The steering committee will review all feedback from the Geek Estate community, and make final decisions for the participants sites in Geek Build 2012. The committee will consist of the following individuals:

• Daniel Beer, Team Leader, Prudential California Realty, San Diego Home Finder
• Ben Fisher, Agent, Sotheby’s International, Park City Luxury Real Estate
• Jay Thompson, Managing Broker, Thompson’s Realty, Phoenix Real Estate Guy
• Dominic Morrocco, Co-Founder & Partner, M Squared Real Estate
• Eric Bramlett, Co-Founder, Displet
• Drew Meyers, Founder, ESM Exec Designs

Next up — we’ll publicize who the participants are who will be building their sites (with the help of the Geek Estate community).

Note: Some of the Geek Build 2012 posts in future will be written by steering committee members and participants — so you’re not stuck reading updates from just me

[via Amber Rae]

Go read it for yourself.

I posted this comment on Jay’s “The Value Add of a Real Estate Agent” post, and thought I’d repost it here:

I think a lot of what this comes down to, unfortunately, is that many agents (and the majority of people in general) are lazy. Everyone wants the “EASY” button. Instead of actually going and “doing something” like interpreting the Case Shiller market stats, writing a blog post, running your own MLS queries to generate unique market stats, building links, emailing your past clients, paying for SEO, etc — agents would rather sit around and bitch and whine about how unfair what everyone else is doing or why they can’t succeed. You know what…no one cares. Zillow is not the reason you aren’t doing well at SEO. Trulia is not the reason you can’t sell your listing. Realtor.com is not the reason you only have one buyer lead in the last 60 days. And on down the line. No one wants to hear it. One thing matters, and one thing only. Execution. And execution starts, and ends with DOING.

Go DO something. Go do anything.

And let me reiterate – this is not just a flaw of agents. It’s a flaw of the majority of the population. Further reading - http://www.drewmeyersinsights.com/2012/01/24/focus-on-doing-if-you-want-to-spend-your-time-with-other-doers/

**Photo via Nao

Over the past few years speaking to agents all over the country, I often get asked how to build a local blog that consistently generates leads over time (and hint: it’s not easy nor is it fast). Rather than continue to field those questions one off, why not just build a local real estate blog from scratch — publicly? This is an idea I’ve been brewing in the back of my mind ever since I ran across the Million Dollar Blog Project. And then the comment thread on Daniel Beer’s a Brutally Honest Case Study turned the idea into a real initiative. If you so desire, you can follow along and build a site yourself. Of course, to do it yourself you’ll need the design and development skills (or money for them) — but we’ll get into all that later. First, let’s be clear what we are setting out to accomplish.

The Goal

Build a real estate website from the ground up, sourcing input from the tech-savvy Geek Estate community, with the following goals:

• Maximize lead generation (signups, blog or IDX)
• Maximize lead conversion (phone calls, requests for showings, specific property requests, track closings from site long-term)
• Maximize time on site, page views/visit
• Minimize bounce rate

How it Will Work

Let me start by saying I don’t want to finalize any details of Geek Build 2012 without the help of the Geek Estate community. There are some amazing talented individuals that follow this blog regularly, and I certainly want your feedback. After all, this project is owned by the entire community — not just me.

I’ve spoken about the Geek Build 2012 project with several individuals, including Daniel Bacon, as a result of the discussion on Daniel Beer’s post – and here’s what we’re thinking makes the most sense:

• There will be between 2-5 actual local real estate sites built (or rebuilt).
• Sites will be built on top of WordPress.org.
• Everything from the branding to the domain name to the title tags to the design to the IDX solution to the calls to action to the the wireframe to the content strategy will be discussed publicly and all decisions will be voted on by the Geek Estate community.
• There will be a steering committee that will make final decisions after reviewing all the feedback from the community. It will consist of several experienced technologists and at least two active real estate agents/brokers who make their primary living from selling real estate.
• The development and design will be crowd sourced to the Geek Estate community (a few tech-savvy passionate participants, and who ever else is willing and able to help), and participants will be expected to pick up the cost of design or development that they cannot do themselves (or cannot be shared across all sites).

What We Need

• Participants – so far, Daniel Bacon is the only confirmed participant who will be building a website. The details regarding what is required of a participant are not totally final — but unless you are able to handle both design and code yourself, there will likely be some cost to participating.
• Coders/Designers – in a perfect world, we’d have one PHP/CSS person and one designer to volunteer some of their time to help on this project. Whether or not the right person is out there and willing to help? I’m not sure.
• Steering Committee Members – if you’re interested in serving on the steering committee, shoot me an email with your qualifications and include a note as to why you want to participate.

**It’s probably goes without saying, but all participants, volunteers, and steering members will get proper recognition throughout this project – you’ll be in the spotlight

Want to get Involved

Leave a comment here, or email me at drew at esmexecdesigns dot com with the subject “Geek Build 2012″.

Look forward to hearing from you…this is going to be a very fun, collaborative process that we’ll undertake together over the coming weeks and months.

More updates to come soon!

No one disputes the need for IDX on a successful real estate website. With that said, what are the absolute BEST IDX platforms for real estate agents and brokers on the market today?

Diverse Solutions dsSearchAgent

vs

rewIDX

vs

Displet

vs

Real Geeks

vs

IDX Broker

vs

iHomeFinder

What do you use? What do you think? Does it work? Do your client like it? What’s your conversion rate? Are there any other providers that deserve to be on this list that I missed? Do any of these providers deserve to be axed from the list?

Would love your feedback as to what works and what doesn’t in the land of IDX.

I personally think there is already enough news in the world. In fact, 24 hour a day news is kind of a joke if you ask me since it leads to much of the over exaggeration of many of today’s issues that are really A LOT smaller than the media makes them out to be.

What do I really wish a media company would do? Figure out how to cover all the good happening in the world on a daily basis rather than talk non stop about how crappy everything is. A media company that only (or 75%) covers positive news…imagine that.

Take a look here!

Take a look and let us know what you think!

There are a couple thanks in order before I can wrap this up…

Thank you to Dawn Lyon for the introduction to the Room 77 team.

As a relatively new web design company without a large portfolio, we’re certainly thankful the Room 77 team trusted ESM Exec Designs with their site redesign — I guess it didn’t hurt that I worked under one of their board members (Spencer Rascoff) for several years and spent an inordinate amount of time writing content on Zillow Blog.

The fact that Room 77 chose ESM  for their redesign means that Mary at Saint Monica’s in Kenya (pictured below) has a brand new computer for her college experience. If you’d like to learn more about our one for one model (one computer for every custom website we build), you can learn more about our motives here. ESM is not just a web design firm — we’re a web design firm with a social purpose to leveling the playing field in this vast world that we live in, one computer at a time.

If you’re a startup looking to undergo a corporate blog redesign — let us know and we’re happy to see how we can help.

Are you looking for .EDU links as part of your SEO efforts for 2012? We can get you at least 10 per month.

Contact us if so.

Note: make sure you know that .EDU links are not free…if only it were that easy, and cheap.

Click here to view the embedded video.

[via Catfails]

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is going to be an ongoing discussion for most of 2012 I would guess, as brokerages and agents around the country decide whether or not listing syndication makes sense for their businesses (I think it does).

[via AGBeat]

Best

Here are two of the best in my mind.

MSQRealty.com

What’s not to like? My prediction — this will be the best site in the entire industry within 6 months. I’ve seen some of the new stuff Dominic has been working on the last few weeks (such as new “building” pages) — and they are wicked cool.

Disclosure: Dominic Morrocco, a partner with M Squared, and I are good friends, and he is a client of Virtual Results where I used to work.

SueAdler.com

I simply LOVE the design of this site, and the focus on the commute information to Manhattan. Further, if you use BoomTown – check out the integrated BoomTown search experience into her primary site.

Disclosure: This is a site by Virtual Results, my former employer.

Worst

What do you think? Do I dare call out some bad ones? In the name of radical honesty, I will call out a few subpar (to put it nicely) sites I’ve come across…

Crye-Leike

In all honestly, I’m just beyond confused as a user as to what they want me to do when I get to the home page. It’s too cluttered with irrelevant information. So..instead of try to figure it out, I’d just go back to Google and look for another site with a simpler user interface.

Z57 and Advanced Access

Any of the thousands of sites built by Z57 (like this one) or Advanced Access (like this one) could be on this list.

Your Thoughts

Note that I’ve seen a lot of agent and broker websites, but no where near all of them. These were the sites I liked the most, and least.

What are your favorites? And what horrible sites have you seen lately in dire need of an overhaul?

how often do you hear college students say “I don’t know what to do with my life” and professionals say “I’m not in love with what I do.” Fuck that. There’s a better way to live.

I changed my major 3 times, so that was certainly me in college until I finally figured it out REALLY late in my senior year (a month or so before I graduated). And I hear from professionals seemingly everyday who hate their jobs and would rather be doing something else with their lives.

Yes. There is a better way. It’s called find your passion and follow it.