realonomics

Part 3 - CityBlogUSA

This post is the third installment of a three-part series with Donald Teel, the Founder of e-Partner, and it addresses blogging in general and the CityBlogUSA Network specifically; its mission, model and functionality. In addition, this post looks at the place of blogging in real estate business model paradigms in a consumer-centric industry.

REALONOMICS: CityBlogUSA is a pretty stout venture, what’s the nutshell on this thing?
CITYBLOGUSA: The e-Partner team took a look at the blogging phenomena during the first few months of 2006 and made some important discoveries about blogs and blogging that we thought might guide us into that universe. We decided there were reasons it was a space we could not ignore.

REALONOMICS: What were the discoveries your team made and what were the compelling reasons to jump into the blogging ocean?
CITYBLOGUSA: “Ocean” is a good word to describe blogging and it was one of the discoveries; the sheer enormity of blogging as a social medium for interaction and idea pooling is profound. We also discovered that a lot of people were writing, only a few were reading and even less are commenting, leading us to conclude that we were still in the infancy stage of blogging as a means to new business models. We discovered that only a very small slice of blogs had what I would call “meat and potatoes” content…real view points, cutting edge thinking…and they ranged from the cute boutique blog to high-powered political blogs.

But far and away the largest discovery was that blogging isn’t really being used as effectively as it can be within the real estate industry to create peer-to-peer relationships and business models that can help owners of real estate companies. Owners don’t know much about blogging and are generally confounded by it. Finally, we discovered that only about 10% of all owners had a grasp of what blogging is; they asked us, point blank, “What is blogging?” While many are saying blogging is peaking, I’m saying, for the industry we have no clue yet what it can mean to us in terms of consumer loyalty.

Our reasons for creating the CityBlogUSA Network, however, were more than fanciful and had to do with our business belief about consumer-centricity within the real estate brokerage business and the fact that real estate companies should utilize blogging as a part of their business development strategies. We work from the premise that anything good for the consumer is good for the broker/owner…literally, everything, and this belief can ultimately create higher profits for owners. Having been one, I can say, owners are generally skeptical people and tend to be a little intimidated by consumer demands. Blogging allows us remove the sense of nervousness about opening up the operation to consumer scrutiny.

REALONOMICS: Tell us about the consumer side of the CityBlogUSA Network.
CITYBLOGUSA: We decided to take a risk and empower the consumer to do what the consumer is already doing or, in fact, wants to do…communicate with others about real estate, thus the marketing tag “Ask the people who live there.” Our first premise, which is the premise of blogging as a social media, was residents know more about living in a city than others do and should be afforded the opportunity to post information about not only real estate but any other topic they want to discuss, from acupuncture to zoology.

We believe the democratization of real estate is evolving at a quickening pace. Peers want to dialogue with peers. Consumers trust other consumers. We need to acknowledge this and create the business models that match this truth, rather than resist the change.

From the business side of the CityBlogUSA Network we asked ourselves a penetrating question, “why aren’t owners providing community-based blogging within the markets for residents who have a story to tell and consumers who want to relocate, need to sell where they live and buy real estate in a different city?

REALONOMICS: What were the reasons owners weren’t providing such a medium for their markets?
CITYBLOGUSA: Lack of knowledge, understanding, initiative, technology enablement and a dash of fear. Like I said, broker/owners, too many of us, didn’t even know what a blog was! Owners didn’t have the time or the technology savvy to create blogs, manage them and make them work.

When we started to tell owners we were going to empower residents in their markets to talk about their “favorite city and home town” via a social networking medium the top immediate question was, “who is going to police what they say?” Which is like saying, “we exist for our clients but we really don’t want total transparency and unfettered communication because we might not like what they say.”

REALONOMICS: Where is the CityBlogUSA Network now in terms of development.
CITYBLOGUSA: Square one…and, it’s a round BETA hole and our sledge hammer is pretty beat up. On a scale of 1 to 10, we are .0023418! Seriously, we took the WordPress Multi-User platform and had to do some pretty strenuous code enhancements to make it work in every State and City in the United States and within the entire e-Partner Community-Based Network. Every developer who does this will attest to the concept of “Protracted BETA” or, the work is never done. Right now the CityBlogUSA Network is up, running, being blogged, agents are joining, owners are joining and we are at about week four. The truly motivated are jumping on board because we are offering some degree of exclusivity to owners who want to be in the middle of this and the agents who want to position themselves. We are just scratching the surface and moving very deliberately toward solutions, avoiding jumping on every bandwagon that hits the Internet weekly.

We have no illusions about resident/consumer blogging. Despite the growth of blogs, the vast majority of consumers are still not fully literate about the blogosphere and how it can empower them…but, they are learning quickly, which is why the real estate industry needs to be at the forefront of the creativity and implementation curve, not behind the eight ball.

REALONOMICS: Where does the real estate industry fit into the CityBlogUSA Network?
CITYBLOGUSA: First and foremost, all that we do at e-Partner involves the industry with a primary focus on broker/owners and the consumer. We start there. However, we are not creating the blogging network so that it can feature real estate practitioners as its centerpiece; that would be counter-productive to the consumer-centric models we believe in and where the industry is going.

The CityBlogUSA Network is consumer and resident focused with broker/owners and agents in more of a supportive role, i.e., we are here, you can find us, blog with us, ask us questions, use our knowledge and invite us into your world if you choose to do so.

In this sense we are not like ActiveRain, which is far-and-away the industry leader for promoting agents and ancillary service providers at the front end of their solution. We don’t have a “come one, come all” element. In fact, we have a “first come, first served” model for agents. We are actually creating limited exclusivity for agents at the community blogging level. If you visit our Myrtle Beach blog, you will see agents from Century 21, independent firms and Coldwell Banker, while the South Carolina Blogging Network is used as a tool of another brokerage firm. I honestly believe the blending of the industry is the wave of the future and it isn’t a new phenomenon. Zillow, Trulia, ActiveRain, CityBlogUSA and others are doing it. In our traditional circles, we have resisted it to a large degree with the exception of Realtor.com, where all firms, brands and agents get to play.

What’s different about the CityBlogUSA Network is the consumer-centricity and resident focus. It will take us a while to get where we need to go, so we are in it for the long haul.

REALONOMICS: How do people get involved in the blogging network?
CITYBLOGUSA: Easy, they go to www.CityBlogUSA.com, pick a State and a City and hop into authoring, commenting and suggesting ideas to their hearts content. They can upload photos of their community through the PhotoBlogUSA component as well. If they are serious about exposure they can spend some money to promote themselves to consumers and residents by engaging in highly target ads.

If a user wants to hop directly into their State, they can simple dial in their browser to such locations as CaliforniaBlogPage.com, AlabamaBlogPage.com, MaineBlogPage.com, etc. Just hammer the state name into the address bar and follow it with BlogPage.com.

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