Mark Tepper, HomeFinder.com VP of Business Development and Sales, was recently added to Frogpond's list of Industry Visionaries, joining notable profiles including Harley E. Rouda, Jr. (CEO/Managing Partner of Real Living), Victor Lund (Co-Founding Partner of the WAV Group) and Steve H. Murray, Editor of REAL Trends & Lore Magazine, among others.

FrogPond, provider of unique 'Communications Solutions' enabling corporations, associations and small businesses nationwide to effectively reach customers, employees and members with ahead of the curve industry information, is headed by Susie Hale.

Below is an excerpt of Mark's Industry Visionary profile. Check out the full interview on Frogpond. Many thanks to Susie and the Frogpond team!

As an "industry visionary", what do you see as the major changes occurring in the real estate industry?

You don't have to be a 'visionary' to recognize the two areas that are challenging the status quo, social media and agent ratings.

Social media phenomena like Facebook and Twitter are changing the way agents and brokers market themselves and their properties. For a very long time, there was nothing new in Real Estate Marketing/Advertising. Social media has taken the local cocktail party and put it online. The great news is this can be leveraged to help grow your business very quickly, especially for new agents. The bad news is, if you're an established agent that doesn't use social media, you may lose the next generation of buyers and sellers.

Lastly, agent ratings could change the way we choose a Realtor. There are a few sites out there that are experimenting with agent ratings, HAR, RedFin and HomeThinking are the few that come to mind. Relatively speaking, it's not that difficult to become a licensed agent, however, it is difficult to stay in the business and be successful. The easier it is for consumers to differentiate agents, the harder it will be for many at the lower end of the skill/experience spectrum to stay in the game.

Who are the "individual trendsetters" that are shaping the future real estate industry?

In 2006, Time Magazine's person of the year was 'You.' It was the year of the individual with the advent of YouTube, MySpace and Facebook. I think this still holds true in 2009. It could be the agent that has a large following on Twitter or Facebook, the blogger on ActiveRain that gets referrals from other agents or the Broker that embraces online advertising that drives email and phone leads to their brokerage for a positive ROI.

What are the expectations of the emerging real estate consumer?

Consumers want to work with trustworthy Realtors and Brokerages that can sell their home quickly with the least amount of aggravation at the right price. That hasn't changed. But what has is that they are increasingly demanding proof of the capacity to deliver on this promise rather than the unsubstantiated claims that characterized a lot of old-style marketing.

What changes should a Brokerage implement to ensure profitability in the future?

Reduce your overhead, office space, unnecessary expenses and Advertising that doesn't have a positive ROI. Don't be afraid of hoteling in your office space to give the agents maximum flexibility and decreased overhead. Plus, you need to invest in your agents. There may be more expenses in the short term but if you invest in the success of your agents, they will pay you back tenfold.

Ok, I will promise one thing: once you understand the basics of how a search engine orders results, mastering the parts that a search engine cares about is pretty easy. I am going to start with a basic story of how a search engine works, and then in future articles do a deeper dive for each element that a search engine uses to determine your ranking position.

The Spider Bot

Any search engine (Yahoo!, Google, Bing, etc) uses something called a search engine bot that spiders the web looking at different sites.

Translation:

Search engine bot = Automated program that never stops running.

Spiders the web = Clicks on links.

The bot starts on a specific page of a single Web site, clicks all the links on that page, visits all those pages, clicks all the links on those pages, and visits all of those pages. The little guy repeats this process, endlessly churning through all the interconnected pages of the Internet.

Historically, the usual starting point for the search engine bots is a place called dmoz. This place is nothing but a Yellow Pages directory-style site with different categories and lists of sites under those categories. From there, the little guy just goes and goes through as many sites as it can.

The first step in getting a site recognized is getting a link to it from a site that the search engine already knows about. So, if you have a new site, I would recommend doing all of the following to ensure that you get picked up by the bots as soon as possible:

1) Submit your site to either DMoz or Google.

2) Get a link back from a friend's site that has already been visited by the search engine bot. An easy way to tell is if you do a search for your friend's site and they come up (this indicated they have been visited by the search engine bot).

3) Do a search for yourself, and if any of your Facebook, Linkedin, or Myspace profiles come up, put a link to your new site on your profile.

OK, now that we have the basics of how a search engine gets to your site. Next week we will cover the parts of your site that the engine cares most about when crawling your site.

Online real estate reality check

A while back I was in the audience at an industry conference when a woman on stage asked this question:

At the end of the day, do any of these online real estate companies really help anyone buy or sell a home?

My initial reaction – as someone running one of 'these' companies - was to dismiss the question as gratuitous, and dead wrong.

She's just trying to provoke the audience. We provide all kinds of information on our site – of course we're helping. And that's what a REALTOR is there for anyway. So what's the problem?

But the question kept creeping back into my head in the following weeks, prodding me to dig deeper into our value proposition and think about what it would take to answer 'yes,' unequivocally.

How could we at HomeFinder.com – and, for that matter, my colleagues and competitors elsewhere in online real estate – provide a more essential service? And while our REALTOR partners would always be the ones who would get properties bought and sold, what could we do to help them get to that goal more efficiently?

Doing this, of course, would not be easy. The online real estate category is a crowded place. Consumers can view listings on myriad sites, all of which offer functionality that is strikingly similar. A set of standards and best practices has emerged as a result – which is good – but with that comes a pressure to stick to proven formulas, familiar features and accept assumptions as to what an online real estate site should and should not do. And that can be quite limiting.

So how do we move forward? I don't have clear answers yet, but here are some things I believe to be true:

We need to take more risks

This sounds trite, but it's true. When is the last time an online real estate company did something that made you think, 'Wow, that's gutsy?' Putting real estate listings online in 1994 was gutsy; Zillow took a big risk offering home values online ten years later. But who's sticking their neck out now? It's been awhile.

At the beginning of 2009, we expanded from being a technology provider to major newspapers across the country, previously known as Homescape, to rebranding as HomeFinder.com and growing our business to become a world-class home search and information site. While this is a goal we continue to strive toward, the HomeFinder.com name change was both a catalyst and reminder of not only what our site and our competitor sites offer, but also what consumers truly want -- to find a home.

Granted, this isn't Page Six material. But we're relatively new to the game and that also puts us in a position to more easily escape our own history than others. That's an opportunity I plan to capitalize on.

Online real estate needs more big moves.

It's not just about a house, it's about living a life

Having all the listings – including FSBO's – is something we at HomeFinder pride ourselves on. But we need to understand that for most people, the house is just part of what goes into a decision to live somewhere.

To make that important decision more effectively, consumers need to get a sense for what lies beyond the four walls of the home they see on the screen. Sure, most sites offer school ratings, basic demographic information and some high-level housing market data.

But today we can go beyond that. The emergence of the 'Real-time Web' allows us to capture what's happening now in any given place, to hear the ambient noise of a neighborhood. The number of new APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) makes exciting mashups of place-based images, video and data possible in ways we could online imagine just a year or two ago.

It's time to innovate in these areas.

A more effective model: better connect home finders with home sellers

Recently, a small storm erupted over a pornographic advertisement appearing on Realtor.com. While this was entirely inadvertent (apparently the result of an error in their ad serving system) it did underscore a point: The largely ad-based online real estate category often delivers a less-than-optimal user experience.

Ads, featured listings and the like can be quite effective for our agent and broker partners. But for consumers, they often just get in the way.

How can we deliver a better experience that gets consumers where they want to go more efficiently, while also placing our broker and agent customers in the right place, at the right time, on the right platform?

We're working on some of the answers at HomeFinder.com as I write.

Call to action

In the end, the conference panelist's question was not an annoyance – it was a call to action. To deliver even more value to consumers and practitioners. To rethink the online real estate formula. To challenge ourselves to question those things we take for granted.

I do not have many answers at this point, just directional notions like those I list above. But I'll get there.

I hope you'll join me.

I was reading online about how different online real estate companies like HomeFinder.com, Trulia, Zillow, etc. are perceived by Real Estate Agents. I was shocked to find that a lot of the negative rhetoric revolved around our collective dominance of search engines. This shouldn't come as a shock to anyone, since we are online real estate companies. If we don't rank on the first page, then we aren't doing our jobs!

What shocked me even more; the majority of the resolutions suggested by agents involved you pulling your listings away from the Internet. The most misguided movement that I saw out of this was the person that ran the anti-Trulia campaign. He wanted you to remove all your Trulia stuff from your site and publish his anti-Trulia badge.

This A) Gives you no value, and b) When you remove the Trulia widgets from your page and put his badge on your page, you are giving him the same SEO benefit that you were giving Trulia. At least the Trulia widgets were adding value to your site by giving someone something interesting to look at, but I am getting ahead of myself.

Mythbusting

Let's dispel a couple of myths: We at HomeFinder.com are NOT trying to put you out of business, nor are we trying to figure out how to steal your commission. In fact, we judge our success as connecting the most potential home buyers with agents through e-mails, phone calls and traffic sent to agents Web site.

There is NO reason why you as an agent or as a member of a brokerage shouldn't be ranking in the top spots in search engines. The things that you can do to accomplish high rankings range from some very simple, to other more strategic long term changes that you can make to help you rise up the search rankings. In addition, partnering with sites like HomeFinder.com, Trulia, and Zillow can benefit you, as long as you know what to look for, and how to take advantage of what they offer.

HomeFinder's Charge

My job is to head up the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) initiative at HomeFinder.com. What I am going to do is post an article every week that will explain the basics of SEO. I will cover everything from what parts of your Web site search bots care most about, how to optimize these parts and how to incorporate third party aggregators to ensure that you are maximizing your Web presence.

We want to see you do well, so we are going to provide you with all the basics to get you to rise up quickly and as high as you can in the search engines. I look forward to writing about the basics to succeed in the search engines, and I really want to know changes that you implement, how the changes have affected your site, and what you think about the future of online real estate. At the same time, I want you to stop me if I get ahead of myself. Let me know if what I am talking about doesn't make sense, or if there are terms you need more definition on.

If you have any questions, would like me to cover a specific topic, or would like to hit me up with a specific question about your site, my email is jwilson@homefinder.com.

The bottom line: Among the last to enter the housing slump and one of the first to begin to climb out, Greenville's compass is fixed north toward recovery

Our ASM travels also took us to Greenville, SC last month…visiting our friends at the Greenville News. Our Affiliates cover the Greater Greenville area, describing it as one of the last areas nationally to feel the burn from the housing downturn and among the fortunate first to show signs of recovery. The Greater Greenville area shows signs of continued improvement, particularly in the quality of life, which has since attracted record setting droves of population growth in the last two years, mainly concentrated in the Mauldin and Greer areas.

Affordability, coupled with the quality of life, has also positively stimulated the local housing market…helping the Greater Greenville area begin to make the steep climb out of recession. With the $8,000 federal tax credit rousing demand from first time buyers and housing affordability inciting current homeowners to action, Greenville's compass continues to point north toward recovery.

Our Affiliates also cited challenges facing agent/broker/builder prospects and current customers in the area. Given the current conditions, real estate is no longer a 'list it and someone will buy it' game. Real estate professionals now have to define the unique selling propositions of a property and market it to the best customer right from the get go. This requires more work and more efforts to cater to the client.

The higher price points in the Greater Greenville area- above the $300,000 mark, are taking longer to sell, creating a need for agents and brokers to develop strategies geared toward long term customer relationships. Some agents are just not used to working with a customer for 9-12 months +! This requires weekly and monthly feedback and a new system to manage their customer's expectations--all within an evolving landscape that serves as a catalyst for change and adaptation both in the market and in the real estate profession.