Guest Post: Bridging real estate and technology worlds

The influx of technology entrepreneurs who are building new real estate 2.0 applications will take off. The recent launches of SecondSpace and Terabitz demonstrate a new appetite by VC-backed techies to conquer a vertical that has massive revenue appeal. Last week, I participated in the Meshwalk, a Silicon Valley networking forum for startup entrepreneurs, and more than a few of the Web 2.0 startup leaders I spoke with mentioned that the real estate industry was one possible target for their new applications.

Real estate has been down this route before. The industry historically looked at the Internet suspiciously as a provider of free real estate data that threatens to disintermediate its practitioners. The initial appearance of Real Estate 1.0 lead generation companies like HomeGain and even NAR-affiliated Realtor.com are manifestations of the brokerages' lack of foresight in developing applications that would connect its agents with the consumer.

SecondSpace is a good example of a company that is developing a search engine-based technology that aims to deliver fine-tuned search results based on compiling users' lifestyle queries. Real estate happens to be one of the best verticals in which to launch their first sites because real estate purchases are all about lifestyle... the grand plan is to develop lifestyle Web sites for other verticals such as travel or even fishing that would complement each other in a portfolio. It's an original model.

The tech world as a whole still doesn't understand the arcane world of real estate (*see footnote below). To bridge the two worlds, I'll be writing a series of articles explaining search engine marketing as it relates to real estate over at Search Engine Journal. The first is up today... all about why real estate blogging is the first manifestation of Real Estate 2.0  and how the agent and the consumer will begin to make their direct connections online.

(*Pardon the plug, but this week's Inman Connect San Francisco is where all the techies come to learn about real estate, ask my friends Pete Flint and Oliver Muoto).

--Pat Kitano, Transparent Real Estate

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