Words: Ashley Rigg
Published: 6th March 2008
The future of real estate marketing
Rich Barton, founder and CEO of
pioneering US real estate portal Zillow.com talks
here about setting up a real estate business. Towards the end of the video, he makes three interesting points about current and future trends in online real estate marketing.
- Web 2.0 (a common buzz word surrounding new property portals) is just a label for new stuff on the web. It has two characteristics:
- It has a social dynamic, like user-generated content, blogs and social networking.
- Openness: Web 2.0 sites make their functionality available to share with other websites and developers in return for branding and links.
- His big idea for the future is one shared by many real estate entrepreneurs. It is to harness the passion that people have for their homes when talking to others offline and bring it online to create a real estate society on the web.
- From a technology perspective, he says real estate is one of the best applications for the upcoming revolution in mobile computing and communication. He doesn’t elaborate but it is not difficult to envisage the possibilities even with current technology. Just imagine a combination of the best features of the Blackberry (GPS) with that of an iPhone (images and video). Researching property purchases on your mobile is likely to become the easiest way for overseas property buyers to find what they are looking for.