 months ago — has just raised $1.5M to expand its operations, and this despite the general nation-wide slowdown in the real estate market.  Real estate blogging, my friends, is growing up.  It’s not a passing fad, or a way for bored agents to spend time online.  It’s becoming serious business.

Curbed’s business model is advertising driven, and while you wouldn’t be surprised to see companies like Trulia advertising there, the site has managed to attract a broader array of advertisers, including financial services and cars.

Want to predict the future of real estate blogging?  Quite simple:  read up on what’s happening in blogging in the technology and political worlds, both of which got in on blogging a few years earlier.  Blogs like Robert Scoble’s and Michael Arrington’s (on the technology side) and Arriana Huffington’s (on the political side) have 8-digit valuations.

Congratulations Mssrs. Steele et. al!

[Update:  I have not been able to find out what percentage of Curbed.com Mr. Steele had to part with to get the $1.5M in funding, leading to the obvious question:  What is the current valuation of Curbed.com?  Speculation here suggests somewhere in the range of $6M to $12M.]

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Tags: Curbed.com, Industry, Trulia

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I’m normally too busy to bother paying much attention to the growing legion of sploggers out there.  If a post or two of mine gets “borrowed” (with or without a linkback) I normally let it slide, but I definitely start complaining if it becomes habitual.  Most sploggers ride on a modest wave of Google Adwords-funded revenue for a few weeks, get shut down, and then move on.  Sometimes a new re.net blogger springs up and decides it’s easier to “borrow” than to write content, but after a few polite email exchanges and explanations, they tend to shape up.

Occasionally, however, a pretty egregious case of content-borrowing comes across the transom.  Imagine my surprise when this latest splog incarnation turned out to be affiliated with Brokers USA — whom I shall not grace with a linkback — which appears to be a respectable, buttoned-up, long-standing San Francisco real estate firm specializing in hospitality properties.

The site’s blog has 2 loooong content pages — which translated into roughly 180 pages when I saved them in a PDF.  A few minutes of perusing these pages found content from

• My blog
• Redfin’s Bay Area blog
• Curbed.com
• SocketSite
  and, perhaps most creatively
• Trulia Voices

The latter included a question on HUD ownership, graciously answered by Kristal Kraft and a few others.

In all fairness to the site’s “author” Gregory Garver, he responded fairly quickly to my email and fax request to take down my content.  His response, however, indicates that he may not yet understand the basic decorum around blogging.  Perhaps UCSB, his apparent alma mater, had no rules against plagiarism?

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Tags: Brokers USA, Curbed, Industry, SocketSite, Trulia, Trulia Voices

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The ongoing Active Rain vs. Move.com dustup, our very own ongoing soap opera saga, illustrates one fact above all else: the re.net is maturing. As the traditional players in real estate (finally) begin to appreciate the potential of emerging technology in real estate, it’s inevitable that more acquisitions will take place — hopefully successfully.

Move.com’s overtures to Active Rain were actually not the first in which a traditional player courted one of the new ones. That honor, I believe, rests with our very own Joel Burslem of FOREM, which was acquired by Inman a number of months ago.

Some other possible pairings? Google must be looking with interest at both Zillow and Trulia. Inman, Ris Media, and other real estate industry news sources may be eyeing some re.net blogs.

And who knows…maybe the Bloodhound will make a play for one of the other Phoenix re.net blogs? Or perhaps these guys might be interested in this one?

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Tags: Active Rain, FutureOfRealEstateMarketing.com, Google, Industry, Inman, Joel Burslem, Move.com, Trulia, Zillow

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Trulia, the online listing site which aggregates data from brokers and agents around the country, just turned two today.  In that short time, they’ve accomplished some fairly impressive feats:

• They built a home search site, getting listings Realtor-by-Realtor, broker-by-broker, without going through MLS’s.
• They formed partnerships with a number of leading regional and nation-wide brokerages, including Alain Pinel, Coldwell Banker, and Keller Williams.
• They layered on an impressive array of quantitative data on schools, neighborhoods, price trends, and so forth.
• They mixed in qualitative information with their Voices product, which has spawned quite an active consumer-agent forum.
• They became one of the leading sources of online traffic for many of their broker partners.

As founder Pete Flint notes in this blog post, they did all this without resorting to the all-too-common bait-’n-switch tactics in this industry.

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Tags: Alain Pinel, Coldwell Banker, Industry, Keller Williams, Trulia

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Trulia Voices, launched 10 weeks ago, is an online real estate Q&A forum, adding qualitative information (”Where are the good restaurants in this neighborhood? Why are prices higher on the other side of Main Street?) to Trulia’s robust quantitative offering (”What are median home prices in Akron? How many homes are for sale in Menlo Park?”)

Trulia just announced some fairly impressive numbers for the product. On average, each question gets answered in 20 minutes and receives 3.2 answers. As of 11:56pm on July 31st, there were just about 4000 (3897 to be exact) questions on the site.

While many of the agent participants on the site are, as you would expect, also active bloggers, there is a growing contingent of agents who seem to be using Voices as a platform to begin learning about online real estate interaction.

—–

Full disclosure: Friend and colleague Pat Kitano of Transparentre.com and I have established a consulting company, and one of our projects has been helping Trulia with its Voices product.

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Tags: Trulia, Trulia Voices

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With due apologies to my civilian readers, my content over the next few days will be heavy on the geeky-technology-side of real estate — you know, with the Inman conference starting tomorrow and all.

Tonight’s back-to-back pre-conference events were sponsored by Zillow and Trulia at bars only a few blocks apart.  T-shirts, free alcohol, and bloggers were all in abundance.

Personal highlights included…

1) meeting The Incomparable Kris Berg (her new official title)…here pictured with Dan Green.  Despite her travails during the long trip here all the way from San Diego, she appeared in good spirits.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2) Connecting again with David G from Zillow, complete with a t-shirt that read “I’m DavidG from Zillow.  Who the hell are you?”  Here he is shown with special agent Therese Swan of Alain Pinel Realtors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3) Scoring a t-shirt from Trulia, here modeled by none other than CEO Pete Flint.  First the front (”Find me on Trulia Voices”), then the back (”because I’m too old for Myspace.”)  A rumor was circulating that earlier versions of this t-shirt had the punchline “because I’m not creepy enough for Myspace.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 4) Getting a look at the fabled Sellsius blog mobile, fresh from a cross country trip:

5) Meeting the Sellsius twins again…Joe here pictured with Ardell Dellaloggia and Dan Green…and then with Mark Lesswing from NAR.  (Mark graciously forgave me for asking some tough questions during his presentation a few months ago at an Opes Advisors-sponsored event.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6) Talking with Mike Simonsen of Altos Research (my blogfather), Joel Burslem (Inman and Future of Real Estate Marketing.com), and Scott Sambucci, also of Altos Research.

7) Comedic highlight of the evening was this somewhat futilely-posted sign, missing perhaps at least a zero, judging by the size of the crowd.

 

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Tags: Inman, Mark Lesswing, NAR, Pete Flint, Trulia, Zillow

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A recent thread over at Trulia Voices* pondered the question of the ROI of adding a pool to a property.  The answer will almost certainly vary depending on geography and price point, but here in the Menlo Park / Palo Alto / Los Altos area and surroundings, a pool is usually a negative ROI investment.

Easily 70% of my buy-side clients, and 90% of my buy-side clients with kids, are very clear that they want a home without a pool.  There appear to be several reasons:

1. Safety:  Parents in this area tend to be hyper-protective of their kids, and even with an elaborate fence around the pool, parents just don’t feel comfortable.
2. Cost:  It costs easily $200/month or more to maintain a pool if you consider all the expenses, including putting aside a reserve each month to cover large periodic expenses.  Most home buyers, especially first-timers, are stretched to the limit financially simply with the purchase of the home, and the last thing they want is another expense, especially a non-tax-deductible one.
3. Space:  With the common 5000-6000 sq foot lots around here, a pool simply eats up too much of the yard.  Los Altos tends to have much larger lots, so it’s not as much of an issue there.
4. Weather:  Silicon Valley’s mid-Peninsula tends to have relatively mild summers.  Sure, we get 90 degree days, but we certainly don’t get many 100+ degree days as do our friends only 20-30 miles further inland.  And while our winters are also relatively mild, there are easily 6 months per year when an unheated outdoor pool is simply too cold to enjoy.

In our still-hot market, the key to maximizing sales price is to attract the largest number of buyers, and pools quite simply scare away a large number of buyers.

Having said that, if you’re considering building a pool in this area, will be living in your home for a number of years, and will enjoy having a pool, then by all means go ahead and do so.  Just don’t build a pool as a way of necessarily increasing its value.

——
* Full disclosure:  I and my friend and colleague Pat Kitano of Transparentre.com have launched a consulting company, and Trulia is one of our clients.

Picture courtesy of Microsoft Clip Art gallery.

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Tags: * Type of Content, Consumer, Industry, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Real estate, Trulia

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