Probably Not – In Reply to Tepilo Ending Need for Estate Agents

Sticking comment here as can’t be arsed with yet another signup or login just to comment.

Let me start of with I’m not coming out to defend the Estate Agency industry as a whole.  Much of their reputation is well deserved there are a great many sharks.  However there are also plenty of super well trained, nice, kind, informed and helpful agents too.  Just like any industry I guess.

Today Mike Butcher has a guest post up on the Telegraph’s website entitled “Does Sarah Beeny’s free property website herald the end for estate agents?”

Well simply the answer is no it won’t.

The whole FSBO (for sale by owner) model is well understood in America, Australia and NZ where a homeowner takes control of the whole marketing and negotiation process in selling their home.

The system works for a percentage but the last research I saw this was something like < 10% of all FSBO resulting in sale.

The reasons are simple.  Most people are not trained in marketing and in English based cultures haggling (negotiating) is a skill long forgotten.  For anyone in the UK the latest adverts by MoneySupermarket.com starring comedian Omid Djalili even mention the “cringe gland” being prevalent in the English where haggling is concerned.

The problem for many is that, quite rightly, their house is not a property it is a home. Somewhere they are emotionally tied to and when it comes to the business of selling a home removing that emotion is critical.

Why?  Well for a start the biggest killer in selling a property is price.  Too high and no one will even view the place, or at least if they do they will most likely be disappointed having expected it to have been better than it is – after all it is priced in a higher bracket with better properties.  Too low and most people will avoid it thinking there is something wrong.  Pricing is key.

Without training or at least access to decent quality comparable sales data it is really hard for a homeowner to get the pricing right.  Sure there are valuers or surveyors but they cost money and the whole point of FSBO is to avoid cost, right?

The second part to removing emotion from the process problem lays in mentally detaching oneself from the home and treating it as a commodity to be sold.  Trust me on this, it’s hard.  And without that detachment even the simplest of selling tools such as presenting the home for sale is a tricky task.  Home prep is not about clean and tidy, it’s so much more. Sure clean and tidy matters but it’s more about creating a space which prospective buyers can visualise as being their own not yours.   Try removing all personal effects, photo’s, pictures, that lovely family heirloom brass plate from the wall and living in the space for a while.  Your home stops being your home.  It’s hard.

And so back to Beeny’s new website, Tepilo.  I’ve seen a number of these “market your own home and save on fees” sites along with magazines, papers and even shops come and go over the last 10 years.  Sure this one has a “celebrity” name behind it.  Sure people are becoming ever better equipped with internet based resources for pricing, marketing and finding property.  But…

An estate agent does this for a job often 7 days a week. The good ones are formally trained (and where available qualified) and armed to the teeth with better information, better skills, more time.

There are amateur mechanics out there who will tinker with their cars.  I don’t.  Sure I could learn a few skills but when it comes down to the safety of my family I’m the first to throw the work to a local garage.  It’s no different in the internet space.  Anyone can get a copy of Dreamweaver or Frontpage (they still do that?) and knock up a website – will it be any good?  Maybe.  Could a professional have done a better job, probably.

Finally every agent understands fees are a sticking point when competing for business.  You can always try to haggle just don’t forget they haggle for a living.  More importantly find yourself an agent who can offer you more value in using their services than they cost, they should be able to prove their track record on this so just ask.

Ads in My Twitter Stream – What Happened to Informed Consent Hootsuite?

A couple of days back I chose to follow my normal course of behaviour and play with any new Twitter clients for my much loved HTC Hero.  As yet there has been nothing on par with the truly awesome Gravity client on Nokia’s Series 60 by @janole so anything new gets a fair go.

I’d seen reviews of Hootsuite’s new client and after throwing a nice shiny baked ROM at the Hero I was able to download and install Hootsuite Lite.  There is a paid for version ($1.99 at time of writing) but as the only additional benefit I could see was the ability to handle more than 3 Twitter accounts (and I use but 1) there was little point in spending the cash just to see if it works.

Setup was simple enough, even though the you get hassled a couple of times to create a new Hootsuite account before being offered a connection to your Twitter account.

Now I’m not going to review the application other than to say it’s very usable, has some decent thinking around navigation and handles a Twitter account admirably – at least on par with the current leader Seesmic in my opinion.  But something odd happened after a feed refresh sometime on Saturday.

I was out and about, hit refresh and a curious new message appeared in my stream from someone I don’t follow.  This in itself given Twitter’s problems of last weeks with random tweets appearing was nothing too odd but this tweet had a different coloured background and the format of the message was odd.

I quickly sent out a tweet to the crowd asking if anyone else had seen these “ads” but everyone who responded hadn’t. Was this the first inkling of the much talked about Twitter advertising model.  If so it was pretty well exactly what I had expected it might be but had no knowledge of it having yet been enabled.

Of course being out and about research was a little hard to do.

So yesterday I sat down for half an hour and did some digging.  It turns out that Hootsuite have partnered with a third party Twitter advertising agency called 140Proof who’s model is to sell advertising messages injected directly into one’s stream by the client application.  They look and feel like tweets but they aren’t – they are put there ONLY in the application stream.

They are inoffensive and not at all obtrusive, as I said they pretty well looked and felt how I would expect a Twitter ad to be BUT I hadn’t asked for them and more importantly I couldn’t recall ever being informed that I was going to get them.  There were no signup T&C’s with the mobile app, no details easily found on Hootsuite’s web page, nothing.

A little more digging and it turns out that, according to this article on Techcrunch that,

Twitter clients pass 140 Proof a user ID list (with no names) and the public information contained in a Twitter users profile, and on the advertiser side, advertisers bid on ads to be directed toward users based on keywords in tweets, followers, as well as device, location and platform. 140 Proof’s algorithms calculates Twitterer’s “persona” based on public tweets and who they follow and serves ads to users based on this data.

YOU WHAT?  So without my permission Hootsuite passes my PI and graph to a third party who then does their thing with it, sells that bundle (anonymously granted) and throws back a targeted advert!

Now sure my stream is public and viewable by all but that doesn’t make it acceptable for a business to utilise that information for their own gain without at least first asking for permission.  What happens if you have a private non-publicly viewable Twitter stream?  Does Hootsuite not work or do they just blindly continue to pass that data on to 140 Proof?

I don’t mind the ads, they make sense, they (in theory and assuming I pay them attention) pay for Hootsuite to offer up their client for “free” (read no money there) but informed consent is required.

For the record NOT one of the adverts I  have seen over the last couple of days has been even vaguely “relevant” nor have I clicked through on any.

I’ll be having a chat with some people over just what consent they should have obtained as surely there must be a requirement in the EU but it’ll be more interesting to see just what sort of lifespan the 140 Proof model will have once Twitter actually do get their advertising live.

UPDATE: I am interested to hear from anyone who has knowledge of the BT/Phorm case being brought by the CPA;  specifically the abuse of Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA).

If Hootsuite are intercepting my profile and tweet stream and shipping it off (hashed or not) to 140Proof for analysis and spam would this constitute a breach also?

Don’t get me wrong I don’t want Hootsuite punished I just wonder if this is/were the case what would be their knowledge of the issue and how would the choose to address it.

Media Revolution? Did it hit the mark?

Last night the BBC showed the latest Janet Street-Porter doco, looking at the future for print media – specifically newspapers.

Now I will admit I only caught the last 15 minutes or so and would love to hear from anyone who saw the whole thing.

From what little I did see there seemed to be little acknowledgement that it’s not the internet or expectation that online media should be free but rather the reliance upon out dated advertising models that poses the biggest threat to the printed media industry.

Did it touch on this?

UPDATE:  Doc Searles has just posted a piece on the Project VRM blog about just this.  Importantly he proposes a system called PayChoice which would afford readers the ability to easily pay for content on their own terms not just the archaic one-sided options talked about and lauded by the traditional press.

Marketing or Advertising?

Which ever camp one sits in one has to agree it is genius.