A frenemy is not a friendly anenome. A frenemy can be both friend and enemy -- a partner and a competitor.

A report on local online ad trends, released this week by research company Borrell Associates Inc., says there is a fading view of major Internet portals such as Yahoo, Google, HotJobs, Monster and others as the enemies to other media (see Inman News article).

"What's in," the report says, is the notion that these companies and others are "the new frenemies." The report notes that traditional media such as newspapers are forging advertising partnerships with Internet sites in an effort to forge a symbiotic bond. Or is this more a case of: "If you can't beat them, join them?" The report also notes that traditional media are losing market share in local online advertising to Internet portals.

"Frenemy" may prove to be a useful term for the real estate industry, which is struggling to define its friends and foes in an Internet seascape blossoming with property-search Web sites. Such sites can enhance the exposure of for-sale properties, though industry players may be reluctant to share this information if their worries about the relevance of their own Web site or services outweighs the desire to forge new marketing agreements.

Real Estate Industry Solutions LLC, a subsidiary of the Florida Association of Realtors trade group, has released a paper that dives into the legalese that is commonly found in licensing agreements for Web site operators that are seeking content related to for-sale real estate.

The paper suggests that the "bottom line for brokers is to read the terms of service and know what you are  allowing the Web site operator to do when you post your property listings to its Web site," as the terms of service  may allow the site to send the data to others or use it in a manner that was not intended by the content provider  (see Inman News article.) In other words, the report seems to suggest: Beware of frenemies in friends' clothing.

Alan Yassky, a National Association of Realtors representative to Move Inc.'s board of directors (Move operates Realtor.com through a contract with NAR), put a new twist on the infamous and oft-cited speech delivered by Bill Chee in 1993 that has come to be known as the "Lions Over the Hill" speech -- and he threw in a gorilla reference, to boot.

Chee, then president president of the Realtor trade group, said in his April 26, 1993, address to the group's directors, "I view the current MLS situation as a few chihuahuas fighting over a bone, unaware that a hungry lion is coming over the hill," and challenged Realtors to "become the lion."

Yassky, who addressed the group's directors Saturday in Washington, D.C., said, he ate dinner with Chee the night before "and I said to him, 'Billy, they're not coming over the hill anymore. We're living among them. The lions are here and they're eating our lunch. And it's like this 800-pound gorilla in the room -- he does whatever he wants to do.'"

Referring to Google, Yahoo and other Internet players that seek to display property information to their massive online audiences, Yassky cautioned the real estate industry about agreements they sign to share property data. "You guys giving your listings away and not knowing where the hell they're going -- what are you doing? It will scare the hell out of you what you are authorizing people to do."

Google approached Move Inc. about the company's property listings content, he said, "and we said, 'We'll give it to you with three exceptions.'" Those exceptions, which he said were not acceptable to Google, related to contractual agreements with NAR dictating specific content requirements for property listings and preventing the display of FSBO listings, for example.

NAR's CEO, Dale Stinton, also invoked the "Lion Over the Hill" speech in an earlier presentation to NAR directors when he quoted Chee: "We must make ourselves such a valuable resource, that no one -- no vendor, no buyer, no seller -- will see any benefit in bypassing the Realtor family."

Add to the list of "unZillowables" that seem to complicate the task of automated valuations -- a past listing that, instead of a sale, produced a string of indictments and mortgage fraud convictions.

The Zestimate for this 3,308 square foot, three bedroom Tudor in Kansas City, Mo. is $905,254. The value range is $760,413 to $1.1 million.

Now, what Zillow doesn't know is that the house was on the market last year for $699,950 -- more than $150,000 less than the original asking price.

After the home was on the market for about 18 months, owners Katheryn J. Shields and her husband Phillip F. Cardarella were approached by some folks who have since been indicted for mortgage fraud.

According to prosecutors, a scheme was drawn up to rig the sale of the house using straw buyers and an inflated sales price. The settlement statement for the deal listed a $1.2 million purchase price, with a "management fee" of $414,580. Shields and Cardarella were to receive $707,000, with the mortgage fraud ring splitting the remaining loan proceed, according to indictments handed down in January.

Prosecutors have obtained guilty pleas from three defendants and appear to have deals lined up with three others who are ready to testify against the remaining defendants in the case (see Inman News story).

Shields, who'd been planning to run for mayor of Kansas City when she and her husband were indicted, has denied the charges.

In the mean time, the house is back on the market with an asking price of $899,000.

The home has been "claimed by owner" on Zillow and additional details added. The Zestimate for the home was just bumped up by $36,549 on May 16, and closely approximates the asking price.

So, no takers last year at $699,950, but the house is worth $200,000 more today.

Or heck -- make them an offer.   

Wikipedia: First-mover advantage is the advantage gained by the initial occupant of a market segment.

The first-mover advantage tends to be associated with high-tech because the classic first mover enjoys the quick adoption rush of a new product or service, and is protected by a high barrier to entry - i.e., a technologically complex development process and its associated patent protections. More fundamentally, a successful first mover will grab market share quickly... but that implies a fast product adoption rate.

Well, real estate has historically proven to be an industry that is slow to adapt and slow to adopt. Last November, I discussed how hard it is to establish a first-mover advantage with a new Real Estate 2.0 product or service because it can take years for product acceptance, during which time competitors, even the brokers themselves, can build their own copycats. Thus, Real Estate 2.0 companies can leverage and retain their advantage, not from first mover product hegemony, but by continually adapting their product to fit the market.

Here are three ways Real Estate 2.0 companies have done this:

1. Continually evolve the product with fanfare to establish a distinct cutting-edge brand reputation:   

• Zillow keeps re-branding itself - first stage it was a consumer play and enjoyed hit consumer traffic; second stage, it evolved into an agent play with EZAds and Home Q&A; third stage, will it try to attract broker relationships?
• Redfin uses mass media consumer marketing avenues like 60 Minutes. It doesn't matter that its brand reputation with Realtors is tarnished, it is playing to a virgin customer - the American consumer - and it's getting fanfare and a positive marketing spin.

2. Create strategic needs for broker cooperation, so that they don't opt to build their own: 

• Trulia establishes relationships with the biggest national brokers to seed their pipeline to the agents who advertise on Trulia, prompting Brad Inman to predict #1. Trulia will soon announce a big round of funding.    
• Cyberhomes and eppraisal have adopted the business model of freely supplying their AVM engines to brokers.

3. Create a sticky Web 2.0 community oriented site because the competition (like all the brokers) are still clilmbing out of Web 1.0 stage.

• Not too many examples yet. I did imply two weeks ago that the first brokers that build Web 2.0 functional IDX Web sites will immediately enjoy local first mover advantage in terms of website traffic and search engine ranking.    
• Active Rain is an example of a pure first mover with its popular RE 2.0 networking community. It seems hard for real estate professionals to commit to more than one networking community.

At Transparent Real Estate today, I post a followup article about the Second Mover Advantage and how it seems more appropriate for real estate business development... watch what the first movers do, learn from their mistakes and build a better mousetrap.

--Pat Kitano, Transparent Real Estate

Before the Zillow launch, there was tremendous speculation what this new company would do to the real estate industry. When Zillow finally went live, their servers crashed as a curious and fearful industry wanted to know whether their online Zestimate tool really worked.

After 15 months, most of us felt vindicated. See, they can't accurately appraise the value of property online. You need to see the property in person! In fact, as recently as last month, I wrote an article complaining about the fact that their Zestimates were still off because they were comping 4,500-square-foot houses with houses that were 1,500 square feet.

Even after meeting with two members of the Zillow team who explained their goal of creating a Web site for every property in the country, I still didn't get it.

Well, stupid me, what a sucker I was!

At NAR's Midyear conference on Friday, Saul Klein said he has seen what has been in front of us since the inception of Zillow. Accoding to Klein, "Zillow is a property wiki." Zestimates are the "stem" (a Wiki term that refers to what you want to define) that gets us all to their site. Over time, users will fill in information about their properties and their neighborhoods. They will record what they paid for their property or their agents will. Imagine what a rich resource this will be, filled with user generated content not only about the price, but about the lifestyle in each area. Imagine hundreds of pictures and videos posted of not only a particular property, but of the neighborhood, recreational, and cultural events.

So, hats off to Zillow. Not only is your traffic close to surpassing that of Realtor.com, you have forced them and a host of companies to disclose comparable sales. While the industry is still moaning about transparency, you've created what may be the single most important property resource for consumers five years from now. Thanks also to Saul Klein for having the wisdom to spot what was really happening. I just can't believe it took 15 months for the rest of us to figure it out.

--Bernice Ross, RealEstateCoach.com and LuxuryClues.com

Just days after the "60 Minutes" segment on real estate commissions and Redfin, the Seattle-based brokerage company publicly announces that it has been fined $50,000 by the Northwest MLS over its blogging sites that conduct in-person reviews of properties for sale. The sites violate an MLS policy that prohibits brokers from advertising each others' listings.

The NWMLS has not returned Inman News' phone calls.

Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman says the industry at large should be concerned about some of these rules that prohibit brokers from displaying listings alongside other information (though he points out that the Redfin reviews in question were located on separate sites from the MLS listings). Kelman says he feels that in a Web 2.0 world where data is constantly being mashed up in new and innovative ways that consumers have come to expect this in real estate. He says the MLS will become "a lonely island of information that's overlooked" if the industry doesn't come to grips with what consumers want.

What do you think?

Cyberhomes.com, an automated home valuation site operated by Fidelity National Real Estate Solutions, today announced an agreement with Keller Williams Realty Inc. to market for-sale property listings at the site.

Fidelity officials said today that they also have commitments from a series of other brokerage companies that could bring about 500,000 property listings to the Web site, and they are also in discussions with a number of MLSs.

The Cyberhomes announcement follows the lead of rival valuation site Zillow.com, which features agent-supplied property listings in addition to past sales information and property estimates. Zillow's Jeff Somers announced at a Realtor conference in Washington, D.C., today that Zillow is "moving forward with discussions about accepting broker feeds" of for-sale property information at the site in addition to agent-supplied listings information.

Cyberhomes has a database of about 100 million property records, and Zillow provides value estimates for about 70 million homes. According to the latest count at Zillow's Web site, the site has about 123,300 for-sale property listings and an additional 46,100 properties at the site carry a "Make Me Move" price set by owners.

Speaking of foreclosures, CNet News named Casey Serin, the wannabe real estate mogul who chronicled his crash on iamfacingforeclosure.com, the "world's most hated blogger" and calls his blog:

"irritainment," defined as: "Entertainment and media spectacles that are both annoying and compulsively watchable."

As the poster child for a burst bubble, Casey has since parlayed his infamy into thousands of dollars in advertising revenue from his site, magazine interviews and TV appearances -- but, on the other hand, has been on the receiving end of endless heaps of abuse by other bloggers.

So, with all the talk of transparency these days, shouldn't he be commended for stepping forward and sharing his experiences and putting a human face on a tough situation? Or is he just taking advantage of this new found attention and milking it for all it's worth?

More on Casey here:
No late night infomercial for this one
Dispatches from house-flipping hell

Technorati Tags: Casey Serin, Foreclosure, Real Estate Bubble, iamfacingforeclosure.com

The buzz is still flaming around last night's "60 Minutes" segment on agent commissions and real estate discounters. Here's the scoop on Inman TV:

Redfin's phones have been ringing off the hook since the airing, CEO Glenn Kelman told Inman News. But not everyone is enjoying the publicity. (Read the industry's reaction to the segment in "Some say '60 Minutes' misses the mark.")

Also, if you're curious to read more about Redfin, here are a few articles to check out:

Real estate debate: High touch vs. high tech
Real estate consumer bill of rights
Readers react to Redfin bill of rights
Redfin claims low-cost model is working
Redfin admits to minor error in 'advantage' report
Redfin: Click here to buy a home

ShackPrices.com, a real estate search site for Seattle and surrounding areas, this week added a new feature enabling people to search homes along mass transit lines in King County. At a time when gas prices in the U.S. are expected to hit $4 a gallon for the first time, for some people this is a pretty innovative way to think about searching for a house.
Galen Ward, co-founder of ShackPrices, said, "We're giving home buyers the opportunity to find a home that should substantially increase in value when transit lines are complete. Homes within 500 feet of rail lines are worth as much as $40,000 more than similar homes just a little farther away."