In this week’s Real Estate Sales and Technology news, we look at Real Estate Tech Media Mergers, How to Survive in the Age of Real Estate Listing Portals, Funding for Real Estate Technology Startups, How to Create a Successful Real Estate Website, and How to Become a Real Estate Technology Rockstar with Paperless Agent.
Real Estate Tech Media Mergers – The New Real Estate Acquisition
While people are still debating the meaning of Zillow’s acquisition of Trulia last week, Real Estate Technology Media companies are now joining forces this week. The News Funnel, a fast-growing content platform for the real estate industry, announced yesterday that it has acquired the CRE App Review, a popular resource for professionals looking for information about trending commercial real estate technology applications and services.
CRE App Review has served as a hub for the discovery and discussion of the latest commercial real estate websites and technology. And over the last several years, the News Funnel has collected over 3000 news sources from the media, real estate companies, blogs, video and market research for commercial real estate professionals.
With the merging & evolving trend of real estate technology movers and shakers like Zillow/Trulia, the News Funnel is now continuing to target additional acquisitions to secure their position as the largest content platform in the real estate industry featuring media, company content and blogs.
So whether you are looking for fresh content for your real estate blog, or just wanting to see who these new real estate tech startups are evolving together, check out The News Funnel & the CRE App Review.
How to Survive in the Age of Real Estate Listing Portals
One of the advantages of the big Zillow/Trulia partnership has brought to the real estate industry has been to highlight our new dependency on listing portals. We’ve yet to see the full impact of this evolution of this real estate technology. However, the National Association of Realtors is now urging Relators to demand better terms from listing portals. The NAR released a “special report” this week to their Internal News Service.
Leaders of the National Association of Realtors are advising members to get tough in their negotiations with real estate portals, outlining steps that members can take, such as:
- Demanding that the identities of listing brokers and agents be prominently displayed.
- Demanding timely, “fresh” listing display.
- Not allowing their listings to be modified.
- Not allowing co-mingling of their listings with “FSBOs” (for-sale-by-owner properties).
- Demanding preservation of copyright notices on their listings.
- Understand the terms of use they agree to for their listings.
- Demand that your provider highlight and promote the term Realtor.
To read the original NAR report click here or for more commentary & coverage head on over to Inman or GeekEstate.
Funding for Real Estate Technology startups in 2014
According to a new report from real estate consulting firm RE:Tech, investors funneled $743.7 million globally into commercial real estate technology startups between the second quarter of 2012 and the second quarter of 2014. NYC firms actually saw more funding deals than their Silicon Valley counterparts.
Among the New York City’s top magnets for investor cash: online marketplace Honest Buildings, which raised $11.5 million; cloud-based leasing portfolio management company View the Space, which received more than $7 million; 3D technology firm Floored, which pulled in $6.4 million; and “crowdsourced comps” firm CompStak, which raised $5.7 million. (The Real Deal featured many of these companies last year in a story on the industry’s hottest tech entrepreneurs.)
The report doesn’t include the money raised by startups in the real estate crowdfunding domain, such as Fundrise, which pulled in $31 million from industry giants like Silverstein Properties, and Realty Mogul, a firm that attracted more than $10 million from big investors, including Canaan Partners.
The commercial real estate technology space does appear to be in its infancy. The report states that nearly 54 percent of the investments made in the two-year period were seed money. About 32 percent of the investments were Series A investments. “They’ve realized that the [real estate] industry is rather antiquated,” CompStak CEO Michael Mandel said, “and that this is a huge market opportunity.” Read more over at The Real Deal or watch a great example of crowdfunding with $31 million dollar Fundrise below:
How to Create a Successful Real Estate Website
Online Real Estate Magazine BiggerPockets just posted a step by step article for creating or upgrading your Real Estate website into a lead generation powerhouse in their article “The 16 Elements of a Highly Effective Real Estate Website”. One of the seemingly obvious, but often overlooked tips was: Simple, Clear Navigation. This step also contained a helpful infographic from Crazy Egg for Eye Training 101: How Your Eyes Move on a Website.
They also reference another older yet still very relevant article on 4 Steps to Creating a Successful Real Estate Website. One of the suggestions isPicking a Real Estate Website URL – What Really Matters including 8 Quick Tips for Naming your Website. While keyword URLS can help, ideally you eventually want your name branded to your service so a keyword URL would be irrelevant. Zillow.com would be a great example. What on earth does that name have to do with Real Estate? Now that’s good marketing!
Clearview’s Tuesday Tech Tip: Paperless Agent
The Paperless Agent helps train real estate professionals to become self sufficient in the latest real estate technology. Saving you time, money and sanity…the Paperless Agent provides an amazing library of online training videos to help you become a real estate technology rockstar. If you are in the beginning stages of coming on board to the real estate technology revolution, this is the perfect training ground for you. Or if you are a seasoned expert, there are plenty of videos that can provide new & overlooked tech tips.
The Paperless Agent covers iPad for real estate training, Evernote for real estate training, Digital Listing Presentation training, a Technology Coaching Club and much more. To access a free Tech Lesson on must have apps for realtors or to get more information about Paperless Agent, click here.
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