Realty World Northern California & Nevada

It was the talk of Real Estate Connect San Francisco 2009. For some, the words “Developers, Developers, Developers” seems like a broken record. For others, it brings back memories of a viral video of Steve Ballmer. For most at Connect, it meant the 48 hour developer challenge. What will two teams made up of a handful of young, creative, and sleep deprived developers come up with in such a short time?

It was an interesting idea and a great challenge – develop an innovative and robust application of any sort is not an easy task, and to do it in just 48 hours seemed next to impossible. Admittedly, I set my expectations low. As someone from this field I have spent countless nights burning the candle at both ends and did not envy their position.

Alas the day arrives and the developer challenge is unveiled and two teams reveal their progress. The first group went the route of creating a customizable IDX solution embodying SoCal MLS data, Onboard Informatics neighborhood amenities data, and Zillow API data. All done within a 48-hour developer challenge? Early into the panelist discussions the team admits they spent many hours planning and working on frameworks prior to the event in “preparation” for the developer challenge and the actual code written during the challenge was for the visual side or “front end” of the webpage.

The second team put together an analytics engine utilizing the SoCal MLS data. Useful and insightful analysis and statistics such as the number of listings per year of an agent, or the average number of closings per year (buy side and list side ratios), average DOM, TFT to sold ratios, etc. were brought together. This team also admitted during the panel discussion they had spent many hours planning and preparing frameworks in preparation for the challenge.

All in all, I thought the developer challenge was a new and great idea for Connect. However, I can’t help but be left with a sour taste in my mouth with the way it was presented to the audience that these types of projects can be accomplished within 48 hours, as the technical level of the audience made it hard for the majority to understand that these types of technological creations are the result of weeks of work. It’s great to see Inman presenting technology solutions to the industry in a fun and compelling way – hopefully next year we’ll hear a bit more about the work that goes on behind the scenes to make these things possible.

Tei Baishiki
Chief Technology Officer
tei.baishiki@rwnc.net

Recently I attended Connect 09, in San Francisco which is produced by Inman News. If you’re not familiar with this conference you’re missing some of the most relevant news, technology, trends, and networking opportunities the business offers.

What was interesting was the underlying current of people that said they were bloggers, yet didn’t understand how blogging worked exactly. I’m speaking in terms of more business and not a vanity parade or a new age personal promotion campaign. Blogging is not about that. This is to say it’s about consumers and not about the content provider.

It is really about dating. Time stamping, in other words. The moment you click the button that causes your content to be published to the Internet. Let’s say you’re looking online for information about a cancer for instance. Just two years ago you would have seen websites and a few places offering information on bulletin boards that dated back to 1958 for example. Much of that information you would have to sift through to find what you’re looking for. So, you make the information “relevant” to you by searching for more recent information related to your query about cancer. Assuming you don’t want cancer information that was originally published in the 1920’s.

Consumers rarely go to real estate sites looking for houses for sale in 1972. They want houses for sales today. Some that even came on the market today. So, your content you provide consumers needs to reflect the time. That means you can’t write to your blog last month and expect traction in cyberspace. Search engines want to help people by making the returns more relevant. And what is relevancy? The date!

So, blog often (everyday) because it really doesn’t take long – just write what you know and the people will come. The search engines see that you’re providing content and its dated everyday, which really means it could be more relevant that the blog someone else wrote last month. This activity will drive your blogs to the top of the list.

And, that is what it has to do with you.

Scott LeForce
President
scott.leforce@rwnc.net