Inman Connect: full of geeky enthusiasm

(photo by whiteafrican on flickr)

The dust has finally settled from the Inman Real Estate Connect conference which finished last week and given me a chance to reflect on some of what I heard from industry leaders and the star filled line up of speakers.

The Inman conference is a unique event for the industry and all of us at Trulia. It brings together leading technologists, brokers, bloggers, analysts and vendors. Brad Inman manages to effectively mix information, networking, insights and entertainment into an engaging 3 day event. This is my 4th year at the San Francisco Inman Connect and it has been fascinating to watch the mood over the years and see some future gazing turn into reality.

If I was to sum it up, I felt that there was an air of geeky enthusiasm at the conference. Admittedly, the industry is mostly full of optimists and while there is not too much enthusiasm about the overall housing market, I felt a new level of optimism about the role of technology. While this optimism is certainly a little self serving and possibly a reaction to the bad news back home, it feels like a new, positive era for the industry.

While I’m certainly blinkered with what’s going on here at Trulia, the two big things I saw at the conference were 1) that listing distribution is becoming more widespread and 2) that social media is alive and kicking in real estate.

Blogs are now really working for many agents, there were countless examples of using blogs to generate real leads, it is not expensive, but it can be time consuming. The combination of great content and personality is a refreshing change from the bland, self serving agent ads of old. Agents that demonstrate deep domain knowledge and are visible across the web are now becoming the go-to place online and offline for home buyers and sellers. It is pretty amazing how things have evolved.

I had the chance to meet up in person with many agents and bloggers that I had seen on Trulia Voices, like Roberta Murphy, Gina Riede, Brian Brady and Ken Glidewell.

I heard countless times, how bloggers were meeting up with other bloggers for the first time and yet thought of many of them as old, long lost friends. The virtual connections were wonderful, but there is no substitute for the real-world interaction.

Sort of like the world of real estate search, I guess. You can find a home online that you are interested in, but of course you’re still going to visit the open home before you stump up the cash.

There were literally dozens of other social media, blogging and “web2.0” companies (such as StreetAdvisor, My-Currency and Trulia Voices) all finding their niche. While some may not make it; a few will build pretty exciting businesses that will permanently change the real estate landscape for the better. We expect to be a part of that change and will continue to attend Connect to meet all the innovators that are trying to be a part of it as well.

The other big trend is that listing distribution beyond the MLS is now the norm with the large brokerages and franchisor groups. There were more announcements during the conference and many companies were starting to use the Trulia listing distribution model that we helped architect with our launch September 2005. It’s pretty exciting for me to see the industry adopt this model which will dramatically reduce the marketing costs of agents and brokers and ultimately lead to a better deal for consumers. We at Trulia are also not standing still with the launch of Trulia Connect, a service for 3rd parties and MLSs to help their clients increase the traffic to their listings.

So as the dust settles and I catch up on the emails and business cards I collected, I feel a bit of geeky enthusiasm as well. The online tools are working, the partnerships are forming and technology is slowly becoming a Realtors’ best friend. I literally cannot wait until next year–the pace of change is accelerating, there is positive momentum and Brad always pulls together the right people for an excellent show. Here’s looking forward to the next year of great strides in a great industry!