TechBytes: Online Reviews, Instagram Ads, Artificial Intelligence and Zillow

November 5, 2015

This is our first edition of WFG’s Tech Bytes curated by Jeff Bernheisel – WFG’s National Director of Technology Marketing. These posts are meant to be small bytes of easily digestible technology news as it relates (mostly) to the real estate industry. We hope you enjoy!

One of the few SEO companies that I actually trust just launched a pretty awesome platform today called their “reputation builder” (see image to the right) that helps small businesses get more online reviews from their clients and sphere of influence (and just FYI, if you’re a Realtor… you ARE a small business). While this isn’t the holy grail of online review syndication that I personally have been dreaming up for years, I took a run through it today, and it’s a pretty sweet platform that I think could easily equate to more business if integrated into your post closing marketing plan. You DO have a post closing marketing plan, don’t you? If not, contact your WFG National Title sales rep. They can help!

The guys over at Curaytor published a pretty in-depth “first look” at using Instagram ads for real estate purposes. In other news, I’m still waiting for Facebook to give me access to run Instagram ads in my ad manager. Hey Chris, can you give Zuckerberg a call for me? Thanks buddy!

Speaking of Facebook, Yann LeCun, director of the artificial intelligence research group recently showed off a pretty amazing app that can actually detect and verbally describe what’s in a photo. Not sure there are implications for the real estate industry for this app just yet… but this AI stuff is something I think should be watched closely as it begins to become self aware and take over the…  oh, never mind.

Brad Inman shares some insight into why Zillow will never become a real estate brokerage, saying “Why would they? Their business model looks like it may be better.” He posted this article on Facebook, stated he was done talking about Zillow for a while, dropped the mic and exited stage left in typical Brad fashion. #BOOM.

We know our buyer clients are searching for homes on sites like Zillow, RedFin, etc. Why not provide your clients a tool that allows them to use any of these sites, while overlaying your contact info, and the ability to easily share the properties they’re interested in looking at in a Pinterest style format?