Blog > Posts from July 2008

Being out at Inman Connect last week, I had far more time than usual to think about the big picture—what are we doing? How is it different? What’s wrong with the current system? Several themes emerged from this thinking, and I don’t have time for all of them right now. So I will start with one...

Online real estate directs consumers toward less-good agents.

Think of the pool of local real estate agents as a pyramid, with the best agents at the top. They are experienced, knowledgeable, professional, and businesslike; they are an active part of a local community of other top agents. If you were the ultimate real estate insider, these are the agents with whom you would work.

They actually do help you sell homes for more, buy better homes for less and solve problems when they inevitably arise. In short, they really do all the things NAR says every Realtor does.

At the bottom are the opposite kind of agents: newbies, part-timers, outdated old-timers, low-volume, slow-volume, no-volume. Basically, they’ve got a license. Over 2.77 million people in the U.S. do—what are the chances that any particular one of them is really good at their job?

In between is everyone else—OK, average, and pretty-good agents who do their job and move buyers, sellers and homes through the system.

So there’s your pyramid, probably similar to that of any other field or occupation. Take doctors or architects or IT guys and the breakdown works the same way (though the ease of entry to real estate caused the bottom of our pyramid to swell between 2002 and 2006). In all cases, it’s pretty obvious who you want to work with, right? The question is just how you identify and find them.

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Last month, Sawbuck was named a finalist for an Inman Innovator Award for Most Innovative Brokerage. Inman News is the leading voice in real estate news, and the awards are given out annually at their Inman Connect conference in San Francisco. In 2006 and 2007, the winners in our category were gigantic brokers Remax and Coldwell Banker.

As you would think, we were really excited to be nominated. We're just getting started in this business, having launched only five months ago, and serving just one market so far (our home market of Washington, DC). Though we have big plans, and feel great about our consumer-friendly model of making buying or selling easier and less expensive, we didn't expect to really be on Inman's radar at this stage of the game.

But on Friday, a strange thing happened...we won!

The awards are the last order of business on the last day of the conference, and Most Innovative Brokerage is the very first category. I was sitting in a special little section at the front with the other finalists and stood up when they read our company names. When they announced the winner, to my surprise, our logo popped onto the giant screens and our name was called. I hopped up a few steps, shook Brad Inman's hand and walked away with a petite, but very nice (and dense) trophy of crystal and marble.

I was quite sure we were not going to win, so it was a most pleasant surprise. The representatives of the other finalists were super-gracious, and many people came up afterwards to congratulate me/us. Afterwards, I made sure to thank the folks from Inman, and let them know we would work hard over the next year to make sure they didn't regret their choice.

Hopefully, this unexpected award will help us as we grow, move into new markets and attract new agents and customers. While we're just getting started, we're onto something.

I spent the last four days in San Francisco at Inman Connect 2008, the leading real estate-meets-technology conference of the year. For a down year for the real estate industry, it certainly seemed crowded to me (through it was my first time, so I don't have a benchmark). While the sample might be somewhat skewed, it sounded like many brokers and agents were using this downturn to redirect traditional advertising dollars online. So maybe that helps explain the turnout.

There was a lot said about blogging, both by agents for consumers and among those in the real estate and technology industries. This obviously served as a reminder that I my blogging has been woefully infrequent of late. So I'm going to try harder.

Another discussion of one of my personal shortcomings came from Merlin Mann, the keynote speaker, proprietor of 43folders.com, and proponent of Inbox Zero. In short, he tries to give people (like me, and probably you) who can be overwhelmed by email a way out. He has a fairly simple and specific system to accomplish this, but it only works with a parallel attitude adjustment about what email is and is not. Worth a look.

I attended many sessions; as expected, some were more interesting or useful than others. One packed session was titled "Brokers & MLS vs. Listings Aggregators." Basically, it was a discussion of the merits of listing aggregators like Trulia and Zillow, and whether they were friend or foe of real estate brokers and their MLSs. It could have been really interesting, but while Trulia and some brokers and MLSs who supply them listings data were on the panel, there was really no one on the other side of the issue.

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