Nestoria Blog

As part of our ongoing series of interviews with thought leaders from the online property sectors, today we look across the Atlantic to interview Mike Price, President of US based firm 360Podcast, parent company of MLPodcast. MLPodcast provides innovative tools to help agents utilize new audio and video technologies to market their properties.

Mike’s is a regular blogger, and his recent post about “Real Estate 2.0″ captured the dual sense of opportunity and anxiety many in the property industry feel about new technologies.

Mike, thanks for taking the time to speak with us.

1. Talk a bit about some of the new technologies MLPodcast is developing, and how you see agents use this technology to generate deals.

Our clients are taking advantage of syndication to increase exposure to their listings. Having a listing enhancement like a virtual tour or flash video is good, however, it makes the assumption that a consumer has already found the listing. Podcast feeds allow us to aggregate not only videos, but data and keywords into a broadcast. We’ve spent over a year building a network of search engines and directories that accept podcast feeds. By submitting to this network our clients are greatly improving the chances of listing being found, either in a direct referral from a portal or directory, or through organic searches in Google, Yahoo etc. We have access to a couple of client’s log file data for their domains and the results have been nothing short of amazing.

We have several exciting new features being released in stages including a new ordering and client tool system. We’ve also recently added some additional voice talent for narration and new music tracks. The MLPodcast video directory will be undergoing some major changes in the near future as well.

2. Technological innovation is of course nothing new. Nevertheless it seems the pace of change over in online real estate has really accelerated in the last year. What do you attribute this to, and what are the major trends that you see gaining widespread adoption?

There are several factors that have an impact on the issue. Consumers have become much more comfortable and adept at using the web. As a result they are placing more demand on the industry to get more creative with marketing. Smart brokers are using technology to morph into business models that combine the best of traditional practices with features and pricing that yield to customer demand. If that eventually means higher volume and lower margins, technology will be a key component to making it work. On the other hand, models are emerging at the luxury end of the scale that will place emphasis on lower volume and higher margins through new revenue streams. I think in between you’ll see several hybrids of different business models. The real estate professional of the future is going to need a decidedly different skill set. One of those skills will rely in how nimble they can be, luckily enough, technology, applied correctly, affords the ability to react to shifts in the industry and reshape business models without the need to start over with a completely new investment or infrastructure.

3. What are your thoughts on the developments specifically in the property search sector in the last 18 months?

Forward thinking companies like Nestoria and Trulia are using web technology to improve the consumer experience when it comes to searching for property. An article in Inman news today had a great quote from a broker. “Tony Floyd, senior vice president for Prudential Georgia Realty, said, “I don’t view Internet marketing companies as competition, I view them as enablers. Some are better, some are worse than others,” he said.” I think that sums it up. The real estate industry has had enough time to figure out that the Lion isn’t coming over the hill. The only thing they have to fear is their own complacency in terms of coming to grips with how technology and the web effect the way they do business.

4. What are the challenges you think a vertical search engine for property like Nestoria faces?

From a competitive standpoint I think my concern would be in continually adding value to the service, both in terms of consumers and the real estate industry. Of course there’s the challenge of capturing as many listings as possible. You have a great challenge/opportunity to add to the traction you enjoy now by moving into as many markets as possible. Then there’s the biggest challenge of all, revenue generation. If advertising alone isn’t enough to sustain a good ROI for your investors, creating new streams of revenue by providing additional products to the Real Estate industry could become necessary.

I wish you the best of luck!

Thanks Mike, you’ll be happy to know we’re continually working on adding value. Keep up the innovation! For anyone interested in tracking Mike’s progress we highly recommend subscribing to his Web 2.0 For Real Estate Pros blog.

past Nestoria interviews: Prashant Agarwal, Paul Carr, Steve Coast
Who would you like to see interviewed next? Let us know.

For those that are interested, we’ve also launched our interview series on our Spanish blog with this week’s interview of Javier Martín.