In the new movie Jumper, the hero is an otherwise normal guy who just happens to be able to jump forward in time–at will. For the real estate industry, the future never arrives so quickly. Instead it comes in dribs and drabs, day by day.

Still, the future always arrives.

From Peter Williams’ entire presentation the other day, there is one line that I can still quote from memory.

He said that, because of the web, in the future, “Traditional agents will not be replaced by technology…they will be replaced by agents with technology.” (more…)

Let’s hear about real estate marketing and the Internet from an overseas perspective.

In particular, I’m thinking of a country where the housing market seems to be in meltdown, there is a fierce political campaign under way and there are some true online real estate innovators in action.

Yes, I’m thinking of the USA.

I’ve interviewed Joel Burslem about all these topics (except the political campaign). Before you read his words of wisdom, there are three things you should know about Joel: (more…)

It is a general consensus that real estate agents have the worst logos out of any major industry group that has a mature online presence. Looking at a list of agents on any portal and you will soon see that agent logos are in general an eyesore.

Franchise groups top out as the worst in my opinion. There seems to be a lack of innovation in bothy font use and colours for logos. Oh and if I see another roof in a logo I am going to on a rampage!

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This exercise is NOT to promote my system It is to give you a glimpse into what I have had to go through to make my development come to life.

History
I was fortunate to begin my development of these systems way back in 1999. At that stage it was a site for a local agent. I was one of 3 partners and the one with no experience, one was a designer and one was a developer and there was me, pretty much a nothing marketing type person, although I had been in related industries for 7 years. At the time of becoming a partner we had 2 clients. During the development process, I thought about having a system that we could develop for all agents.

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So you want to have the best real estate site n your area? I am sure you understand the basics but here are some hints to get you there.

1. Information Everywhere:
Engage a service (or build your own) that controls all of your property data in one place and build a tool set that makes it easy for you distribute that data via XML data feeds. Any developer worthy of the name ‘developer’ could do this - however there aren’t as many who say they can do it that can actually do it. The second thing you need to do is join sites that you can distribute the data to. There are many that cost money, but there will be more and more that are free.

Here is a list of National sites for Australia and New Zealand:

Fee Based Services:
1. http://realestate.com.au (au)
2. http://domain.com.au (au)
3. http://realestate.co.nz (nz)
4. http://realenz.co.nz (nz)
5. http://allrealestate.co.nz (nz)
6. http://homehound.com (au) (FREE)

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