Yes, I am tardy with my report for Day 2. There was not much going on from an interesting meeting standpoint so I visited the tradeshow floor. For anyone that has not been to a Realtor tradeshow, it is certainly an experience. Flashing buttons, contests, people throwing free things at you. Having been to many of these, it always amazes me the types of companies that have booths. For example, there were several jewelry and makeup booths. While I am not a woman, it seems odd that they would come to a real estate tradeshow. It would be like having Titleist as a vendor. Lots of real estate guys like to play golf but they don’t really fit at a Realtor tradeshow. Then again, I am pretty dense about this stuff and they seemed to have a bunch of women buying stuff so I guess they are the smart ones.

I visited a bunch of booths but a couple stood out for different reasons:

Realtor.com – They intro’d a Zillow/HouseValues-like feature on their home page called “What’s Your Home Worth.” It is a lead generation system for agents that provides basic home value data and then let’s the consumer elect to get more refined info if they want from a “featured” agent. Agents can buy territories and they apparently will rotate as consumers access the feature. Once a consumer asks for more info, the “featured” agent will get an email and that consumer will see the particular “featured” agent for a period of time each time they return. With the large amount of traffic that R.com gets, it will be interesting to see how well the lead gen system works. I tried my zip code and there was already an agent signed up! I think this will be a winner for R.com and the agents that jump on it but I also think that agents will squak when their choice area is sold out.

HomePoint – This is a Trulia-like company (although the get data via the MLS directly) that is trying to become a portal of sorts. Agents sign up for territories and get “featured” when a consumer clicks on a listing. Again, this is a lead-gen system for agents that even extends to listing agents and FSBOs. The thing that I did not get was how they were going to generate traffic. No eyeballs, no leads.

More later….

Russ