Author Archives: Dustin Luther

About Dustin Luther

Founder and original blogger on Rain City Guide, Dustin has since started #InterestedIn Marketing where his team provides content and social media services that helps industry experts earn recognition as thought leaders. You can find me on Twitter (@tyr) and LinkedIn (/DustinLuther)

Interview with Mary McKnight of RSS Pieces

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[photopress:mary_mcknight.jpg,full,alignright]As the online face of RSS Pieces, Mary has quickly become an influential member of the real estate blogging community by freely giving her expertise on many technical areas of real estate blogging. She’s fun, interesting, opinionated and intelligent… What more could we ask for?

What inspired you to start blogging?

I actually started blogging years ago on a number of fitness sites because it was a passion of mine and blogging was a way of connecting with other aficionados and sharing my experience and knowledge. That’s where I developed my unique voice and my strategy for driving traffic and penning posts that keep readers coming back. believe me, I crashed and burned many times when I first started blogging. Back then, there wasn’t a manual for how to do it- it was all trial and error. But over time, I came up with a formula that worked. So, when we entered the real estate market with a blogging product, I applied the same successful
formula I used for my fitness articles.

Are there any special topics or issues that you enjoy covering?

I love anything about emerging technologies so topics covering web 3.0, the semantic web, FAOF and SIOC are what I’m interested in covering now. But my roots are definitely tutorial posts. I like writing them and I love knowing that in some way I have helped Realtors to build their knowledge base so they have the tools to grow their business. I’m a big believer in giving people the tools to build their business regardless of which blogging product they use.

[photopress:rss_pieces.jpg,full,alignright]What have you done to personalize your blog?

I always try to use a conversational tone and talk to my readers rather than type at them. I hate to be lectured or read dry technical manuals (which I read a lot of), so I like to keep my posts fun and often campy. I also like to share little bits of my life in posts so readers can connect with me directly. I find that when people feel that they know you and can connect with you they are more likely to contact you or share themselves with you. I receive the most comments and emails from posts where I share bits of my life. Here is an article I wrote about humanizing your blog for intimacy.

Do you have any favorite posts?

By far my favorite post was the meme- I loved watching that virus spread throughout the industry and beyond.

I also have a special place for each post that I penned as a guest host on other blogs because I can’t believe anyone would trust me with their blog!

My favorite tutorial posts are:

What are some of your favorite blogs (real estate or otherwise)?

Good question. A blog has to be stellar to make my feed reader and here
are the top 5 feeds in my reader from Real Estate and Other.

Real Estate:

Other:

What tools/websites do you find most helpful in putting together your blog?

The RSS Pieces system was built by the ground up by our own staff so all the tools we need for SEO and add-on functionality are already inside the system but here are some of my favorite development and free SEO tools:

Macromedia Homesite, Widexl, NUAH, iWebTool, Zen Studio, W3C, RSS Pieces SEO tools. We also are always looking at what the power bloggers are doing and what the industry thinks is on the horizon.

How does blogging fit into the overall marketing of your business?

Blogging is an essential component of our marketing strategy since we are a blogging company. I think as a blogging company you have to prove that your system works by making it work for your own company. I hope that our little blog does show clients and prospective bloggers that you can build success with blogging in a fairly short period of time through strategic content, a little bit of home grown marketing, quality SEO and a lot of attitude.

What plans do you have to improve your blog over this next year?

  • Implementation of the semantic web in our blogging platform so each of our blogs will web 3.0 enabled
  • Drag and drop template configuration so users can rearrange the way their sites look without having to call the developers to recode them.
  • Better online image editing and gallery management in our editor
  • Better support for people using cell pones and PDAs

What is the one tool or feature that you wish your site had?

Better support for people using cell pones and PDAs.

What do you think real estate blogging will look like 3 years from now?

I think the line between blogs and websites will be blurred so much that people won’t be able to tell the difference. Blogs will take on more traditional website features like listing searches and mortgage calculators. They will begin to replace their website counterparts. This is the direction in which RSS Pieces has been moving. Traditional blogs are pretty featureless by nature, more and more companies will begin to add features to their blogs so they can become their central on-line presence. Also, once FAOF and SIOC are in place, blogs, forums, aggregators and other social media sites will become more interconnected giving blogs a firmer foothold on the Internet as information resources.

I also think that natural selection will occur and as the blog population grows, weaker blogs will die off and the overall quality of the remaining blogs will increase.

Thanks, Mary, for taking the time to answer these questions!

Everyone else, feel free to leave a comment or peruse these other interviews with other influential real estate bloggers…

Changing the World One Banana at a Time

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It appears that Rain City Guide has gone to bananas…

The following photo baffled me when I first saw it.

How to explain someone linking to Rain City Guide with this photo?

[photopress:rcg_banana.jpg,full,centered]

With my curiosity peeked, I noticed that Ed Kohler posted the photo from his Flickr account… Hmm… Who’s Ed Kohler?

Ed is the man behind the the WhereToLive site (which is a decent map-based home search) and the Colorado Home Stop site (which is one of the best map-based home search interfaces I’ve been fortunate to play with!).

Ed emailed me last week to let me know about his Denver-area home search tool and despite my interest, I never got around to talking about it. But on the theory it is never too late, here are some of the features I really like:

  • Lightning fast
  • Photo scroll bar (Mac-style) at the bottom of screen that is connected to the map and highlights listings on map on mouse-over
  • Micro icons get bigger with zoom
  • Like Windermere’s maps, they bring every thing on one page, and aesthetically, it is much cleaner than the Windermere maps
  • Clean Trulia-style filters
  • Pull-down neighborhood search
  • Right-click functionality for zooming
  • Ability to compare homes without leaving the map

The moral of the story is that if you really want to get my attention, simply post a photo of a banana with Rain City Guide written on it and then let me discover it! I’m assuming that Ed is one of the monkey’s behind the banana site, and if so, it looks like he may be willing to help others out with a personalized banana!

Interview with Kristal Kraft of the Denver Real Estate Blog

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As some of you may already know Ardell and I have been playing on ActiveRain lately. My personal goal in taking part was to learn about the group dynamics and see how and why people are active on the site. [photopress:kristal_kraft.jpg,full,alignright]Interestingly, one of the things I decided to do was ask the group who was the most influential person on ActiveRain so that I could interview them on RCG.

The results were loud and clear in that Kristal Kraft is not only the point leader on ActiveRain, but the most influential person for many members of the site. I spent some time following Kristal’s posts and I found her to be consistently informative and interesting. Armed with that knowledge, I decided to ask Kristal a little bit about her blogging influences and experiences.

What inspired you to start blogging?

Blogging has been a natural progression for me; ten years ago I published my first real estate website. Then in the year 2000 I took a year off from work to travel around the world on a bike. That year I was biking and blogging (without a blog platform). At the time I thought of if as a travel/photo journal of my experience, the site Bike Tracks was written often times in a tent with a flashlight attached to my head. I would publish as soon as I could find a land line. OK, so it wasn’t really a blog, but I had a huge audience. In fact at one point in Africa I didn’t publish for a couple weeks. Everyone was in a panic worried I had been eaten by a lion or something awful! After that, they got used to my irregular postings. Funny how things work, I took my position seriously when I found out people were reading my site. Riding a bike 80 to 105 miles a day can get boring! There were times when the journey got very difficult, but my “responsibility to my audience

Rain City Guide on Your Mobile Phone!

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The other day someone emailed to ask me to fix Rain City Guide so that the site wouldn’t break when they tried to visit via their mobile phone. I gave a LOL and told them that RCG already works on a mobile phone!

Here is how I read Rain City Guide (and or the other 250 blogs in my feed reader) when I’m on the go.

Using your PC or Mac:

  1. Go to Google Reader on your PC (not the Pocket PC): http://www.google.com/reader/view/ (You will likely need to sign in using a free Google account. Let me know if you don’t have one and I’ll send you an invite)
  2. Click on the “+ Add Subscription” button
  3. Copy and paste this feed into the empty field and click “Add”:
  • http://raincityguide.com/feed/

Repeat steps 2 and 3 with the comment feed:

  • http://raincityguide.com/comments/feed/

Now, you’ll have all the posts and comments send to your Google Reader where you can check them using the browser on just about any handheld phone (assuming you get an internet connection on your phone!).

However, note that the URL for the Mobile Google Reader is a little different. So on the browser of your phone, you’ll need to go to this address to check the blog:

  • http://www.google.com/reader/m

I recommend typing this in once on your phone and then saving it as a bookmark! (or better yet, email it to an address you can check with your phone and then just click on the link!)

These same instructions will work with just about any blog on the planet… Just replace the RCG feed with the appropriate feed!

UPDATE:

I just remembered that there is one other Google Reader-related item you may be interested in subscribing to and that is the list of articles that I “share” using my feed reader. The idea is that as I’m reading articles using Google Reader, I often click on a share button to share items that I think are interesting. I watch a few other people shared items and I’ve found this to be a great resource for finding new and interesting bloggers. Similar to the other feeds listed above, simply subscribe using this URL to add this item to your feed reader:

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/12864365649340148034

BTW, if you are also sharing or staring items in either Google Reader, del.icio.us or any other service and think that others might be interested, definitely leave a comment to let me know about it!

Interview with Ardell DellaLoggia of the Searching Seattle Blog

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[photopress:ardell_mlsphoto.jpg,full,alignright]There is only one Ardell. She’s a top-notch blogger that shows up all over the place in the blogging world. In addition to RCG, she keeps up an ActiveRain blog and her solo blog at Searching Seattle. And while it might seem somewhat self-serving to interview one of our own contributors, I couldn’t resist the curiosity to unleash this interview on Ardell! 🙂

However, before I begin the interview, I have a HUGE announcement! Today marks Ardell’s one year anniversary as a Rain City Guide contributor. Her first words may have been “be gentle” but she has been much more disruptive than gentle on the real estate blogging world! Let me be the first to say thank for for giving us such a fabulous, fun, and fantastic year!

What inspired you to start blogging?

I wouldn’t call it an inspiration. I honestly was just doing my “good deed for the day”. A Microsoft employee named Noor, explained to me in his Toastmaster’s International speech at our club in Redmond/Bellevue, that a blog was a personal online journal, a web log, a log on the web. So when John Reilly of Internet Crusade emailed me on 1/1/07 and asked me to be one of the people to test their blog product, I had a basic idea of what he was asking. I said yes and just started typing away. I wasn’t really realizing others would read it, except John. I look back at those first articles and wonder why I chose to write on those topics. I mean, who is sitting around on New Year’s Day writing on such intense topics? I’m not a techie geek for sure, as you can tell by my huge print, color text, etc. But I am a real estate nerd.

Unlike other people who decided to blog, or who had an urge to be a writer, I was just typing out whatever I was thinking about. Just turned out to be TMI about real estate 🙂

Are there any special topics or issues that you enjoy covering?

I like to talk about the real estate process, real estate commissions especially the buyer agent fee, and how people and agents interact differently using technology and why that will make things easier and cheaper. I think people want to know a whole lot more about what they are getting themselves into. They may still want to hire someone to do “it” for them, but they want to know a whole lot more about what that “it” is, and why it costs so much and does it have to cost so much. I think talking about these things angers a lot of people, so I mix up other things in between. If I could, I’d only talk about those three things.

What have you done to personalize your blog?

Personalize my blog? LOL That’s an oxymoron…I’m all over it. To read me is to know me. I think I need to learn how to DE-personalize it 🙂

[photopress:ardell_at_computer_small.jpg,full,alignright]Do you have any favorite posts?

I loved this post and I especially loved when the client commented. It totally surprised me. This was my favorite, but it just slid by. I must have been the only one who liked it…oh, and my sister loved it. Most people, like “Jack” in that first linked article, came to me from this one. So I’d have to say that is one of my favorites as well.

What are some of your favorite blogs (real estate or otherwise)?

My first instinct in answering this question would be to link to the Who’s Who of the Blogosphere and the Usual Suspects, but honestly I don’t like blogs…I like people. To me Sellsius is Joe and Rudy, Urban Digs is Noah, Urbnlivn is Matt and Property Monger is Jon. I like those people via their blog. The only blog I used to read regularly was Bloodhound, but it has gotten too confusing for me. Too many people with too many different viewpoints. If I could click on Kris and read all her stuff in sequence, and then click on Greg, etc , the way RainCityGuide functions when you click our pictures, I’d still read it. But I can’t keep up with all the people, and I like the people, not the blogs. If I read the blog and don’t like the person…I leave. If the blog doesn’t have a personality, I don’t read it.

How does blogging fit into the overall marketing of your business?

It’s turned it upside down, as you know. Most of my clients come from my writings now. It’s nice that they already “know me” when we first meet and there doesn’t seem to be much difference from “me on blog” to “me in person”. I like when they say “Oh, now I know what Dustin meant when he said he can see your hands moving in your writings”. I think Glenn Kelman was one of the ones who said that when we met. I am in person as I am on the blog…one of the benefits of “stream of consciousness” blogging.

What plans do you have to improve your blog over this next year?

I added the podcast. Other than mispronouncing my name and calling me Ardle, I like it. I also want to make it easier for people to find specific topics of interest. More like an encyclopedia of real estate topics. Oops I mean wiki 😉 Right now you have to go to the archives, but I think that is one of the problems with a blog. The older it is the more you bury what people want to read. I indexed it last year, but I changed my categories so I have to get the index back up and linked. It’s a lot of work.

What is the one tool or feature that you wish your site had?

I actually like it the way it is. I’ve tried a lot of different platforms to test them. My Bloglines went caput the other day and I lost my entire Family Blog. It’s still there but it’s totally blank, so I’m never writing there again. Blogger is OK, but it bores me for some reason. I’ve tried it two or three times and can’t seem to be consistent there. I like having both WordPress and RealTown blogs. Word Press for Rain City Guide is THE best, but that’s because of what you, Dustin, have done to it. My other Word Press blog is not nearly as easy as this one. So best is Word Press after Dustin modifies it!

What do you think real estate blogging will look like 3 years from now?

I think you will see some lawsuits, actually. A lot of people are writing like they are 12 year olds on My Space and ranting about things that border on slander. Making negative comments about competitors, badmouthing those who “discount”, some even say nasty things about their own clients. Of course after a law suit or two the blogs will become less colorful and will be “bought” from news sources. So enjoy reading the colorful ones while you still can!

Thank you Ardell for taking the time to answer these questions!

Interviews, interviews interviews:

Interview with Drew Meyers of the Zillow Blog

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[photopress:drewmeyers.jpg,full,alignright]Drew is one of the most frequent contributors on the Zillow Blog, which is considered to be one of the best corporate blogs around. I was fortunate to spend some time with Drew at the Blog Business Summit this past fall where I was also turned on to his personal blog where he takes on all types of technology issues. Drew has all the attributes of a great blogger… interesting, smart, opinionated… so I was particularly happy when he agreed to tell us about his blogging experiences.

What inspired you to start blogging?

We decided to start blogging at Zillow for a couple of reasons, well before the site even launched. We felt that blogging was, and still is, a powerful way to communicate. It allows us to talk to people; to give them insights into our site and the industry overall, while also gaining feedback directly from our users. Additionally, we believe in being transparent with our users (and the industry) and we try to do this by blogging about what is important and top of mind for the company. It’s real. It’s refreshing.

Personally, patience isn’t one of my strong traits (though I’m improving). Everyone who has worked in a software/web development environment probably knows that it takes time and man power to make an idea a reality. By blogging, I feel like I’m making an immediate impact to help build and strengthen Zillow’s brand one post at a time. Blogging is also a very creative way to express myself through writing.

Are there any special topics or issues that you enjoy covering?

There are a number of personalities amongst those of us who are regular contributors to the blog, all with preferences on topics we like to write about. This is great for our readers, as we like to believe that there is something of interest for everyone on any given week — it is one of the perks of having a group blog. As for me, there isn’t one specific topic that I like to cover. I have many interests and real estate is a very broad category, giving me freedom to write about a wide range of issues – if I HAD to choose one, I’d say the technology side of real estate.

What have you done to personalize your blog?

Audiences increasingly want companies to provide some insight into the personalities behind a brand, a concept that blogging allows us to do. We encourage as many employees as possible to contribute. As you can see on our blog, there is a range of levels, departments and variety of topics that our contributors tackle. It can be our tech guys trying to explain the Safari issues, it can be our general counsel talking about the significance of the Craigslist ruling, it can be an intern pitching the widget he just created or Lloyd announcing that “we’re opening it up.” This range of contributors adds a dimension of personalization.

We’ve also recently added MyBlogLog’s “Recent Readers” widget to make it even more personal. We think this helps our readers connect with each other. We like the picture feature so much we are thinking about adding this to the site for our contributors in the near future.

Do you have any favorite posts?

There have been a ton of great posts since we first launched the blog in February. A few favorites that I have posted include:

  • Why Do You Blog? — Along with many others in the real estate industry, I have grown to really enjoy blogging. With this post I tried to get inside the heads of some of real estate’s most intriguing bloggers regarding why they are compelled to blog.
  • The Shire in Bend, OR — I really do like finding interesting or odd stories related to real estate that interests a wide audience. And seriously, I’m not including this just because it focuses on my uncle’s development — I would have written about the Shire even if the developer wasn’t a relative.
  • Seattle During a Windstorm — Zillow employees are down-to-earth people and sharing some personal stories is essential to building relationships with our users (even if those relationships are only virtual).

What are some of your favorite blogs (real estate or otherwise)?

If you asked our blog team this question, each person would likely have very different answers (which again, makes us pretty unique). For me personally, my favorites include:

  • 3 Oceans – Kevin is an incredibly smart guy (our Blog Team even got to meet him while he was in Seattle) and likes to write about the technology side of real estate.
  • A VC – David Gibbons (Zillow Director of Customer Support) and I are both pretty avid readers of Fred Wilson’s blog focused primarily on the Web 2.0 space.
  • Scobleizer – What I really love about Robert Scoble is that he is REAL. He says what he thinks and doesn’t hide from any issue. He’s definitely a 1st mover in social media by revolutionizing corporate blogging while at Microsoft with his Naked Conversations book. His new company, Podtech, is an early front-runner in the podcasting and videocasting explosion.
  • Trizoko biz journal – This is an business blog that definitely has its own style. If you’re looking for some business advice mixed with a good chuckle, this one’s for you.
  • Guy Kawasaki – Guy is simply a fantastic communicator who always seems to write interesting stories.

What tools/websites do you find most helpful in putting together your blog?

I would say the team overall is the greatest tool. We tap into each other to bounce ideas around or to brainstorm new angles & then make them a reality through collaboration. We all have different news sources that we read regularly which mixes things up a bit. I’m a pretty big fan of regularly reading posts on Active Rain to find interesting perspectives on different topics within the industry.

Technology-wise, I do Technorati searches and have an RSS reader, both which help monitor the blogosphere to track industry blogs.

How does blogging fit into the overall marketing of your business?

Very heavily. As many of you know, Zillow has not spent any money on traditional advertising. Yet, we’ve managed to attract between 3 and 4 million users a month strictly via PR and word of mouth efforts. That said, the Zillow Blog is our primary communication tool with the outside world and thus has been very important to us from a marketing standpoint.

What plans do you have to improve your blog over this next year?

In 2007, Zillow is planning to upgrade the site in a number of ways. The Zillow Blog team certainly has no shortage of ideas, but we always like to hear feedback as to what features would make our blog more interesting and engaging. Any ideas?Some features we are thinking about include:

  • Effectively surfacing recent comments and most popular posts
  • Author bios and photos
  • Burning feeds for each category of our blog
  • Giving the Zillow Blog team a better way to surface links we find interesting, but don’t have time to write a whole blog post about. Basically, a link-blog within the Zillow Blog structure.

What is the one tool or feature that you wish your site had?

We’d love to have a blog widget for the Zillow Blog that allows a reader to pull a Zestimate (via our API) right from the sidebar of the blog — hint, hint to the developer community. Between this and the features above, I would be a happy camper.

What do you think real estate blogging will look like 3 years from now?

I see it being different in four key ways. 1.) Real estate blogs will add multimedia, both audio and video (video blogging will explode in the next 3 years), to become more interactive. Many realtors will probably have short overview videos detailing all the neighborhoods that they cover available on their blogs. 2.) I think that about half of the influential industry bloggers today will remain highly influential – the ones that don’t tire of the time required to blog. 3.) I predict neighborhood blogs will all but overtake local neighborhood newspapers in the vast majority of major cities as consumers continue to turn to online news sources. 4.) I certainly agree with Sellsius’ response to this question — that a blog will be attached to EVERY real estate web site.

Interview with Joel Burslem of the Future of Real Estate Marketing

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[photopress:joel_crop.jpg,full,alignright]When I first started reading Joel’s blog last Spring, it was like reading the type of posts I wish I was writing… He was covering a huge swath of the real estate technology field every day and making me look lazy! Needless to say, I always enjoy his writing and I consider him to be today’s gatekeeper of real estate technology news.

In terms of real estate technology, if it doesn’t go through the Future of Real Estate Marketing, it probably doesn’t matter.

What inspired you to start blogging?

I’ve always enjoyed writing as a way for me to help get my thoughts together on a particular subject and I’ve had a personal blog in one shape or another for about four years now. My first blog in fact was simply a way for my wife and I to keep our friends and family informed of our travels throughout Asia.

I have worked in different marketing roles over the years, in several different industries, but real estate was a new challenge for me. I quickly realized I had a lot to get up to speed with and started doing a lot of research online, which meant stumbling across and reading some of the existing real estate blogs, including RCG.

Naturally, after a while, I felt compelled to jot down a lot of what I was thinking about and so The Future of Real Estate Marketing was born.

Are there any special topics or issues that you enjoy covering?

I find it fascinating reading about and reporting on how the Internet, social media and technology are changing the real estate business. I’ve always tried to steer clear of market analysis or commenting some of the more pressing structural changes facing the industry. I prefer to leave that to the experts.

What have you done to personalize your blog?

I’ve always tried to have my own voice be heard through my writing. That’s by far the most personal side of blogging for me. Also, I’m fairly selfish on the things I write on; I tend to focus only things that interest me. But because I come from the high tech/consumer marketing world, and not strictly a real estate background, I think that I bring a fairly unique perspective.

From a technical standpoint, I use WordPress 2.0 with a heavily modified Qwilm theme. I did all of the design myself. I don’t consider myself a web design guru, but I can muddle my way through HTML, PHP and CSS. I love WordPress’ extendibility and am constantly installing and playing with new plugins. You can expect to see the sidebars on my site change fairly frequently.

Do you have any favorite posts?

Not any in particular. But I do like to think really big picture at times. Those are the posts that I really enjoy sitting down and hammering out.

What are some of your favorite blogs (real estate or otherwise)?

RCG of course. I’m not just pandering to the host either. Dustin was definitely a driving force in getting me to put my thoughts out there. His encouragement early on was what helped me stick with it too.

I love the Bloodhound, Greg’s prose constantly amazes me, even if it takes me a couple of times to read it and understand it. The guys at Sellsius do an amazing job of pounding out useful posts day in, day out. I’m especially excited about some of the newer voices on the scene; Mary at RSS Pieces and Pat at TransparentRE in particular.

Some others in my newsreader:

Required Daily Reading

Guilty Pleasures

What tools/websites do you find most helpful in putting together your blog?

I swear by Firefox and its extensions. I collect links and interesting articles with Del.icio.us and compose my blog posts with the Performancing plugin. I usually have several tabs open at the same time and I never have to leave my browser.

How does blogging fit into the overall marketing of your business?

I never saw blogging as a way to improve my business when I first started. I just started writing. It’s grown to a point over the last little while where it can support itself financially (advertising revenue covers my hosting costs now) and it’s definitely helped raise my own profile in the industry I guess, but I think I’d still keep writing even if no one was reading it.

What plans do you have to improve your blog over this next year?

Maybe another redesign? Who knows… I’ve always more or less done things on a whim with FoREM. I love the challenge of pulling something down and recreating it in an entirely new form. I’m not happy unless I’m constantly innovating. That’s led to a lot of sleepless nights.

What do you think real estate blogging will look like 3 years from now?

Honestly I think there’s going to be a shakeout. People are dipping there toes in right now and I expect over the next 6-12 months we’ll see a big rush of Realtors trying out blogging. But I’m guessing most will quickly tire of it. Those who are still at it in 3 years time will be the ones who persevere and stick it out.

I also hope we’ll see a lot more netcasts/vlogs – right now there’s a real lack of decent real estate-related content outside of the written word.

Thank you Joel!

If you liked this interview, you may find some of these appealing:

Interview with Michael Simonsen of Altos Research

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I first met Michael in person back at the Real Estate Connect conference in SF last summer and was immediately impressed.

[photopress:mike.jpg,thumb,alignright]The Altos Research blog has been rolling full-steam ahead with really solid analytical posts about changes in neighborhood value up and down the West Coast. At the same time, I could tell that his business running Altos Research must have been taking off because his widgets that track market value by neighborhoods were showing up all over the real estate blogosphere.

Needless to say, Michael’s posts just keep getting better and I’m extremely excited he agreed to this interview…

What inspired you to start blogging?

In mid-2005, the Altos Research platform was really kicking in for the first time. My co-founder, Jason, and I loved seeing the output of the analysis – geeking out on the data. The blog seemed like the best channel to start letting people know what we had. So in October 2005 we started. The process of blogging, it turns out, is crucial for me to actually figure out what we had and how people like to consume it.

[photopress:altos_logo.jpg,full,alignright]Are there any special topics or issues that you enjoy covering?

Altos Research is all about analyzing real estate markets in real time. I think our blog is at it’s best when we identify and publish market information that no one else has.

What have you done to personalize your blog?

Despite the fact that our blog is first and foremost a marketing channel to interact with our customers, the content is intensely personal.

There’s a fascinating disconnect between traditional corporate marketing and sales processes. Corporate marketing (or real estate marketing for that matter) is planned, structured, and homogeneous (read: stiff and impersonal). But everyone knows the adage that people buy from people they like. Sales is about personality. The blog is really the first time a marketing channel leverages personality. Many of my customers know me before they ever speak with me.

Do you have any favorite posts?

A couple months ago I did a quick post on our stats tracking flipped properties in a market (quick remodel and back on the market for more money.) I cited San Jose. The post got picked up in TheStreet.com and some other heavy-traffic investment sites. We had huge (huge for us) traffic spikes.

What are some of your favorite blogs (real estate or otherwise)?

I read Paul Kedrosky’s Infectious Greed every day. I’m an unabashed Silicon Valley-phile. I love the ethos and dynamics of the technology startup/venture capital culture and Paul is like mainlining for that addiction.

What tools/websites do you find most helpful in putting together your blog?

I’m a huge fan of HitTail. More than any other analytics tools I’ve found, HitTail provides a clean, clear presentation of how people find you and guides thinking about what people want you to write about.

How does blogging fit into the overall marketing of your business?

Blogging, believe it or not, is nearly 100% of our marketing to date. Our sales come either from our passionate clients recommending our services to their friends or from people who read the blog. We’ll augment our marketing with other techniques as we grow, but it’s hard to imagine any single approach more effective.

What plans do you have to improve your blog over this next year?

The biggest key for me is to post more. I tend to be a long-form poster: I try to find a topic, formulate a thesis for a post, construct the argument, get supporting images and links, edit, edit, edit. That process takes me several hours, when I’m thorough. I need to sleep less or something.

What is the one tool or feature that you wish your site had?

I wish the damn system of trackbacks or Technorati or something worked reliably. The effectiveness of these types of features is just plain random.

What do you think real estate blogging will look like 3 years from now?

We’re still really, really early in real estate blogging. Real estate is a relationship business. You know how to build relationships off line. But the Internet is where 70% of people start the home search. The blog is the premier mechanism for building relationships over the Internet.

The good news is that the real estate blogosphere will never be overcrowded. It is self regulating. Many Realtors will never start because the evidence of lousy performance sticks around for ever. If you are a lousy networker off line, that’s ephemeral, no one ever knows. The fear of failure will keep this space open to those who are dedicated and enthusiastic. Rock on.

Thanks again to Michael for your insight!

Want more interviews? Try one of these on for size:

Interview with Glenn Kelman of Redfin

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[photopress:glenn_kelman.jpg,full,alignright]Since joining on Redfin almost exactly a year ago, Glenn has earned a reputation of a colorful, intelligent, and unconventional CEO. In my quest to interview the real estate bloggers who have influenced me, I am very glad that Glenn took the time to talk about his foray into corporate blogging as well as the team he has built up at Redfin, many of whom are expert bloggers in their own right.

However, before I begin the interview, I have a request… Will someone please record tomorrow’s panel discussion between Glenn and Allan Dalton at Real Estate Connect when they both answer the question: Is the Realtor becoming irrelevant in the internet age? Now back to our regularly scheduled interview…

What inspired you to start blogging?

[photopress:Noam.jpg,thumb,alignright] The person who showed me how to blog is my friend, Noam Lovinsky, a 26 year-old Israeli-American with unnaturally large, expressive hands.

He introduced me to his subscription set the way a 13 year-old shows you his comic books. He is the kind of person who, if you ask him to play checkers, gives you a list of other people to play first, and says “Beat them, then we’ll play.”

The reason I enjoy blogging is simply because I enjoy writing; I once wanted to be a novelist. I take a child-like joy in finding colorful pictures on Flickr to post alongside the writing. And I appreciate the hurly-burly of comments, which helps us figure out what to do at Redfin.

On the other hand, I worry that blogging can be self-indulgent and even a bit solipsistic, all of us bloggers talking to one another.

But mostly I like it.

Are there any special topics or issues that you enjoy covering?

The Roman playwright Terence once wrote “I am a human; nothing human is alien to me.” The best topics for a post are always people. More than the topics, what I enjoy about blogging is the tone, which itself seems more human to me than most corporate writing: you can admit mistakes, make personal observations, sometimes explain how you feel. Ventures into other topics have been precarious: every time I mud-wrestle traditional real estate agents, I lose; my posts about Redfin sound like press releases.

What have you done to personalize your blog?

Mostly, just let folks write in their own style, unedited. Our blog has improved since Matt Goyer began posting; I feel the same way about posts from Eric Heller, Rob McGarty, Cynthia Pang and Bahn Lee. Each has his or her own voice.

Do you have any favorite posts?

It was fun to testify before Congress. Any post that quotes Emily Dickinson or P. Diddy is good. I like posts about odd Redfin employees because, well, they are so odd. But for some reason this post has stayed with me the most, because I like the picture so much (a Redfin employee trying to work while flying down the freeway).
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What are some of your favorite blogs (real estate or otherwise)?

Very partial list (excluding RCG of course):
John Cook’s blog: scrupulously fair, blazingly fast.
TechCrunch: a carnival of start-ups, oddly idealistic and cynical.
SocketSite: which tries to be rigorously analytical but often is just compulsive.
Guy Kawasaki’s blog: probably the best writer on start-up culture in the blogosphere.
Matt Goyer’s blog: which taught me to be myself.
I also like what Joel, Kevin and Greg are doing. OK, sometimes Greg drives me nuts, but in a good way.
And I love the Redfin bloggers who provide eyewitness property reviews for different Seattle neighborhoods.

What tools/websites do you find most helpful in putting together your blog?

NetVibes is a good way to read blogs. We use Six Apart’s Moveable Type to publish our blog, and Google Analytics to monitor traffic. Flickr is a good place to find colorful photos. I’m glad we’ve finally made it easy to post to del.icio.us and Digg.

How does blogging fit into the overall marketing of your business?

First off, a blog isn’t just a marketing vehicle. It’s a way to have a conversation with the market, narrowing product cycles, gathering ideas, correcting blunders.

Second, I honestly believe that if Redfin were stripped absolutely bare for all the world to see, naked and humiliated in the sunlight, more people would do business with us. A blog at its best can facilitate that kind of nakedness.

Most important, the blog expresses our personality. Most corporate websites are a sensual deprivation chamber. Sometimes it seems like everyone in business is trying to act all grown up and professional and fake, but what people are really starved for in our denuded commercial landscape is a little personality.

What plans do you have to improve your blog over this next year?

We plan to introduce neighborhood blogs to each of the markets we enter, with eyewitness property reviews. This may end up being too much work, or too expensive, but so far our efforts in Seattle have been promising.

We’re also excited about using our blog for virtual focus groups, so that we can gather feedback on new designs before coding. Matt Goyer has already started to develop a community of folks interested in the design of real estate web sites. Now we just have to decide how much we have the guts to share.

The flip side of all this is that we need to make our site, Redfin.com, open to blogs, so that as you browse neighborhoods on the map or click on listings, you can see property reviews, neighborhood alerts, local real estate advice. In six months, I wouldn’t be surprised if Ardell is popping up all over Redfin.com with noisy opinions about this neighborhood or that house.

What is the one tool or feature that you wish your site had?

The ability for users to subscribe to neighborhoods, like Bainbridge Island, South Seattle, Bellevue, Green Lake.

What do you think real estate blogging will look like 3 years from now?

Ardell will run six separate blogs. Greg Swann will be predicting Zillow’s conquest of other planets.

Enjoy this interview? There’s lots more where that come from:

Interview with Rudy and Joe of the Sellsius Blog

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In terms of real estate bloggers, Joe and Rudy are at the top of their game… Follow their blog for a little while and it becomes obvious that these are two guys who are committed to understanding, tracking and promoting the real estate blogosphere. I can’t be the only one to wonder if I’ll ever get a sneak peak at the money-making side of their operation (which was first announced on RCG in August 2005), but that is besides the point because this interview is about blogging and there is no doubt these guys have played a pivotal role in shaping the connections between real estate bloggers as it exists today!

What inspired you to start blogging?
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We started blogging very early. As Silver Sponsors of the Inman Connect NYC in January 2006, we attended several conferences on blogging and caught the bug. We were readers of RCG, Matrix, Inman & Property Grunt. Property grunt & Inman gave us positive press and encouragement and you gave us life as vaporware 🙂 We never forgot it. This really inspired us. In the beginning it was easier, since we had no readership to answer to. We felt, heck, no one is reading us so let’s do what we want. So, in a sense we inspired each other. We decided early on we’d break some rules, go our own way and see what happens. We’re still learning.

Are there any special topics or issues that you enjoy covering?
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We enjoy marketing , branding, advertising, technology and personal stories. Our business is promoting our members, helping them attract more clients and improving their bottom line. We are always looking for anything new and innovative that can help them.

What have you done to personalize your blog?
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Hopefully, our personality comes across in how we write, comment and choose our images. We try to interject humor and put the Sellsius° spin on a topic. We look for the exception to the rule and go against the grain when we feel it’s right. We stand up for the consumer’s right to informed choice, we advocate for professionals and want to improve the industry we love.

Do you have any favorite posts?
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We love all our Zillow posts, especially Unzillowable, To Coin a Phrase and Mining The Elusive Unzillowable, where JF debates David G. We are also proud of the Bell Labs posts where we collaborated with Ryan Block of Engadget to save a piece of technology history. We felt like journalists covering a story. We liked Realtor’s Allan Dalton Calls Zillow Carnival Act because we got to create our best Selltoon°. We also like our promo pieces (Mary Kay Gallagher and Willie Williams). We did a Year’s Best Posts so you get an idea of what we liked. We like a lot of what we do because we’re having so much fun.

What are some of your favorite blogs (real estate or otherwise)?
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We try to keep up with everyone in the real estate blogos. We would not choose a favorite because at different times we follow different blogs. It depends on the topic discussed. Zillow posts always get JF’s attention. Copyblogger is a must read. We also like Lifehacker, Micro Persuasion, TechCrunch, PronetAdvertising. There are so many more. We still visit grow-a-brain and Joe likes some Russian sites. We find a lot of great writing & commenting on Active Rain.

What tools/websites do you find most helpful in putting together your blog?
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Bloglines, tabbed browsing, the Wire Services, YouTube, Wikipedia (often better than Google), Firefox extensions like AIOS & Stumbleupon, Google’s Images, Alerts, & News. Fast Stone Capture for screenshots & resizing images is a MUST. Tiny URL, CoComment & Commentful are useful commenting tools.

How does blogging fit into the overall marketing of your business?
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The blog helps build the Sellsius° brand and we will use it to promote our membership. We are big believers in branding. We want the Sellsius° brand to represent trust, honesty, caring, knowledge and PASSION.

What plans do you have to improve your blog over this next year?
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We can’t be too specific other than saying we are going to better promote others, including other bloggers. We will also partner with other bloggers for new ideas we have for the genre. We have already collaborated on a consumer facing blog called MyHouseKey.org.

What is the one tool or feature that you wish your site had?
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We invented the Blog Surfer to help retrieve archived posts in a new way and increase page views. The blog surfer is a random remote control, a blog post stumbleupon. We would like it to be tag or category specific so you could surf only marketing posts, for example. Our page views skyrocketed with the surfer.
A tool I’d like to see is an automatic Table of Contents Creator where each post title would be sent to a categorized Table of Contents, with a corresponding link to the post. Blogs are like books and a Table of Contents is necessary. But keeping a Table of Contents up to date is cumbersome. If you visit our Table of Contents, it needs updating.

What do you think real estate blogging will look like 3 years from now?
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Blogs will be attached to every real estate website. Every blog will have advertising of some kind. That won’t even take 3 years, maybe only 1. More contributing writers. More hired writers. Payment gateways to transact business on the blog. Blogs will be more varied. Skype on every blog. Blogoholics galore.

Thank you both Joe and Rudy for indulging me in this great interview!

Want more? Here are some more interviews with other influential people within the real estate blogosphere: