TechEstate Today is hosting its third installment of real estate tech and innovation events – TET Conference ‘19.
TET ‘19 will feature leaders and innovators in real estate and tech to discuss and debate what the role of tech will be in moving real estate forward in 2019. There’ll be panel discussions, talks, and a keynote delivered by Dave Garland (Second Century Ventures / NAR), Mark Choey (Climb) Andrew Flachner (RealScout), Alex Tieu (Movoto), Alex Pelin (TET), Kenny Truong (Climb) to name a few!
Breakfast and lunch will be provided to all attendees. Following the event, attendees can expect a high-value opportunity to connect and network with other real estate professionals and tech leaders over complimentary beer and wine.
The event will be hosted at Broadway Studios in San Francisco on Tuesday, February 12. First 50 tickets are available at $99, then $149.
Alas! Your burning questions about the 2019 housing market answered!
With home prices seeing record highs in 2018, we have to wonder what will the new year mean for prospective homeowners? CurbedLA’s latest article gives highlights of the predicted upcoming market trends.
“Analysts with the online real estate company surveyed 100 real estate experts across the country on their expectations for 2019. Their responses suggest that home values in Los Angeles will continue to rise next year, but at a significantly slower rate than the nationwide average.”
Check out the complete article on CurbedLA and see that the future market has in store for 2019.
New rules and regulations were finalized this Tuesday adding numerous restrictions for hosts sharing their home on the ever popular housing service. The Los Angeles City Council voted to restrict rent controlled units from being able to be listed on Airbnb as well as limiting the number of days non-rent controlled units are allowed to be rented out.
” They are the city’s first attempt to legalize and simultaneously crack down on short-term rentals, which critics say are creating conflicts in neighborhoods and worsening the housing crisis. […] “With Los Angeles facing a housing crisis and growing homeless population, the trend of commercial Airbnb investors taking homes away from permanent residents has got to end,” Cynthia Strathmann, executive director of Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, a nonprofit in South Los Angeles, said in a statement. “The action by the LA city council today is a major step forward in addressing this growing problem.” “-CurbedLA
Check out the full article for detailed insights into these new regulations, going into effect July 2019.
Is your email box filling up with real estate holiday greetings? They started rolling into mine at Thanksgiving but I just got around to reading them.
One stood out among all the others. I’ve awarded it the prize for The Worst Real Estate Email Ever. Take a look and see if you see what I see.
Naturally, the agent’s name and brokerage have been changed. Believe it or not, it came from a highly-regarded (at least in the industry) East coast agent.
I’ve interviewed her in the past and she is absolutely captivating. Not only that, past clients in her CRM are primarily those who spent or received upwards of $1 million for their homes.
Which is why I was a bit shocked by the lack of care she put into her emailed real estate holiday greetings. Hopefully, her recipients don’t know that it is a canned greeting she copied and pasted off a website – that she didn’t take the time to write, in her own words, a heartfelt wish. But there is a lot more that they will notice, unfortunately.
By the way, there is nothing wrong with trolling for ideas, but when it’s sent without personalization? That’s just all kinds of wrong.
Sadly, that’s just the first problem. Here is what else is wrong.
Who is this from?
As you can see, the email isn’t signed. Unless you consider that odd URL at the bottom a signature.
Obviously, since I’m not a lead, this email was sent to her entire CRM. Imagine being someone who met this woman at one of the many open houses you attended months ago.
Are you going to be able to figure out who she is just by her first name (which is a very common name, by the way), last initial and her broker’s name? And why is she forcing us to guess at who she is? Always let people know who you are in your real estate holiday greetings – and in any other messaging.
Would YOU click on that? Me neither.
If you insist on using a URL as your signature and linking it to your website (or anywhere else), at least put it in a friendlier format. Leave off the protocol (http://) and the subdomain (www).
“JaneD.ReMax.com” is better, but still odd. How about “JaneDoe.ReMax.com?”
Neither of them should replace the agent’s name, but they would at least let the recipient know who sent the email. Alas, my sender didn’t do that, so I checked the email header to see who sent it:
Happy Home Real Estate (janed@gmail.com)
Again, the brokerage name has been changed. Notice, however, that Jane uses a Gmail account. For real estate agents, this does nothing to instill confidence. Not that there is anything wrong with Gmail but using it in business isn’t wise.
It looks spammy. And, her broker is once again front and center.
So, still nothing to identify the particular agent who sent me the email.
That’s just the beginning of how this highly regarded agent wasted her time sending out this useless and borderline-insulting email.
Contact your leads and keep track of what they do on your site with the CRM built into every LeadSite. Learn more
There’s that icky grammar to consider
One of the first things I noticed, after trying to figure out who sent the email and marveling at the lack of personalization, was her punctuation blunder. Someone neglected the comma after the word “thanks” when they cut and pasted the greeting.
Her spell checker threw her a clue when she left out the comma, yet she chose to ignore it.
Why?
Either she isn’t paying attention to what her contractors are sending out or, worse yet, SHE wrote this.
Think I’m being nit-picky?
Don’t assume that your email recipients — or those who consume any of your content — don’t notice typos and grammar gaffes. In fact, they will wonder if you extend the same carelessness to the marketing of their homes.
They will. Studies prove they will.
A couple of years ago Grammarly and Redfin conducted a study of luxury ($1 million and more) listing descriptions.
They found that the descriptions “written in full sentences without spelling or grammatical errors sell three days faster and are 10% more likely to sell for more than their list price than listings overall.”
Conversely, listing descriptions that included “misspellings, incorrect homonyms, incomplete sentences, among others” spent more time on the market and had “the lowest percentage of homes that sell over list price.”
None of us is perfect. I’m a professional writer and I’ve missed mistakes in my copy. Not often, but it does happen. But as the person charged with selling what may be someone’s largest financial asset, you cannot afford to look sloppy, careless or lame.
EVER.
I feel like a cog in her real estate wheel
Imagine that I’m one of this agent’s former clients. Do you get that regardless of how consistently she has followed up with me since our transaction, this email will alienate me?
First, I would try to figure out where I stand in her salutation. Especially since I haven’t a clue as to who sent it.
I’m not a friend, not family so I must be “clientele.” Way to personalize the greeting, right? And the thought that she sent this same, cold, thoughtless email to family and friends doesn’t speak well of her either, in my opinion.
She’s not a person I want to business with, how about you?
Is it truly that difficult to send an email that addresses your past clients by their names? If so, you need a more up-to-date CRM or automated email marketing platform. Or, learn how to use the one you have (most allow you to personalize your emails) or hire a freelancer to help you out.
If you can’t do that, do your business a favor and don’t send out real estate holiday greetings; you’re only hurting your brand and your reputation.
Where’s the branding in your real estate holiday greetings?
The absolute lack of branding in the email is the weirdest part of all. It’s so generic, it could’ve been sent by my dentist.
We know that you wouldn’t make this mistake, but new agents should make note of this. Your winter marketing should let people know who you are at a glance.
What’s the solution?
Let’s start at the top. The subject line of our agent’s email is “Thanksgiving Holiday.”
Again, rather blah, and it’s highly doubtful many opened her email. When I first saw it, I assumed one of my clients was sending me their office’s Thanksgiving hours.
Tip number one, then, is to come up with something compelling. That means breaking away from the banality of the pack and offering up a spicier subject.
While it’s not about the winter holidays, Billings Montana broker/owner Amber Uhren’s St. Patrick’s Day marketing plan included an email blast. The subject line read: “Bet you don’t know this about St. Patrick’s Day.”
Inside was a graphic with a quick message, wishing the recipients a happy St. Patrick’s Day and a CTA linking to the blog post that addresses the email’s subject line.
Spend the time necessary to come up with an enticing subject, clearly identify yourself, keep your real estate holiday greetings short and sweet and focused on the recipient. The folks in your CRM will thank you.
Eco-Shelter is a social enterprise increasing access to safe and affordable roofing for low-income households in India.
Globally, 1.6 billion people lack access to adequate shelter; in India alone, there are more than 350 million people. A roof over your head is one of the most basic human necessities, but current roofing materials available to ultra-poor populations are expensive, hot, fragile, and can contain toxic elements such as asbestos.
Eco-Shelter set out on a mission to identify underutilized technologies, processes, and materials that could be leveraged to meet the enormous roofing challenge. The Eco-Shelter pilot project will examine social acceptance, environmental impact, and market feasibility of introducing a new, safe, and affordable roofing material to low-income households in India. We are piloting a new bamboo composite material that is strong, light-weight, and durable (25+ year lifespan), and can keep homes several degrees cooler.
I first came across them at the 2017 SVP Fast Pitch where they won the audience choice award, and it turned out the founder, Alexa Bednarz, is a friend/colleague of my good friend who works at the Gates Foundation. You can see that pitch here:
Eco-Shelter had a launch party for the campaign at Obec Brewing in Ballard last week (that I wasn’t able to attend), and I thought some readers here may be interested to learn more. As a follow up, I had the chance to ask Alexa a few questions via email.
Without further ado…
1. What led you to embark on the entrepreneurial path to create Eco-Shelter?
I was inspired to start Eco-Shelter after working several years at the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation in global health and development. I began to see themes around successful projects that achieved broad scale, and one of the underlying success factors was an underlying demand for the product or service being introduced. A challenge in international development is that most of us working in the profession don’t have the first-hand life experiences of those we wish to serve. So, I took a step back and decided that whatever venture I started would start where there was a market demand from those I wish to serve. I began reading several studies which suggested housing improvements– roofing in particular– were financial priorities for many families living in extreme poverty globally. This piqued my curiosity and the more I began to learn about roofing materials available to the ultra-poor, I realized an improved alternative could have significant health, financial, and environmental impact. Improvements in housing can lead to better health outcomes and increased productivity. Lastly, there is something very human about housing. I truly believe that as human beings we all share the desire and right to live somewhere dry, safe, and secure that we can feel proud of.
2. What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced during the journey?
What we’re trying to do hasn’t been done before, so there isn’t a step-by-step playbook on how to do it. I’ve been fortunate to get great feedback and advice from subject matter experts, investors, and other entrepreneurs, but sometimes the advice is conflicting and doesn’t take into account all of the factors. Learning to take pieces of information and put them together into a road map is a skill but ultimately it comes down to trusting your own judgment. As a foreigner doing work in India, I’ve known that I need a team of people who understand the local context to tackle this challenge and we’ve begun building a team of field coordinators and partner with grassroots organizations in India, but recruiting for the right skill sets and expertise can be very challenging.
3. What impact will Eco Shelter’s new crowd funding campaign enable/make possible?
I believe strongly in taking a Human-Centered Design approach in business to ensure your solution is meeting your customer’s needs and price-point. This is vital to achieving broad scale and uptake. Our crowdfunding campaign will allow us to expand our pilot to 25 more homes in several cities across India. We are piloting a corrugated bamboo roofing panel to assess community acceptance and willingness-to-pay while testing several models of distribution. The insights from this pilot will directly influence research and development so we know how to best optimize the product to meet customer’s needs and price point. As a social enterprise, it’s also critical that we measure our impact. The pilot will allow us to look at several impact measures such as the reduction in indoor temperature, cost-savings, and increases in productivity.
Thanks Alexa for sharing your story. Eco-Shelter has raised $23,000 of their $55,000 goal. If you’d like to support the cause, please do so below….
In our latest real estate tech entrepreneur interview, we’re speaking with Brent Steiner from Engrain.
Without further ado…
What do you do?
I’m the founder and CEO of Engrain, inc.; a company specializing in software and touch-screen products for the real-estate industry.
What problem does your product/service solve?
Our products’ goal is to make sales/leasing, marketing, asset management, and operations more effective. We have two different product lines: TouchTour, which aids the leasing process by sharing rich information and beautifully designed experiences on touch screens or iPads; and SightMap, which is a suite of interactive maps that can be placed on a website to replace floorplans, used by the operations teams, or by asset managers, by presenting availability, floorplans, financial performance, or other data that are relevant to each use case.
What we’ve learned is that people expect really high-fidelity interactive experiences all the time – our smart phones and the Übers of the world have set our expectations very high. Our focus is on providing that same rich and highly designed experience and integrate it with the systems that drive the real estate business.
When a prospective renter visits a property’s website, an online SightMap meets that expectation and gives them information they couldn’t get through static floor plans. When they come visit a property (or a leasing office for a property that isn’t ready to show yet), TouchTour is also extremely engaging and entertaining. And both will hook into CRM systems so they can be used directly for lead generation.
For asset managers and the back-office, we have SightMap Asset Intelligence which presents a wealth of financial and operational information in a similarly easy to use and exploratory interface. People can go from a full property view down to unit-level information.
What are you most excited about right now?
Our platform was intentionally built to be extremely flexible. We’ve been adding new integration partners that have set the stage for a couple of really exciting opportunities.
The first is that we’re working to get our SightMaps integrated into ILS sites so that people searching for apartments can get better information, sooner, and properties can really stand out.
The second is self-touring, which is clearly the next evolution of apartment-hunting. We already know how to effectively provide renters with the information they need to make a decision, and now we’re extending that into integration with IOT security devices and CRM processes so that a person can set up a property visit and select their new home without ever having to see a leasing agent (unless they want to).
What’s next for you?
In addition to meeting the self-touring challenges, we’re reaching into new markets by providing more integrations with property management and CRM systems, and finding more opportunities to turn data into meaningful information with well-crafted visual and tactile interfaces. We see opportunities for our solutions in any vertical where people have physical units they need to lease or manage.
What’s a cause you’re passionate about and why?
I’m a huge believer in philanthropy and that’s become a core value within Engrain, too. I encourage the team to recommend opportunities to give back, and then we try to multiply the value of the employee’s efforts. As a result, we support a lot of causes and the team can get pretty competitive about which department or person can bring in the most cans for a food drive or raise the most money for cancer research.
We’re constantly looking for great real estate tech entrepreneurs to feature. If that’s you, please read this post — then drop me a line (drew @ geekestatelabs dot com).
At CREtech’s event yesterday in New York, 2018 #RETAS winners consisting of the best & most innovative tech companies in the commercial sector were named in the following categories:
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
BLOCKCHAIN
CONSTRUCTION
COWORKING/POP UP RETAIL
CRM & MARKETING
CROWDFUNDING & CAPITAL SOURCING
GEOSPATIAL & MAPPING
IMAGING & VIRTUAL REALITY
LISTING MARKETPLACE
OPERATIONS & ADMINISTRATION
RESEARCH & ANALYTICS
SMART BUILDINGS
SPACE SHARE & UTILIZATION
TECH-ENHANCED BROKERAGE
TRANSACTION & UNDERWRITING
Judges consisted of VC’s, Angel Investors, and Corporate Investors in the commercial real estate tech industry.
TechEstate Today is hosting its third installment of real estate tech and innovation events – TET Conference ‘19.
In our latest real estate tech entrepreneur interview, we’re speaking with Brent Steiner from 
What we’ve learned is that people expect really high-fidelity interactive experiences all the time – our smart phones and the Übers of the world have set our expectations very high. Our focus is on providing that same rich and highly designed experience and integrate it with the systems that drive the real estate business.
Thanks to Brent for sharing his story. If you’d like to connect, 
