The LA Times has collaborated with GoIndustry DoveBid to produce an online real estate auction site called Zetabid. The Zetabid differentiator doesn’t just stop at its auction listing style, but it extends to the sites rule of only housing or showing foreclosed homes for sale and for auction.

The Zetabid site is up and running today, but its first auction is not scheduled to take place until the end of September. In the meantime, though, anyone visiting the site will be able to view the estimated 165 properties up for auction. Each listing comes with open house times to allow those that are local to the listing to visit the actual home prior to bidding. To also ease and facilitate in the sale, Zetabid includes a “Bid Now” feature on all listings, allowing the potential homebuyer to buy the house prior to the auction, if the seller agrees.

Overall, it is an interesting concept and industry insiders will be looking to see how many homes are sold at the September auctions. With the right amount of press and attention, Zetabid could be successful, as the real estate market tries to rebuild itself. With that being said however, a few questions do come to concerning Zetabid business plan: What is the lifespan of Zetabid? Will they broaden their scope in preparation of a once again healthy real estate market? But no matter the answer to the previous questions, the current reality is still this -

• The average price of a home in the US is down 36 percent when compared to 2006
• It is estimated that by the end of 2008 there will be over 1 million foreclosures, according to the National Association of Real Estate
• Analysts believe that the home foreclosure crisis makes this the best time to buy a home in America

Therefore, if basing Zetabid’s success factor on the current reality, I think they will do quite well.

Source: Nielsen, August 2008

written by Beverly Crandon

Real estate site Zillow has just launched a new product called Showcase Ads, a self-service ad platform that lets advertisers create targeted ad campaigns.

With Showcase Ads, advertisers can buy anywhere from 25 to 100 per cent of the available views on searches, for homes within a specific ZIP code or region. Moreover, to measure performance, advertisers are given both the number of expected impressions for their ad and real-time updates on ad performance. Showcase Ads run for 30 days and are paid per ZIP code targeted.

The Showcase Ad product builds on the company’s EZ Ads platform, which launched in April of 2007.

written by Beverly Crandon

Roost, a real estate listing search engine, has recently released a new and improved set of features designed to set them apart from the rest.

The bundle of new and improved functions are a part of something Roost is calling Social Notes. It allows users to share Web pages through email, social networks, blog posts, and general Web page embeds. Moreover, once a listing is shared, the recipient of a note can reply through a comment link, thus enabling a ‘pseudo’ chat feature.

With the plethora of real estate listing sites that exist today and with Realtor groups and real estate agents growing a liking to their own Web listing sites, any new real estate search engine has got to come up with features that are unique and beneficial to both the Realtor and the home buyer. A “me too” product just won’t do and Roost.com seems to understand that.

written by Beverly Crandon

Covering stories from blog.ad-ition.com and other relevant classified media news.

This episode’s covered news bits include coverage of two publishers potentially forming a workforce collaborative partnership, what the search giants are saying the economy has done to their advertising business, Gannett and ADTECH, automotive spending, and a review of the top auto, real estate and recruitment sites for the month of June.

 

 Standard Podcast [21:58m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

written by Beverly Crandon

Zillow is finally putting their newspaper consortium relationship to work, by making it possible for real estate agents to place an ad in their local newspaper and at the same time, place a ‘Featured Listing’ ad on Zillow.

Last November, Zillow partnered with 280 newspapers from the Yahoo! consortium, without really using Yahoo as a conduit. The relationship started in a similar fashion to how the newspapers work their relationship with Yahoo! Hot Jobs - distribution of their ads to an online partner. The change today further enhances this relationship by allowing the consortium to sell their advertisers featured placement spots on Zillow.

The Chronicle, the Mercury News, the Philadelphia Enquirer and the Richmond Times Dispatch will be the first of the set of newspapers to roll out the program and the plan is that in the weeks following, additional newspapers will go live.

On the flip side, newspapers will start to add Zillow features, such as ‘Zestimates’ to their own sites.

written by Beverly Crandon

Trulia now provides its professional users with a social media platform that allows them to market themselves with a lighter air.

Trulia is calling the social application Trulia Voices and it works as a win win for both real estate professionals and perspective homebuyers; Agents have a forum to appear as an industry expert through responding to posted queries and homebuyers have a “no pressure” forum for posing their  real estate  related questions. As an added bonus to info-seekers, Trulia totes that all questions posed on the site are answered in 20 minutes or less!

Trulia Voices represents just one of the many innovative products that this real estate listing startup has employed to set itself apart from the rest. This concept is very similar to the “Ask the Expert” functionality we encourage publishers to employ on their local market sites. Trulia has proven, again, that the concept utilitarian Q&A works, with their over 31,000 questions being asked and answered to date.

written by Beverly Crandon

A recent VHS survey covering 1,300 real estate agents and their spending says that agents who have 5 or more  years of experience , represent higher priced listings and spend more on marketing those listings ($864 per listing). This opposed to those who have less than 5 years experience and spend an average of $675 per listing.

“The longer an agent is in the business the more likely they are to represent more properties, have higher-priced listings and spend more on interactive media,” said VHT, Inc. CEO Brian Balduf.

Summary of VHT real estate survey results:

• In the past year, 30% of agents managed 5-10 listings; 34.8% managed 10-20 listings; and 20.6% managed 20 or more listings.
• The average listing price for 59% of the agents was between $250-500K.
• 24.5% of agents/brokers spent an average of $250-$500 to market their listing; 20.6% spent $500-$1,000; 25.2% spent more than $1,000; and 18.8% said “it depended the listing.”
• Though respondents indicated a significant portion of their listing budget was spent on newspapers, only 20.4% said they think this medium is “effective.” Some 49% said online ads were “very effective.”
• Agents said online ads and signage are “more valuable” for promoting a property. But when asked what their sellers felt was important, 92.4% said sellers mentioned newspaper ads.
• Realtor.com, Craigslist and Google were the top national websites used by agents.
• When asked how their media buying process could be improved, 27% said they needed an “easier” process; 16% replied that they wanted “more statistics”; and 18% stated that they need a one-stop distribution mechanism.

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: Real Estate, Real Estate Advertising, Real Estate Agents, Real Estate Agents Ad Spend, VHT

AdMission and Builder Homesite Inc. have teamed up to create an information deep, new homes site network, combined with targeted advertising display spots. The partnership between the two seems unlikely, especially in a niche site such as this, but BHI has cleverly combined a great user experience, with a source of commercial advertising revenues. When a site visitor searches for a new home, or developer project in a particular area, not only will the appropriate classified homes listings appear, but now a display ad, derived from the users queries, featuring images and details on new homes from BHI’s associated home building firms, will also appear on screen.

BHI has just officially started to offer this form of advertising to builders in it’s network, but the feedback has been positive from those who were involved in the programs beta. BHI also plans to roll out the display ads to their partnering sites Yahoo Real Estate and Trulia.

AdMission has done a lot to get involved in the world that was once deemed the territory of traditional classified forums. AdMission has worked on programs with third party automotive sites such as Autobytel, all the way to independent car dealers who can create their AdMission ads on their own (and a good-looking one too) using a simple self service tool found on the AdMission Website. An interesting thing to note is that if a dealer keeps their inventory updated in the AdMission database, any ad they choose to create will be fit with current content. Asking dealers to update their inventory however, leads me to believe that AdMission, at some point in the future, may be interested in another business model that would be in direct competition with the traditional classified players. In addition to auto, the group has worked with Career Builder, LA Times and Coldwell Banker, just to mention a few.

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: AdMission, Builder Homesite Inc., New Homes, Targeted Advertising, Trulia, Yahoo Real Estate

Question-and-answer Websites have seen their audience and usage numbers more than double, when compared to the previous year.

Yahoo! Answers sticks out as the clear winner with 74% of the Q&A market share, but there are new players who are quickly growing in size: WikiAnswers, Answerbag and Askville (a beta Amazon site). Q&A sites probably wouldn’t have been as popular four years ago, but with the rising UGC participation online, people are using Q&A sites as legitimate resource tools and sources of authoritative information. I for one was impressed by the caliber of answer I received when I first tried Yahoo! Answers, just after their official launch date.

“As we see user-generated content proliferating in different flavors, this is yet another way people are interacting with social media,” said Heather Dougherty, research director at Hitwise.

The success of Q&A sites speaks to something we have been saying to publishers all along – create an “ask the expert” section to service your niche categories – automotive, real estate and recruitment. And unlike business models such as Yahoo! Answers or WikiAnswers, you rely on a rotation of your larger advertisers in each vertical to own the Q&A. In doing this you not only avoid the staffing costs associated with managing the product, but you also cover a few crucial areas:

Win an advertiser for life: flattery will get you everywhere. Through asking one of your advertisers to own a portion of your site for three months shows that, you not only value them as a customer, but you think they are experts in their field.

Provide more tools and resources for your readers: an Internet user’s biggest pet peeve is not being able to find or access the information when they want it. This is why navigation and site audits are so important. By providing the “ask the expert” section you give users another way – period!

Comply with information gathering and online consumer trends: if it can work for generalist Q&A sites like Yahoo! then it will definitely work for niche categories.

According to comScore, Yahoo! Answers, had monthly traffic of 25.3 million in February (up from 17.4 million in 2006) and an average time spent online per user of nine minutes per session, according to Hitwise.

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: Answerbag, ask the expert sections, Askville, WikiAnswers, Yahoo! Answers

There is a revenue model in almost everything. I am convinced of it now. In Nevada and Michigan, they have made a profitable business out of hosting bus tours to repossessed homes. A real estate agent usually guides these tours and they are fee-based. Therefore, the agent has the possibility to make revenue off the sale of a home, as well as the bus tour. Oh how the real estate market has transformed itself during times of adversity…

Michigan Tours

Nevada Tours

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: Real Estate Michigan, Real Estate Nevada, repossessed home