Real Estate 2.0 vs Real Estate 3.0

Just a brief snack in response to Seth Godin and Lee Hopkins blogs.

REAL ESTATE 2.0
Do what Seth says:

The first is to become the expert in what you do. Which means micro-specialization. Who is the single-best agent for condos in your zip code? Or for single family homes for large families? Who is the one and the only best person to turn to if you’re looking for investment property in this part of town?
…

The kids at Squidoo just built a promotional tool that lets you get started. Mayor of your zip code is a way to start a discussion group/info page about what’s happening in your slice of the world. You become the source of information, the watercooler, the person to turn to. Of course, if you spend ten minutes on it and then move on, it’ll fail. But, if you spent 30% of your time working on your page (building it, curating it, promoting it), what do you think would show up in Google searches? What sort of interactions would you start having with people thinking about your little part of the world? Even better, what if you built a blog about your town, as good as any local paper, with high school sports and tax controversies and everything… don’t you think the right people would read it?

…….

Or, consider this: Take half your office (the half made vacant by the people following Plan A) and turn it over to local groups. Let the active (and nascent) clubs and organizations meet in your office. Not once in a while. Regularly. All the time. Become the hub. Because, after all, you’re the mayor.

The second asset to build is permission. It turns out (according to the NAR) that 91% of all Realtors never contact the buyer or the seller of a home after the closing. Not once. Wow. Someone just spent a million dollars with you and you don’t bother to call or write?

The opportunity during the current pause (and yes, it’s a pause) is to find, one by one, the people who would benefit from hearing from you and then earn the right to talk to them. Earn the right to send them a newsletter or a regular update or a subscription to your blog. NOT to talk about what matters to you, but to give them information (real information, not just data) that matters to them. Visit dailycandy.com to see an example of what people like to hear.

Why do you only give google juice to your own sites Seth, like Squidoo, and not to non-Seth sites, like dailycandy? Or was that an oversight? I don’t think it was – you keep NoFollow on, which means that people linking to you hand over nice SEO stuff but you don’t give it back. You gotta walk the walk as well as talk the talk Seth dear.

Anyway, I think this is a very Web 2.0 approach.

REAL ESTATE 3.0
Web 3.0 is quite different. Its consumer to consumer. I think it would look like this.

• allow prospective home owners to peruse houses (advertising)
• allow them to bid on a house (eBay style)
• run the legals, the evaluations, the loans and the purchasing all online through an escrow process (think peer to peer loans like Zopa or escrow project management and brokering services like eLance)
• Link into brokering service like plumbers, electricians, and other community suppliers. And yes, Scoble, I found a plumber who blogs!
• At very least the content would be Distributed and not centralised on a host site, even if the actual negotiations are run on a host. Think house ad and floorplans on Facebook, with discussions in Squidoo and bidding on social finance loans on site.

What do you want? A real estate agent who inserts himself/herself into your life, offering office space for community gatherings, and sending you newsletters OR do you want a hands-off service that simply provides all the brokering and escrow services so that you are enabled to do the peer-to-peer buy/sell yourselves?

Web 2.0 is about marketing people wanting ‘in’ on the conversation, host to consumer (B2C and C2B). Web 3.0 is a distributed world where the Social Network host is hands off and enabling consumer to consumer (C2C).

And yes, Seth I understand what you are saying – but you are looking at it as a marketing person while I am looking as a social network person.

Lee, I’m busy, stop sending me stuff to respond to 😛

By the way Seth, before you respond on here, please think about something? If everytime something is written in the blogosphere about you, or Squidoo, or another of your projects, you pop up and respond, like a good little well trained marketing 2.0 person, how long do you think it will be before bloggers catch on? And create a “Get Seth Commenting” Blog Carnival? Bless you for your eagerness, but please don’t teach others to respond to everything ever said about them on the ‘net. Sometimes it just inflames a situation that should be ignored *shows scares from flame wars* . A ‘real relationship’ is knowing when to initiate, when to respond and when to just turn the TV up and ignore. 🙂

Lee, that’s what I was talking about: a blogger responds to comments on his or another’s blog, because a blog is functionally a one-to-many channel, and engagement is the name of the game. A social network host enables many-to-many discussions but should rarely intercede – even if the discussion is about the social network itself. Jumping everytime someone whinges about your site is making a rod for your own back, if you have a large network. Anyway normally the consumers will engage in supporting you – with mixed results. 🙂