Now it’s real estate’s turn.

Or at least that seems to be the case in what could be a developing feud between real estate agents and online listing services such as Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com.

As these sites have risen in prominence, real estate agents are starting to push back, especially as they find it difficult to live without them.

In protest, a small number of agents have started to pull their listings from the sites. (In one case, an agent rambled on about the issue in a seven-and-a-half minute video on YouTube.)

A new white paper issued this week suggests that the topic is gaining momentum.

The report, written by VHT, which sells photography and video services to agents, concluded that agents are no longer competing against each other. The competition, rather, is “the fast-growing, third-party ecosystem of listing aggregators, online publishers, virtual tour providers, advertising networks and media companies that are dominating search engine results in order to capture online leads.”

It goes on to suggest that the remedy is for real estate agents to become savvy online marketers, and to drive sales leads through their own Web sites, rather than advertising on Zillow or Trulia.

A Zillow spokeswoman says only one brokerage so far has pulled its listings — the same one that produced the YouTube video — and a Trulia spokesman said they’ve “only seen a couple” of agents remove listings.

Seattle-based Zillow went public in July, raising $70 million; San Francisco-based Trulia is expected to seek an IPO sometime this year. Realtor.com which is operated by the National Association of Realtors, is owned by Move, Inc., a publicly traded company.

“We are not their competition,” said Trulia’s spokesman Ken Shuman. “We are a marketing outlet with 20 million unique people coming ever month who are looking to buy or to rent a home.”

So, while the practice does not seem to be widespread, agents are increasingly vocal about the shift in power that has occurred over the past decade from real estate agents to online Internet providers.

Indeed, Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com do get the majority of online traffic.

In January, Zillow controlled 37 percent of online visits; Trulia controlled 27 percent; and Realtor.com controlled 25 percent, according to the report. The remaining 11 percent was split among dozens of brokerage firms, such as Century 21, Coldwell Banker, Keller Williams, Prudential and many others combined.

“As an industry, brokerages have done a poor job of making themselves and their Web content visible to search engines,” wrote VHT’s CEO Alex Zoghlin, who authored the report.

But to understand what’s going on, it requires some basic knowledge of how the industry works, so let’s step back for a moment for a brief overview.

The Multiple Listing Service (MLS) is a list of most homes for sale in the U.S.

Real estate brokers receive the list and can post it on their Web sites. But other sites, like Zillow and Trulia, are not brokers and therefore don’t have access (unless they strike agreements with the different MLS divisions across the country).

Up until now, Zillow and Trulia have used a mix of sources, including agents, who volunteer to post their listings on their Web site for free.

Zillow and Trulia then make money, in part, by selling advertising to agents, who want leads for home buyers and sellers.

But it’s not exactly clear what has some agents so upset, and more importantly, it’s difficult to separate fact from fiction.

ARG Abbott Realty Group broker and president Jim Abbott, who recorded that YouTube video, lists a number of reasons for pulling his listings from the sites. He says the information is often display incorrectly, or is out-of-date; other claims he makes include theft of intellectual property and poor customer service.

What Abbott didn’t come right out and say is that he is not happy with the shift in power, or that the sites are profiting off the information that agents give them.

But late last year, Edina Realty of Edina, Minn., was willing to say it: The company said it pulled its listings because it was unfair that the agents are giving up their listings for free to the sites, which were then profiting off those same agents.

But according to Zillow’s spokeswoman Cynthia Nowak, that is not entirely true.

“What many agents don’t understand is that it is completely free to receive prominent placement on their listings,” Nowak said. “All they have to do is sign up for a free Zillow profile and verify their contact information, and their name, picture, contact info, etc. appears at the top of their listings.”

Still, to pull a listing off Zillow or Trulia at this point is somewhat anti-homeowner. The home’s seller is usually looking to reach the largest possible audience in order to sell their home — and is not interested in the politics of placing listings online.

An agent in Phoenix Jay Thompson, who goes by the handle “The Phoenix Real Estate Guy,” sided with Zillow. In a long blog post, Thompson broke down each one of Abbott’s points and explained why he disagreed.

On one point, Abbott said that syndication sites use peer pressure to sell advertising to agents.

Thompson’s response: “If you don’t like the fact that syndication sites sell advertising, that’s fine. Don’t buy it. Peer pressure? Put on your big girl panties and stand up to the peer pressure and do what YOU think is right.”

But who knows if his statements were entirely unbiased? Two months later, Zillow hired The Phoenix Real Estate Guy as its director of industry outreach and social media.

But at least one part of his blog post is true, no matter where he works.

He asked, “Is there an ‘anti-syndication movement’ afoot in the real estate vertical? Maybe. Maybe not. Only time will tell where this is headed.”

Indeed, it is not clear. After all, this might be another example of an industry playing catch-up with the Internet.

Zynga bought its San Francisco HQ building for $228 million, the company said in a regulatory filing, which I have embedded below.

Having enjoyed a party or two in the space at 650 Townsend Street over the years — even before it housed the online gaming company, I vaguely recall an epic Devo concert there during Web 1.0 — I can tell you it is a nice space and that Zynga has fixed it up real pretty.

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus — for those who might not know — is a bit of a real estate mogul himself, having housed Zynga and other start-ups in previous buildings he owned.

This one’s all Zynga’s, which sources said will give the fast-growing company — which just went public — an ability to lock in affordable growth space and also host community events.

I vote to bring back Devo ASAP, now that we can trash the place without worrying about the landlord.

ZNGA-20120305-8K-20120302

LivingSocial can now add real estate to that list, too.

The Washington, D.C.-based company, which is the second-largest deals company after Groupon, says it has secured a 28,000-square-foot six-story building to host a number of activities and classes, such as cooking, painting, photography and yoga.

Doug Miller, LivingSocial’s SVP of New Initiatives said, “In our state-of-the-art facility, local merchants get the resources, space and audience they need to scale their businesses and reach new customers. We believe this is the next step in the evolution of local commerce.”

The building, at 918 F Street, has a culinary kitchen, a demonstration kitchen for 36 people, and three flexible spaces that can be adapted for dining, dancing, classes, workshops and more. A basement bar serves as a venue for mixology classes or beer and wine tastings.

The inaugural event will be a dining experience by Mike Isabella, a “Top Chef All-Stars” runner-up, who will be giving a sneak peek of his new restaurant, which will open in the spring.

A close competitor to Groupon, LivingSocial has experimented with a number of different programs. Late last year, it announced Room Service, which delivers high-end meals to your door — complete with dishes, candles and cloth napkins.

Room Service kicked off with one restaurant, which was offering two set menus for $66 each. A lot of kinks still had to be worked out, such as how to keep plates hot or cold, and how the restaurant would get the dinnerware back the next day.

However, it appears the service never took off. LivingSocial is no longer accepting reservations, and the Room Service page is no longer live. A spokesperson confirms that it is currently reevaluating the service with restaurants.

In 2011, LivingSocial lost $558 million on revenue of $245 million, due to aggressive acquisition costs.

In July, the Salt Lake City-based company, which is also known as Overstock, discontinued the year-old Eziba, a boutique site that mimicked flash sales sites like Gilt Groupe, Rue La La and One Kings Lane.

Meanwhile, on its homepage, the company has also been cutting back. After six years, it shut down its auctions category, which was similar to eBay; earlier this year, it shuttered real estate, which allowed people to browse homes for sale and receive discounts on real estate services.

And finally, one of its newest ventures is also on hold.

In March, O.co launched a vacations tab, which offered discounted hotel rooms. It is expected to relaunch later next month with a new partner.

In an interview, O.co President Jonathan Johnson explained the cutbacks.

He said that auctions and real estate in particular didn’t seem to fit its model. The two categories weren’t things you could easily add to the shopping cart and buy right away. The real estate tab was a referral service, and auctions required haggling.

Meanwhile, Johnson said, Eziba cannibalized sales from its main site.

Eziba was a modern boutique that featured large photos of the products, in contrast to Overstock’s more straightforward, traditional e-commerce layout, which stressed searching for items displayed in small thumbnail pictures. Eziba offered a dozen or so products at a time by email, as compared to the hundreds of thousands of items found daily on Overstock.

“We watch and see what competitors are doing,” Johnson said. “We thought private sales sites would be good to experiment with … What we learned was that it wasn’t bringing us any new customers.”

Johnson concluded that they could offer the same deals on Overstock.

He also said manufacturers were concerned that by offering discounts on items for Eziba, it was hurting future sales over the next week or month.

“We did not see the lift in Eziba that we were hoping,” he added.

The 12-year-old company is stuck with a model that surfaced when shopping first became prevalent on the Internet. With 2010 revenues of $1.1 billion, it all of a sudden appears out of style compared to smaller start-ups that are able to raise millions of dollars in venture capital.

And even while those more trendy companies get all of the attention, a majority of sales still are occurring on traditional megasites, like eBay, Amazon and the Overstocks of the world.

One business Johnson said the company investigated but never launched was daily deals.

“We did some development on the Groupon model,” he said. “But we aren’t bullish on the model. The merchants we talked to said it brings in a nonloyal, coupon-using customer that doesn’t come back. I wish them (Groupon) the best, but there’s 600 other Groupon-like competitors. It wasn’t the right time to say ‘me, too.’”

The vacations tab is expected to relaunch in December with a new provider, and will offer a larger array of products, including hotels, rental cars and airfare. It will rejoin three other categories — shopping, cars and insurance. In a note to users, it says: “We promise we aren’t lying by the pool or sitting under a beach cabana, but are hard at work exploring even better vacation destinations, packages and exclusive deals.”

The company also continues to expand internationally. Today, it ships to 91 countries, and in the next two to four weeks, expects to add another 23 countries. The shift from using O.co instead of Overstock was to support visitors in more languages.

In the three months ended Sept. 30, the company’s revenues fell 2 percent to $239.7 million, from $245.4 million in the year-ago period. Its losses also widened to nearly $8 million from $3 million.

The company attributed the decrease in revenues to several reasons, including lower conversion rates, 8 percent fewer new customers compared to last year, and its rebranding efforts.

Flint — who, ironically, is a renter in the high-priced city of San Francisco — said Trulia is spending time to build out its management team and is currently looking for a CFO.

Earlier this week, it appointed Dr. Jed Kolko as chief economist. Kolko will lead the company’s research department and will also comment on market trends.

Flint said the San Francisco-based company has raised $33 million in venture capital and was no longer interested in seeking private equity. “We are really focused on the IPO,” he said.

He declined to provide a timeline, or to confirm reports from last week that Trulia would seek an IPO in 2012.

Now that one of the company’s closest competitors is public, Flint knows exactly how well Trulia stacks up. “It makes me even more excited about the opportunity,” he said. “While we compete, I’ve been happy about them telling the story to the market.”

Flint says the company has 300 full-time employees, attracts 17 million unique visitors to its site every month, and has been breaking even for 12 months.

In comparison, Zillow has 264 employees and 25 million unique monthly visitors [up from the 20.8 million I pulled from its latest quarterly filing.]. In its first quarter as a public company, it also recorded its first profit. Zillow priced its IPO at $20 a share. Immediately after, its stock soared to as much as $45 a share, but it is trading today at $27 a share. It is valued at $763 million.

Move, Inc. is another public company in the space, and manages the Realtor.com site. It is trading at $1.53 a share and has a market cap of $244 million.

Flint said Trulia’s biggest differentiation in the space is the amount of user-generated content it receives, including agent recommendations. It recently rolled out estimated home valuations to compete with Zillow’s Zestimate service.

Today, it is live only in the San Francisco area, but Flint said Trulia made an effort to make that more social by allowing people vote on whether they agree or disagree with the value of a home by clicking thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

The Seattle real estate company reported that revenues totaled $15.8 million, more than doubling from $7.3 million in the second quarter 2010.

The company also reported a net profit of $1.6 million, representing the first time the company has been profitable on a quarterly basis. In the year-ago period, Zillow lost $2 million.

In addition, the company said its monthly unique users during the quarter jumped 93 percent to a record 20.8 million, and that in July, it marked another record traffic month with 23.2 million unique users to both its Web sites and mobile applications.

Zillow’s largest source of revenue comes from agents, who subscribe for special listings. The company said premier agent subscribers totaled 13,385 as of the end of June, up 180 percent from 4,777 at the end of second quarter 2010.

The company sold 3.46 million shares to raise $70 million. It will also complete a private placement, totaling $5 million, and will have the option of selling 500,000 additional shares, depending on demand.

The Seattle-based company, which aggregates real-estate listings and mortgage information, trades under the ticker symbol “Z.”

Zillow expects to use the proceeds for general corporate purposes, including working capital, sales and marketing activities.

The company has a history of losses, spanning the past five years. In 2010, it lost $6.8 million on revenues of $30.5 million, and in the first three months of 2011, it lost $826,000 on revenues of $11.3 million.

Zillow is known for coining the term “Zestimates,” which estimate home values. It covers nearly 100 million U.S. homes today, and has also added rental estimates. It primarily generates revenues from local real-estate professionals.

A year ago, the 75,000-square-foot building at 410 Townsend St., near AT&T Park, had filled to capacity with young tech companies, after hovering at a 60 percent vacancy rate in late 2008 as the financial crisis hit. Now many of those start-ups have grown so much they have had to move out to bigger digs, while some remaining tenants have cannibalized the space.

“In 30 years in real estate, this is the fastest-growing building we’ve ever had,” said Chris Economou, the San Francisco leasing manager for PMI Properties, the landlord for 410 Townsend. “We’ve never had start-ups that have gone from 10 people to 200 so fast.” He adds that PMI is now able to charge rents of $34 to $35 a square foot at the property, up from $18 to $20 a square foot 18 months ago.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The Seattle-based company, which aggregates real estate listings online, has priced its IPO between $12 and $14 a share. Once the sale is complete, it will have 27,058,139 outstanding shares. At $14 a share, the company will be worth $378.8 million.

The company plans to raise up to $55.7 million, not including over allotments, if any. In conjunction with the offering, it expects to secure an additional $5.5 million from Technology Crossover Ventures, which will buy shares at the same price as the IPO.

Zillow expects to trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol “Z.”

Its two closest competitors are privately held Trulia and Move, Inc., which has a public market capitalization of $355.5 million.

The company announced the acquisition last month, but only disclosed the price in a document filed with the SEC today.

The Seattle-based real estate listings company, which filed for an IPO after the acquisition took place, did not actually name the company in the filing, but said “it acquired all of the operating assets of a real estate agent and rental property manager marketing service company.”

That matches the description of Postlets, which aggregates listings and distributes them across a number of sites, including Zillow and even some of its competitors, such as Trulia.

In the filing, Zillow said it intends to offer the service as part of its platform for real estate professionals as an additional tool for marketing their listings across the web. In addition to the cash, Zillow also paid with 700,000 shares of common stock.

Zillow is seeking to raise $57 million in the public markets, including a $5 million private placement. Also disclosed in the updated filing was the information that the company expected to be listed on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “Z.”

While other sales positions have been hit hard by the recession, ranging from newspaper reps to real estate agents, it turns out not every one is losing out.

Fueled by hundreds of millions in capital and real revenues, the daily deal phenomenon is creating thousands of new sales opportunities–and the competition is heating up for trained workers with the contacts and experience.

Founded in 2007, LivingSocial has 1,350 total employees and Groupon, which has only been around since 2008, has more than 7,000. That’s not including all of the copycats, which also must hire local representatives in order to be live in a particular market. National providers are also flooding into the space, including well-established companies like Google, Facebook and Yelp.

But these aren’t the stereotypical door-to-door salesmen with briefcases full of samples. They carry iPads loaded with flashy presentations and are pitching something entirely new.

They are trying to sell local restaurants, spas, and yoga studios on the idea that in exchange for offering a steep discount, new customers will walk in their doors.

The frothy local sales market has been noticeable for Jessie Burrough and Harry Jigamian.

Burrough joined LivingSocial more than a year ago, becoming the company’s 24th employee after working as a commercial real estate broker for years. She is now responsible for some of the trendiest and most-trafficked neighborhoods in Seattle.

“It’s super fun, and it’s exciting when you believe in what you are selling. I remember thinking, this is a no-brainer, and that it is so easy to sell. I loved the idea,” she said.

For Jigamian, the decision was also easy, though he’d never heard of LivingSocial before they approached him.

He was a newspaper sales rep for the online-only Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He now oversees LivingSocial’s local sales office as general manager. “I did not know what LivingSocial was, but I knew that online was where everything was going. Now the only two questions are, ‘Where does it go from here, and how high does it go?’ It was all too much to say no to.”

If you aren’t familiar, companies like LivingSocial and its larger competitor, Groupon, offer a voucher for a steep discount, usually amounting to 50 percent off. Customers pay upfront for the coupon. Half of that revenue goes to LivingSocial, and the other half goes to the advertiser, who will end up making 25 percent on the overall transaction.

Normally, deals aren’t valid until a certain number are sold, sort of like buying bulk at Costco. That’s where the “group-buying” term comes from.

While it’s a large chunk to swallow, the daily deal companies want merchants to look at it as akin to placing an ad in the newspaper–except instead of hoping people see the ad and come into your establishment, you will know exactly how many people paid for one and how many redeem it.

Mostly, the focus has been on local commerce; increasingly, it’s expanding into national brands and advertisers, opening the door to nationally-focused sales people as well. (In a separate post today, I wrote about LivingSocial’s latest nationwide promotion on flowers for FTD.com after its prior offer on Groupon failed.)

Mitch Spolan, SVP National Sales for LivingSocial, said he decided to leave his job at Yahoo and join LivingSocial because, with group buying, “there’s no modeling and no guessing. You know when someone buys a voucher that they are fundamentally buying a ticket to come in and see that store.” As Spolan helps to build out LivingSocial’s national sales team, he says the concept makes it easy to recruit. “The sales people understand that. There’s such a desire to be in this space.”

Still, closing a sale can be difficult on the national or local level.

Some merchants have been burned after selling thousands of vouchers, and then losing money on every customer who walks in the door. For a small retailer with low margins, it can run them out of business.

Here’s a look at a day in the life of Burrough and Jigamian as they make two sales calls, and a video in which they explain how they got into the business.

The first stop was at a restaurant called Re:Public, located in the hip new South Lake Union neighborhood that is being revitalized by Microsoft Millionarie Paul Allen, but has been slow to take off. Their second stop was at the Garage, a warehouse on Seattle’s alternative Capitol Hill, which has been converted into an over-21 pool hall and bowling alley.

Re:public, which is not yet a year old, has never done a daily deal before, but the Garage was a veteran of the process, having participated in a LivingSocial voucher a year ago and experimenting with a handful of smaller competitors since. It has not worked with Groupon.

Re:Public

On an early afternoon, before the happy-hour crowds start to filter into the bar and restaurant that serves upscale dishes like grilled octopus and oxtail ragu, Burrough and Jigamian make an appointment to see co-owner Matt Greenup.

To get the conversation rolling, Burrough tries to get to know him by asking about the business.

Greenup explains that they were one of the first restaurants in an unestablished neighborhood. They opened before the streetcar ran from the downtown core and before Amazon.com relocated thousands of workers to new buildings nearby. It’s been hard, but they’ve also done a good job at filling its 115 seats in the early evening and on weekends. But not late at night when the vibe goes from upbeat to lowkey.

Enough about Re:Public. Now, Burrough introduces LivingSocial to Greenup.

On her iPad, she breezes through a presentation, moving from one slide to the next with the swipe of a finger. She keeps it light by joking that next she’ll be performing an interpretive dance routine. It’s a joke that makes this more of a friendly situation than a business meeting.

Some of the highlights:

• We have 10-plus million subscribers.
• We have 200,000 subscribers in Seattle.
• Our subscribers are between the ages of 20 and 40 with extra money to spend.
• You get a check from us in addition to 24 hours of exposure on our site.
• You get great social media exposure through our “me plus three” offer, which encourages people to share a deal with others.

But Greenup has concerns.

Re:Public has stayed away from discounts because their food is one of their highest costs. ”It’s a financial decision for us as to whether we want to cut into our profits,” he said. “If five tables are getting 75 percent off, that’s a big difference in return.”

To resolve those fears, Burrough has solutions.

She said they could make dinner reservations mandatory to ensure that a large number of LivingSocial participants came in on the same night. The description could also encourage users to come late at night to fill empty tables.

Jigamian adds: “You are already offering discounts at happy hour.”

But the pressure stops there.

Burrough offers to keep in touch and to send some ideas to him over email.

The Garage

Now a hardened veteran of the process, owner Mike Bitondo was way beyond needing a flashy iPad presentation, and knew exactly what questions to ask.

Burrough acted as if they were friends who were catching up for the first time in awhile, and she had a lot to update him on with what’s changed over the past year at LivingSocial.

“We are better at managing the online redemption online,” she said.

Relieved to hear it, Bitondo said: “I’m sure that was the number one thing people asked for.” If only you could go back in time, he said, so that his 70 employees spread across six different bars wouldn’t have to continue manually checking off some of the 1,200 vouchers that still haven’t been redeemed.

“Only if you have a DeLorean,” she said with dead-pan humor.

Back to the future, she quickly adds that they do have smartphone apps, and secret shoppers who will report back on their experiences of being a patron. They also have free advice on how to update their Facebook page, or will even shoot a video for some of their best clients.

Overwhelmed by copycats calling him, Bitondo goes on a bit of a rant:

He’s heard from sites focused on families to ones that focus on giving back a percentage of the profits to good causes. The phone calls are nearly daily. “My big turn-off is that these people think they are geniuses, and that they have this really good idea. But in reality they want to take a large commission for sending out a mass email. It’s a transparent concept and they pretend to have this big facade about how great it is.”

Having said that, he’s willing to consider doing another deal in the slow season with someone he’s already dealt with. ”I have 40,000 square feet. It’s hard to fill a 1,200-person venue every day.”

He can only guess how many will sell this time now that LivingSocial is far less obscure. “I’m scared to think how much we might do this time,” he said.

For nearly a full day’s work, Burrough left empty-handed, but convinced that both would participate. The last we checked, she was still in discussions with Re:Public and The Garage with paperwork nearly completed for at least one of them.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110502/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-sales-person-on-the-front-lines-of-the-group-buying-frenzy/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110425/realtor-com-puts-house-hunting-ipad-app-on-the-market-for-free/ http://allthingsd.com/20110425/realtor-com-puts-house-hunting-ipad-app-on-the-market-for-free/#comments Mon, 25 Apr 2011 23:47:23 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=4814 The next turf war for real estate information sites has shifted from the Web to mobile devices.

Realtor.com, which is the largest in the highly fragmented market, has launched an iPad application catching up with two of its closest rivals, Trulia and Zillow. Update: The app will actually be live tomorrow.

The top-visited real estate website in March was Realtor.com; however, none of the companies enjoys a commanding lead.  In fact, a new source of traffic for any of them, whether it comes from a mobile phone or tablet, can turn into a first-mover advantage.

Last month, Realtor.com’s market share totaled 6.5 percent, followed by Yahoo! Real Estate and Zillow.com, with 6.04 percent and 5.36 percent respectively. Trulia was listed fourth with 4.63 percent market share, according to Hitwise.

Realtor.com was one of the first online destinations to publish housing listings, and today it is the only one that has a direct relationship with the National Association of REALTORS.

Because of its ties, it gets a direct feed of the information from the Multiple Listing Service and claims to have the most accurate collection of listings because more than 80 percent of all property listings are updated every 15 minutes.

Realtor.com’s parent company, Move Inc., went public in the late ’80s, and last year reported revenues of $197.5 million and a net loss of $20.9 million. Meanwhile, Zillow filed documents with the SEC last week announcing its intentions to go public. In 2010, it’s revenues totaled $30.5 million and it recorded a net loss of $6.8 million. Trulia is also preparing for a public offering.

“Mobile is such an important part of the way you look at real estate now,” said Steve Berkowitz, Move’s CEO. “It’s something we’ve seen grow exponentially year over year.”

The free iPad application is the latest push, joining Realtor.com’s presence on the iPhone, Android and Windows Phone 7. Berkowitz said they don’t break out traffic it receives from mobile devices, but that people are viewing about 10 properties a second from the various apps. So far, mobile traffic does not exceed the PC, but he says the audience is two to three times more engaged than on the Web. Additionally, Realtor.com mobile apps have been downloaded 3.6 million times and active users have increased by 79 percent in the past four months.

With the release of the iPad app, users will be able to use the large screen to search for homes for sale or properties to rent across the country. Users can hunt for homes or open houses based on location, the MLS number, or by city, state, or street name. Listings can be saved to be viewed later, and one feature lets you search a section on the map by circling that area with your fingertip.

As with Realtor.com’s other applications, users can also reach out to an agent to schedule a tour or ask questions. In the past year, Realtor.com mobile apps have contributed to a 240 percent increase in consumer outreach to local agents and in-app communication between agents and consumers has increased by 148 percent since December, Berkowitz said.

Of course, the one downside of the iPad application is that it only works when a user has Wi-Fi connectivity, or if they’ve opted to buy the 3G model.

Realtor.com makes money by charging agents a subscription fee to showcase various listings and make them stand out from the rest. Inclusion in the mobile apps is a part of those rates.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110425/realtor-com-puts-house-hunting-ipad-app-on-the-market-for-free/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110422/twitter-signs-lease-to-stay-in-san-francisco/ http://allthingsd.com/20110422/twitter-signs-lease-to-stay-in-san-francisco/#comments Fri, 22 Apr 2011 20:42:57 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=5841 After much wrangling, Twitter announced today it has signed a lease to stay in San Francisco for the long term. The company is to be the recipient of a payroll tax break in exchange for moving to one of the city’s more troubled neighborhoods. It had previously signed a letter of intent to stay in the city provided such allowances were made to save the company an estimated $20 million in payroll taxes over the next six years.

In a blog post, Twitter said it expected to move to its new Mid-Market office in mid-2012. “San Francisco’s unique creativity and inventiveness is a part of Twitter’s DNA, and we feel like we are part of San Francisco,” the company said.

The Market Square building (formerly known as the San Francisco Furniture Mart) is about eight big blocks away from Twitter’s current SOMA office and will need to be extensively renovated before Twitter can move in. The building was bought last month by Shorenstein Properties for $110 million.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110422/twitter-signs-lease-to-stay-in-san-francisco/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110411/could-groupon-save-the-real-estate-market/ http://allthingsd.com/20110411/could-groupon-save-the-real-estate-market/#comments Mon, 11 Apr 2011 20:45:30 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=4378 Groupon has proven to be a great way to increase awareness and traffic to local businesses. But what about breathing new life into a sluggish real-estate market?

Chicago-based real estate agency Dream Town is hoping that’s the case with its weeklong $25 deal offering $975 off your next home.

The Chicago-area deal stipulates that for $25, you’ll get $1,000 in cash at the time of closing if you buy a house or list a house with Dream Town Realty over the next year. The deal requires the buyer to enter a minimum transaction of $150,000, and of course, there’s a limit of one per household.

Groupon is not disclosing how many vouchers have been purchased so far, but it was successfully “tipped” after 50 were bought. There is no cap on the number that can be sold.

On the company’s Web site, Dream Town bragged that it was offering the “nation’s first ever Groupon offer for Real Estate.”

Dream Town’s co-founder and President Yuval Degani told Chicago Breaking Business: “What we’re trying to do is acquire new customers. We’re not really looking at it as a reduced commission. We’re looking at it as getting customers for life.”

Under that rationale, any business could consider offering a group-buying discount from Groupon, or one of its competitors, such as LivingSocial. Already, we’ve seen major categories emerge, such as travel and family-centric activities.

Could real estate be next?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110411/could-groupon-save-the-real-estate-market/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20110411/sold-zillow-buys-postlets-to-build-up-real-estate-listings/ http://allthingsd.com/20110411/sold-zillow-buys-postlets-to-build-up-real-estate-listings/#comments Mon, 11 Apr 2011 17:55:07 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=4365 Zillow has acquired Postlets, a company that has created a platform that makes it easy for real estate listings to be distributed across the Web.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. But as part of the acquisition, Seattle-based Zillow said Postlets co-founders Asher Matsuda and Raymond Chen will join as full-time employees.

Postlets, which was founded in 2005, has more than 500,000 registered users, who distribute more than 350,000 for-sale and for-rent listings across the U.S.

In the online real estate space, one of the biggest differentiators between Zillow and its competitors–such as Trulia and Realtor.com–can be having the biggest selection of listings, so in many ways, an acquisition that could potentially increase inventory makes sense.

Postlets helps real estate agents, property managers and landlords create listings and send them to 13 real estate and social media Web sites. Zillow said it will continue to let Postlets send listings to the other distribution partners, including San Francisco-based Trulia.

Both Trulia and Zillow are prepping for initial public offerings. Trulia has said it is ready for an IPO with the recent appointment of a COO, and Zillow has reportedly been talking to bankers.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110411/sold-zillow-buys-postlets-to-build-up-real-estate-listings/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110401/zillow-and-trulia-release-house-hunting-applications-for-mobile/ http://allthingsd.com/20110401/zillow-and-trulia-release-house-hunting-applications-for-mobile/#comments Fri, 01 Apr 2011 13:00:38 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=4076 Trulia and Zillow, two of the biggest competitors in the online real estate space, are continuing to push into mobile with the addition of more smartphone applications.

Trulia.com said it is now supporting iPad and Android in addition to iPhone. Zillow has released a BlackBerry application, adding to a portfolio that supports iPad, Windows Phone, Android and iPhone.

Both are trying to offer access to information to home buyers wherever they want it, and not necessarily when they are in front of computers.

Being accessible to users whenever they want the information will be critical as both companies may jockey for an initial public offering in the not too distant future.

San Francisco-based Trulia recently said it was prepping for an IPO as it continued to build out its management team, and Zillow was reportedly in talks with investment bankers to discuss the prospects of going public.

Trulia said the addition of iPad and Android applications builds off a base of more than two million mobile users, who visited Trulia.com from their phones last month. That represents a more than 300 percent increase compared to the year earlier, it said.

Both the iPad and Android apps will be slightly different from what was being offered on the iPhone. The iPad app will use the larger screen real estate to display a color-coded heat map that examines the differences in average listing price and sold price within a city or county. The Android app will allow users to add open houses to their calendars and scan QR codes.

Zillow said with the addition of its BlackBerry app, it will now cover more than 90 percent of smartphone users. The Seattle-based company said its services are used on mobile devices more than 6.5 million times each month with 23 million visits to home detail pages.

In addition to being able to search the BlackBerry app for homes based on a user’s location, they will also be able to filter searches by price, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and other information. Homes will be viewable in satellite or street view, and will feature color photos.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110401/zillow-and-trulia-release-house-hunting-applications-for-mobile/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110318/facebook-twitter-finally-link-up-via-new-york-office-sublease/ http://allthingsd.com/20110318/facebook-twitter-finally-link-up-via-new-york-office-sublease/#comments Fri, 18 Mar 2011 14:49:50 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=30904 The last we heard about Twitter’s New York office was that Twitter did not have a New York office, just a place in New York where people go to work. But now that place that is not an office is going to move–to Facebook’s old office. Twitter will be subleasing Facebook’s old midtown space, which is just down the street from Facebook’s new midtown space, reports BetaBeat.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110318/facebook-twitter-finally-link-up-via-new-york-office-sublease/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110223/apples-n-c-data-center-intended-for-itunes-mobileme/ http://allthingsd.com/20110223/apples-n-c-data-center-intended-for-itunes-mobileme/#comments Wed, 23 Feb 2011 21:05:02 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=58268 Apple’s finally getting ready to light up its North Carolina data center. Asked about the facility during the company’s shareholder meeting today, COO Tim Cook said it’s on track to open this spring, according to reports. And it’s intended to support MobileMe and iTunes, though it’s unclear in what capacity. Certainly that long-rumored cloud-based version of iTunes is one possibility. As I wrote last fall:

Were Apple to create the cloud-based version of iTunes that’s long been rumored–one from which users’ entire iTunes libraries could be streamed–and were it to bolster MobileMe’s iDisk and Gallery services with more robust storage, even the 64GB Air might seem an attractive option to the high-end user. And Apple’s new N.C. data center, which is nearly five times the size of the one it operates in Newark, Calif., may well make both those things possible.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Apple Owns Another 70 Acres Near NC Data Center
• Was Apple Planning on Doubling Its North Carolina Data Center All Along?
• Apple Reaching for the Cloud With MacBook Air and N.C. Data Center
• That’s Apple’s New Data Center? Where’s the Giant Glass Cube?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110223/apples-n-c-data-center-intended-for-itunes-mobileme/feed/ 8 http://allthingsd.com/20110208/inside-facebooks-big-move-to-menlo-park/ http://allthingsd.com/20110208/inside-facebooks-big-move-to-menlo-park/#comments Tue, 08 Feb 2011 09:00:39 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=3322 Facebook is holding a press conference later today to announce it will move to a campus in Menlo Park, Calif., that the company expects to become its long-term home.

News of the move was first reported in the Palo Alto Daily Post in November, and multiple reports of real-estate transactions have been published since. (Those realtors are a chatty bunch!)

Facebook will finally make things official on Tuesday at Menlo Park City Hall.

Its relatively new office complex is on the east side of Highway 101, near the Dumbarton Bridge and not much else. It was formerly occupied by Sun Microsystems, which moved out after being bought by Oracle. When Sun occupied the buildings, most employees had private offices, so Facebook has already been working to tear down walls to create the sort of open floor plan it enjoys at its current office. According to a former Sun employee, every time he’s passed by in recent weeks, the dumpsters have been overstuffed with detritus.

Coincidentally, the address for the new office park is 1601 Willow Road; Facebook’s current main building is 1601 S. California Avenue in Palo Alto.

Facebook’s current offices in Stanford Research Park are definitely less cool than the company’s original home, which was surrounded by restaurants and cafés in downtown Palo Alto. And eastern Menlo Park is much, much less cool. It’s also less bikeable and convenient to public transportation.

But it is considerable consolation to employees that the campus is more accessible to San Francisco, especially relative to most other nearby major tech campuses in the deep south Peninsula and South Bay.

Facebook moved to its current offices in just 2009, and has since expanded down the street to a building on Page Mill Road that currently holds much of its nontechnical staff. The company currently employs 2,000 people, although sources say it expects to grow to as many as 3,500 before the end of 2011.

Staffers don’t have much reason to venture out, since they are fed three gourmet meals a day plus unlimited snacks.

Prior to the 2009 move, Facebook had expanded to 10 or more buildings in downtown Palo Alto, where it had operated since formalizing operations after being founded by Mark Zuckerberg and some of his Harvard classmates in 2004. The company celebrated its seventh birthday last week.

For most of those years, Facebook offered employees a $600 monthly stipend if they lived within a mile of the offices. When the company uprooted itself two years ago to California Avenue and ended the stipend program, many employees moved their homes out of the immediate area. Facebook now offers multiple shuttles per day from San Francisco and from Caltrain stations near its offices.

Moving from Palo Alto’s main business district to a quiet office park owned by Stanford was a big change for the company, but a necessary one after it outgrew the downtown area. Many of the company’s former downtown offices are now occupied by the analytics start-up Palantir.

Those noisy, frequent shuttle buses that come with a swarm of young employees migrating to work every day are among the annoyances that caused much tension with the residential neighborhood that surrounds Facebook’s current office on California Avenue. Residents of the College Terrace neighborhood have persuaded the city of Palo Alto to institute an actively enforced two-hour parking limit, in part to keep Facebooker vehicles contained in the company’s designated parking lots.

Commenters on local news discussion boards complain that these NIMBY folks drove Facebook, its employees’ business and corporate tax revenue out of town. But the reality is that the social networking giant is too big for its current space, which it had said from the beginning was temporary.

The new Menlo Park campus has 57 acres and one million square feet of office space, and Facebook has already reportedly purchased nearby buildings, likely to ensure it has room for further growth.

Plus, fostering a close-knit pod of employees all living within walking distance of the office has become less important as Facebook expanded. With the company saying it’s likely to go public next year, expectations are that many employees will be buying mansions in the suburbs and pieds-à-terre in the city soon enough.

(You might ask, why do I know so much about the minutiae of Facebook’s office locations? Well, in addition to having covered the company for the last six years or so, I grew up in Palo Alto, my mother lives around the block from Facebook’s current offices (where I am now in constant fear of parking tickets) and my husband (as mentioned in my ethics statement) has done research for the company off and on for the last three years.)

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