That call marked the unofficial launch of the National Association of Realtors, Realtors Property Resource or RPR. RPR is a national property database initiative with a back end Realtor component and a consumer facing website called HouseLogic. It will be officially launched this week in San Diego at the NAR conference.

Since Friday afternoon the webosphere has been buzzing with speculation, opinion and reactions to the RPR  pre announcement. If you have a few minutes to dedicate to reading here are some interesting posts on the topic that have surfaced over the weekend.

• RPR Madness! NAR Unleashes National Property Database with Cyberhomes from Brian Boero at 1000Watt Consulting
• Run Altos Run! NAR Announces RPR from Mike Simonsen at Altos Research
• The Coming Civil War in Real Estate: The RPR Saga Begins from Rob Hahn at Notorious R.O.B Blog
• Will Realtors Property Resource (RPR) Drive Up the Cost of Referrals? by Matt Stigliano on Active Rain
• Breaking News: NAR/RPR + Cyberhomes = by Jim Duncan on Agent Genius

Will RPR be a good thing for our industry? Time will tell.

Should agents and brokers know everything they can about this initiative? Absolutely.

I’ll hold my opinions and continue to share information…

Do you have an opinion on RPR you’d like to share?

Not all newspapers are dead according to Eric Stegemann of Tribus Real Estate Group who discovered last week at Bar Camp Chicago, that some newspapers are changing the way they publish and are thriving among all age demographics.

Rhonda Duffy is disappointed in her fellow Atlanta listing agents and for good reason – they appear to be doing the least amount possible to market their listings – million dollar listings at that. For the price they earn to sell these these homes, Rhonda thinks they could be doing a better job. Once you see her point here on her ActiveRain blog, you’ll understand why.

When planning your Twitter strategy should you come across information like this… run for the hills. This is the very worst advice possible for real estate folks to follow.

Guy Kawasaki posted an interview with Lee Aase who manages syndication and social media for Mayo Clinic. Read as he explains the history of Mayo Clinic’s use of social media and how effective this effort has been.

Sometimes I think agents get in their own way and in their quest to do the right end up doing the wrong thing. And miss out an opportunity to do right by their client. Colleen Fischesser documents one such experience representing her buyer and what happens when the listing agent just doesn’t get it in a post she titled I’d rather you just said thank you.

Some simple, but succinct advice on promoting your business through Facebook

Who doesn’t face writers block every now and then? Sometimes, it’s not even writers block you suffer from but burn out from the deep thinking you engage in all day at work. And yet a blog post is due, your at deadline and you need a muse. Sugar Pine Realty/GMAC Blog offers this advice titled Blog Writing Ideas for Realtors.

Authenticity vs Authority. Mark Olson discusses these two schools of thought. Which is more important? Which begat the other? Which matters most? He then asked some of the smartest business and branding writers and commentators for their opinions. Check it out here.

James Kimmons provides an example of what happens when agents don’t always cross their T’s or dot their I’s during a listing presentation in his post published on About.com titled Tell them what IDX search is and why it’s better. The post raises some interesting points about the variety of tools, technologies, services and designations that Realtors possess often not clearly defined or leveraged to their best advantage with customers. 1000wattblog explored the branding side of this discussion a while back in their post title Releasing Real Estate’s Pheromones.

Adam Singer, blogger for the The Future Buzz provided 140 of his own insights regarding Twitter that helps expand the way we look at and use this broadcasting tool.

The sky opened up at Active Rain this week as thunder cracked and lightening lit up from its clouds via Jeff Corbett’s post which tackles the issues surrounding public perception of the real estate industry now at an all time record low. Many agents have left comments but it’s going to take more than that to change an industry and shift public opinion.

The dangers of Web 2.o beared its sharp teeth and bit the Domino’s Pizza brand in you know what. Brian Solis offers some wise words and caution to company owners who brands might be at risk from the foolhardy antics of their employees in his post titled The Domino Effect.

Bob over at Active Rain provides a nice illustration of why the Long Tail matters.

Who needs a fax machine when you have a cell phone?

Reggie introduced us to ZingDing, an interesting take on the virtual tour concept.

Joe over at Sellsius explains TokBox. This could save agents who work with tech savvy client a lot of time.

Happy Weekend!

The Internet has given us all the ability to be instantly published for the world to see. While these publishing rights have opened up amazing opportunities for agents and brokers to broadcast and build their brand, they are also riddled with sizable drawbacks.

Among the most concerning is the freedom readers and other publishers have to post commentary about you. Some of it can be generously positive but there is always that nagging possibility that some of it could be considerably negative, thus impacting your reputation. As a result, there has been significant discussion of late regarding the risks that come with Web 2.0 and the overall importance of keeping tabs on and managing our online reputations across the many channels within it.

So what do you do if people are writing unflattering things about you? What if they are saying these things and you don’t even know. These posts can come in all forms and appear anywhere on the web from comments left on your own blog posts to fellow agents taking issue with your opinions on Active Rain or some past client who feels the need to vent about something on Yelp.

All it takes in one person with an unhealthy appetite, a misunderstanding or even  vengeance to pose serious threat to your career, your reputation and to your well being. The years you’ve spent building your reputation as a professional, honest and knowledgeable real estate expert can be tarnished with a few taps on the keyboard and clicks of the mouse.

This is not new to the web. eBay sellers for instance have been contending with negative feedback for years. With the volume of review sites available online, manufacturers, retailers and service providers of all kinds have been dealing with and perfecting the art of reputation management.

Here in real estate, we as an industry while new to Web 2.0, we are certainly not new to controversy and bad press. But up until now, we have had little in the way of monitoring or managing that press beyond Google Alerts. Recently, a new service was launched that now provides a tool to assist real estate professionals in this regard. The app is developed by long time real estate industry well knowns Brendan King, Jeff Tomlin and Jason Collins. All three were part of the orignal leadership team of Point2 Technologies Inc. and know the power of the online world.

You’ll find the new site at: http://steprep.myfrontsteps.com. StepRep allows you to sign up using your existing Google account (brilliant- because that means one less username and password to remember or should I say forget) and then once you’ve spent a couple minutes filling out some basic info about yourself for your search, your online reputation management begins.

StepRep spiders the web seeking anything and everything that has your name attached to it. It looks for comments, blogs, articles, links that in some way reference you. Once you’ve triggered a search through StepRep, the program will then update you via email anytime something new is found about you.

As you open each entry, you have the ability to rank those findings and categorize what people are saying by virtue of three rankings – good, bad or watch. Once ranked, you can create and add a reputation widget to your site or blog and post all those comments you have assigned as good to the widget for your visitors to see.

Awareness, as they say is the first step. A very important one. The next question becomes what to do if someone publishes something online about you and your business. In my next post I’ll share some tips on defending your online reputation. In the meantime, go sign up for StepRep and start making sure you are well-versed in what’s being said about you behind your back.

A Fad That Will Pass?
Some people would say that social networking is simply a group of people talking to each other.  That is partially true – there is a large group of us on Facebook all connected to the same “friends,” and the same goes for LinkedIn. Ditto for Twitter, and some might say the same for Active Rain and even YouTube.

I believe this is much more powerful than any of us may realize.  Rudy from Trulia suggested earlier today in his post that your company’s presence on the social media front is a very important component of the face and personality of your brand or company, and how you manage it is key. I couldn’t agree more. The numbers are simply astounding. According to Wikipedia, LinkedIn has a total of 24M registered users that span 150 industries, Facebook has over 100M users who upload 14M photos each day and the site gets 132M unique visitors each month. The newcomer microblogging site, Twitter, has 2M individual accounts and is growing daily.

That is a significant “somewhat” captive audience out there that will drive the real estate market in the years to come. They will be our customers, our broker owners, our real estate agents, and they will be looking for us on all of these social networking sites and on others that haven’t yet been conceived. What we say and how we present ourselves, and whether we are even participating will be a large factor in our business success. In the past several weeks, I have received franchise inquiries from Twitter, comments on YouTube videos, employment inquiries with resumes and franchise inquiries from LinkedIn, suggestions, meeting requests, comments, friend requests, links to products we might be interested in and general messages from Facebook.

Business Concerns
One of the early fears from a business point of view about social networking is that companies might be embarrassed or put at risk by an employee’s behavior online. That is a valid concern and most companies, including ours, have a social networking policy in place. It is very important. We never post a blog without others looking at it first. The pictures we post are always in good taste. We treat social networking as an important business tool.

Competitive Fun
There is a certain competitiveness around social networking. Who has the most “friends,” who has the most “contacts,” the most “recommendations,” the most “followers.” And yes, we are competitive here at BH&GRE. Wendy has the most followers on Twitter, Nicolai has had the most comments on a single blog post, and while I will never reach the almost 1,000 friends my 20-year old nephew has on Facebook, so far I am the winner on that site at BH&GRE. But that could all change… next Tuesday our very own web content and social media manager will begin his first day of work.

Let the fun begin!

Over the past month I have been searching for the first addition to my staff. We posted the position internally and on all of the major job boards, monster, craigslist, Yahoo!, etc.. The position requires about 3-5 years experience and would most likely attract someone in their 20s. I had a hypothesis going into the process and it was to see how well my application of social media would shape each candidates interview process.

Before joining BH&G Real Estate I would go into an interview blind as Googling the company and prospective Executive leadership could only get you so far. When I was interviewing for the VP of Interactive Marketing position here it was a whole different story. I was on our Industry blog, read press releases on Realogy’s web site, investigated Sherry, Nicolai & Wendy’sbackgrounds on Linkedin, searched for any viral video on YouTube and lastly took a shot in the dark that they maintained Facebook pages (which they all do). I got to know each and every one of them personally and professionally via those sources before I even walked in the door. I was able to evaluate whether or not my vision for the brand and professional goals were shared amongst my prospective boss and peers. I assume you know what the answer was as you are reading my post on the brand’s blog right now.

So back to my story, the interview process lasted about a month and the results were exactly as expected. Every candidate, except for one, referenced the fact that I was looking to move (read my previous Clean Slate blog posts), their parents planned their vacations through my previous company (viewed my linkedin profile), and knew I had children (I have pictures in my office so I can’t completely attribute that to flickr). I even got a candidate to apply for the job directly to me instead of going through a job site because they found our blog, where my contact information is readily available. So this made me think that consumer behavior is changing and the next generation of home buyers is incredibly savvy. Bottom-line is if we don’t play in the social media sandbox we are NOT in it for the long term.

The second observation is the application back to the real estate agent/broker. Maintaining any of these social media outlets is the key to showing value and developing a relationship with a potential customer before they call/email/text or god forbid walk through the door. Social media is a double edged sword as it can do as much good as it does harm. You have to walk into it with clear cut objectives and that will dictate which channels you should use and how you can use them most effectively.

The simplest application to get the social networking/media ball rolling is your email signature. Simply having you phone number(s) and address is just not enough as email should be viewed as an incredibly viral channel. Check out a snippet from Jonathan Washburn’s profile page on Active Rain.

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Connect With Me:

Please connect with me on these web 2.0 apps/social networks.

Facebook

I have active instant messenger accounts with MSN, AIM, Google Talk, and Yahoo, but if I put them on this page then the spammers will find them. Contact me through ActiveRain’s and I will send you my IM account names.

YouTube: Rainmaker413

Twitter: jonwashburn

I am on LinkedIn as Jonathan Washburn

Del.icio.us: jonwashburn

Flickr: jonathan_washburn

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I am not condoning including every one of these links or social network references in your signature, but try a few and see how fast your network grows. Just keep in mind growing the network is only half the battle as you should have something interesting to say to keep’em engaged.

I dare you! (that’s reverse psychology)

As you may know from my last blog post, my family and I are in the market for a new home. I began the research process of finding an agent both on the web via Active Rain and through local referrals from friends and family in our prospective neighborhoods. We chose the agent through active rain as they happened to be much more knowledgeable and in tune with our requirements for finding a new home. The agent set up an automated email from their local MLS that would send us listings as they hit the market. In addition I went to Realtor.com, Zillow & Trulia daily just to make sure I had all of the bases covered so that the perfect house wouldn’t fall through the cracks. About a week ago a very promising home hit the market in our price range and it just seemed too good to be true. The pictures on the MLS site were plentiful, good school system, taxes were in line with our expectations and most of the all the price seemed low for the amount of property/beds/baths. There wasn’t an address listed so I went off to Trulia to see if I could figure out where in the town this home was located and sure enough there was an address. The default view is “map” and the location appeared to be ideal as it bordered a large wooded area. I zoomed in a bit and then hit the “satellite” view and that’s when things really came into focus. There appeared to be a building with 4 large round towers no more than 50 yards behind the woods in the rear of the property.

My first assumption was some sort of water treatment facility so I threw a search into Google Maps and it turns out I was pretty close, but it wasn’t water — it was sewage. After seeing Erin Brokovich I decided to pass on this house, but it got me thinking that 5 years ago I may have put an offer on it.

Today we live in an age where all industries and rapidly moving towards pure transparency. And as a real estate professional you have to assume the process I went through to expose the “too good to be true” scenario is typical. In my case it was extreme as I found something negative, but on the flip side I could have just as easily found out how far we were from local schools or what the neighbors paid for their house 2 years ago.

Coming from the travel agent industry, our front line sales force hated Tripadvisor.com as it could undermine every sale they made. Picture this, you just put a down payment on a vacation, went home and searched for the resort the agent recommended and found out that someone was there last week and saw a roach in their room. The agent would pick up the phone the next day and ask me to call Tripadvisor to remove the negative review. I told them that #1 it’s impossible, but #2 that they should always be one step ahead of their customer and have checked the site before recommending the resort in the first place.

At this point we should all be pretty confident that in the end the consumer will play a large role in shaping the direction of the real estate industry. And, to be successful, we have to observe and embrace their usage patterns and mold our systems to accommodate their needs.