Real Estate Connect - Day 2

Another day down at Real Estate Connect. Several interesting presentations and panels took place this morning including a fascinating talk about virtual Real Estate by David Fleck, VP Marketing at Second Life/Linden Lab. Also, Brad Inman admits he would rather have dinner with Realtors than UC Berkeley faculty; "Realtors are more interesting."

Happiness: What’s it worth?

• Daniel Gilbert, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and author of Stumbling on Happiness, talked on the topic of happiness. One great takeaway I got was that following both bad AND good events, your feelings due to the event never last as long as you expected.

The Internet Real Estate Ecosystem: Where do you fit in?

• Sami Inkinen, COO at Trulia spoke about the changing real estate landscape. Where do you fit in? Everyone who provides value to the consumer has a spot — what is yours?

Virtual Real Estate:

• David Fleck from Linden Labs, who operate the virtual online world, Second Life, discussed how people buy and sell VIRTUAL property online with REAL money! I found "virtual jail"  interesting — people who need policing in Second Life, are sent to jail, which in that world is a giant corn field.

TurnHere.com’s videos were sprinkled between the day’s presentations. There is an "Ice Bar" in Iceland that is actually minus 5 degrees Celsius inside — made entirely of ice. Who knew?

Fight, Flight, Partner?

• This panel consisted of Dottie Herman, CEO of Prudential Douglas Elliman, Steve Ozonian, CEO of Help-U-Sell.com, Lennox Scott, President of John L Scott, and the newcomer to the industry, Justin McCarthy from Google. Dottie made two main points. 1) People want to pay for a value added service and 2) Agents need to partner with their brokers and co-brand themselves. Lennox Scott predicted that we’re now 3-4 years into the revolution to create a more efficient transaction for the consumer — stating that a revolution takes 7 years. According to Justin, "the market is more real now."

Pioneering a new Brokerage Model:

• Glenn Cohen, founder and CEO of Expert Realty, talked about some changes to come in the industry. No surprise, but IDX, SEO, and PPC are all very important for the future of the industry. His prediction that commissions will drop to 4.5% from their present level of 5.2% was dropped on an unsuspecting audience.

Innovative New Business Models:

One cool feature of the conference was that 6 entrepreneurs gave elevator pitches to the audience. Rather than summarize each business plan, I encourage you to click though and to these businesses hoping to impact the industry:

• CityCribs was represented by Gea Elika.
• Ron Hornbaker spoke for PropSmart
• Rajesh Navar — LiveDeal
• Michael Smith, the CEO of Streeteasy, has done some great things in the very complicated New York City property market.
• Keith Teare — Edgeio
• and Joe Zekas from YoChicago. Joe made sure the audience knew that, in Chicago, it is pronounced YOChicago.

While manning our "Demopod," lots of interesting people introduced themselves, many of whom were Realtors interested in using our API on their web sites. Thanks to everyone for stopping by. I wish the other attendees here in San Francisco a fun, and safe, evening!