Leaders of the Pack

Industry leaders must focus on instinct and innovation to stay in front of technology trends
by Bill Briggs // photographs by Phil Mumford

The big idea - at the time, merely the latest techno brainstorm to rock real estate – bubbled up when an unemployed, late-30s husband and father decided to go house shopping.

That man was Rich Barton. In 2005, more than a year after he had retired from his first Web creation, Expedia.com, Barton possessed "no real plans" to work again. However, amid his property hunt, the dot-com dynamo wandered onto the Internet for some personal research and was stunned by what he didn't see. "When it came to real estate, the Web was basically the same in 2005 as it was in 1998," he says. "It was even hard to find a listings Web site with a map. It was unbelievable."

Inspired by the void, Barton and former Expedia partner Lloyd Frink concocted Zillow.com, blending instant home-value estimates – Zestimates – with listing data and online dialogue. Zillow's launch, a product of the livelier and more social Web 2.0, was a landmark moment in the technology-rich transformation of American real estate. The raw hunger of consumers who are still fueling this movement has amazed Barton. "I can't find the bottom of this one," he says. "It's insatiable, the appetite for more information to make them smarter, to give them an edge, to save them money or simply to indulge in entertainment."

In the wake of this revolution, the industry is alive with online gizmos and tactics: Virtual Earth mapping tools, merged Multiple Listing Services and massive public-retail engines like Craig's List and Google – which lists real estate as its top search category.

It is a moment dominated by tech-savvy agents and brokers who are using video tours to sell, smartphones to stay connected, and interactive Web sites to lure new customers. Consider that Michigan-based RealEstateOne.com draws more than 1 million people per year to its site. Impressed? JohnLScott.com – home site for the Seattle, Wash.-based company – lures 1 million visitors each month. More impressed? Zillow.com attracted 5.2 million visitors in March alone.

Ultimately though, it is a landscape increasingly ruled by the people, not the practitioners. Each month, an estimated 35 million to 45 million consumers troll Internet real estate sites. They are ravenous for every scrap of information on the value of their home – and the homes of their neighbors – but only about one in 10 is planning to buy or sell anytime soon. In other words, the virtual marketplace is packed with window shoppers who prefer the Web's anonymity and don't want to be treated like a lead.

The industry's response to this techno makeover? Initially, of course, many agents and brokers viewed the Internet as a threat. Valuation sites like Zillow were seen by some as interlopers. The housing slump didn't exactly soothe those tensions.

"In some situations, I'm passionately fighting (with other company leaders), constantly having to take the position of the consumer," says Kristi Graning, senior vice president of information technology and e-business for RE/MAX International. "And in this environment, when we're really focusing on our bread and butter – the agents and brokers – it doesn't always sit well to talk about the consumers. We balance it all the time."

1 of 7