Niki and the folks at Homethinking have launched RealEstateVoices, a “a real estate social news site designed to help you discover the most interesting articles of the day, as voted and suggested by your fellow users” — it is pretty much a vertical version of Digg or reddit but focused on real estate. I like the model and while there are certainly things in the interface I’d change (show some more of the article in the summaries please) it’s a great idea and worth checking out.

From today’s WSJ article entitled Snippy Things Folks Say About Your Home Are Now Also Online:

Some agents and homeowners already are howling that the reviews are hatchet jobs, perhaps motivated by spite or a desire to discourage competing bids for property the reviewers want to buy. Operators of the sites say the reviews — some of which are full of praise — will provide valuable insights for home shoppers. Companies like Zip and Reply hope this free, user-generated material will lure more shoppers to their sites.

Online consumer reviews (products, merchants) have always been fraught with the danger of self-serving merchant reviews artificially boosting results (sometimes merchants threatening bad-review posters), or of irrelevant ratings drowning out valuable insights. Firms like Epinions or Amazon have taken various steps to countering these like letting people rate how useful various reviews or reviewers are etc. But unfortunately, when we’re not talking about a $275 digital camera or a $14.99 book and are looking at a space with:

1. even more heterogenous ‘buyers’ some of whom may not be in the market (some people look at open houses recreationally - I’d also say these people are far more likely to post reviews on homes),

2. no qualification criteria (you don’t have to buy or do anything to post a review — also even hard to establish who is a real buyer/seller anyway),
3. often, no reputational consequences to posting lots of negative reviews,
4. as I have seen from watching HGTV shows, people’s tastes and reaction to different homes vary so broadly and they may or may not have experience with cheap renovations that can greatly improve value in a certain situation, that I can see the same home getting a very broad range of reviews anyway even from legitimate, disinterested potential buyers.

And of course, as we know from the consumer-content-review world, given the broad range of SKUs (lots of unique homes) and the fact that many different sites are competing for these reviews, the number of actual reviews will be quite small.

I certainly see the value provided by legitimate “normalized” observations on these very-expensive products, but on balance given the perverse incentives of various participants there are lots of issues with home reviews. Importantly also, because of the size of the transaction and what is at stake for the seller, a potential legal overhang exists that is far less likely over a product or merchant review for a $60 purchase.

The condo complex where we bought our home is just over two years old now, and so every few days it seems like we receive letters, cards or “gifts” from real estate agents shoved in/under/around the doors. Since the doors face out onto the street it’s pretty easy to see that everyone on the street is getting these things. A recent odd one was a fly swatter which had to be the weirdest thing I’ve received. But a few days ago I got one that got me thinking about how careful you have to be about promotions. It was a fridge magnet that had printed on it all the Raiders, 49′ers, Cal, Stanford and San Jose State football game schedules. Actually not bad, the agent picture and phone number aren’t too big so something that some of us might actually find useful (I’m a rugby fan, so apart from knowing when “Big Game” is this year, probably not that useful for me). I love disclaimers: The teams “do not provide, sponsor, endorse, or have any connection with this magnet” apparently, which made me chuckle.

The problem, however, is that all the fridges in our complex are stainless steel. Which means, fridge magnets won’t stick to them. The point of my story is this: you want an agent who knows the area, who knows the market and is working with homes in the area; and so if you think about it for 30 seconds you know that this agent probably hasn’t t worked with people or homes in this area otherwise they wouldn’t have spent whatever-it-cost on something that just plain won’t work for everyone who received it (though I guess you could stick it somewhere!). Not only is it not going to be in front of people as intended, it also might send a negative message. And as for all the other giveaways and letters, speaking to the other homeowners they mostly find them annoying. There’s a lot you could riff off of this about how agents can and should add value, and better market themselves as I’m sure Homethinking would attest…

Update: Great quote from a RealtyTracker press release:

“Branded tchotkies, such as notepads, pens and magnets are marketing tools of the past. If a REALTOR wants to connect with a home buyer or seller, they need to move their marketing dollars to the web.”

Reply.com last week launched its new website with Zillow-like home valuation data. The one twist is that you can “send an offer” to the owner of the home if you are interested in buying it. You’ll pay $24.95 for the privilege of doing so and in return a physical packet of some type will be sent to the homeowner. I haven’t tried the service yet, so I will reserve final comment for now but it doesn’t seem like an extremely strong value proposition unless I’m really missing something. I haven’t dug into the valuation data deeply either, but anecdotally it seems to have some of the problems the Zillow data does (some of which they’ve fixed since they’ve been around for a bit)… I’ll spend some time digging into the service more deeply in the coming weeks though.

You may remember Reply.com’s founder Payam Zamani as the founder of Autoweb and the ill-fated PurpleTie. Looks like he’s on to something a lot better with Reply.com. Let’s see how the new site usage data looks — Zillow saw a huge buzz-fueled spike when it rolled out but has not yet regained those heights.