Photo courtesy of Tim Larson of Grey Clad Mystery

We all search for perfection in the real world. We look for the perfect person with whom we can bond. We look for the perfect culinary or wine-tasting experience. We look to catch the perfect wave. We look to achieve the perfect SAT scores; well, you get the picture. We all strive toward that elusive dream of perfection in whatever it is that we deem important in our lives.

Fast forward to the way in which buyers/consumers search for the perfect place to call home versus the way in which real estate web developers construct a real estate site. In his funny and illuminating article entitled Rethink Real Estate Search, in Inman News, Marc Davison, of 1000 Watt Consulting points out that real estate internet sites are engineered by programmers–”guys and gals with 180 IQ’s–guided by folks who get their kicks from Excel.”

A programmer might construct a search by zip code, or create an application that includes home-value estimates that “can never be accurate, no matter how many Ph.D.s are thrown at them;” or create searches that are “cluttered by advertising;” or provide maps that are either “hybrid,” “satellite” or “list” views (“humans don’t search from space”), instead of speaking to what real people are looking for when they search for the perfect place to live.

And while it is true that statistical data has demonstrated that over 80% of buyers/consumers begin their search for the perfect home online, their home search continues off line, on the ground, and at the local level in conjunction with a real estate professional

A real person–a “human,” if you will, pursues their search for a home by actually driving through neighborhoods, by talking with neighbors, by “test-driving” the commute from work to a prospective home, by asking about the neighborhood schools and test performance, by checking the proximity of schools to the home under consideration; real people ask about whether the home or condo has a yard large enough for a pet or a garden, whether the house has a home office, a main floor bedroom, a hobby room, a media room, a living room in addition to a family room, a master suite downstairs, a chef’s kitchen, a finished garage; whether the garage is attached or detached, a two or three car garage, where the neighborhood shopping centers, parks, fitness center, bike paths, movie theatres, restaurants, local pharmacy, cleaners, barber shop are located–you get the picture: the things/stuff/features that make a home the fulfillment of a buyer/consumer’s dream home and a neighborhood that is a perfect fit for their lifestyle.

The buyer/consumer wants to have a dialogue, a conversation, with their real estate agent about what the buyer considers to be the most important features in their search for the perfect home. This then, as Marc Davison suggests, can be formatted in an innovative way by programmers who would create a “natural search paradigm” that would describe homes in a manner that reflects how people really think.

And by the way, buyers/consumers want to see pictures, lots of them, and not crummy, blurry pictures, and not three pictures of toilet bowls with the seat raised, as Lynne Pope illustrated in her recent post. Imagine buyers finding an unlimited number of pictures, say 50 photos–more than enough to capture the essence of the room’s space and with descriptions that stir the imagination and paint a picture of what it would be like to live the lifestyle that this home evokes.

And what about creating and sharing a video of the neighborhood amenities–a journey into the heart of the community, highlighting the nearby pools, spas, tennis/sports courts, parks, restaurants, shopping centers, and schools.

Now I’m sure that you get the picture–in focus, evocative, and enlightening–and so will the buyers if you dialogue with them about what they would like to see in their search for the perfect home. And maybe the conversation will inspire change—moving the discourse toward a more perfect home-buying experience on-line through a human centric search algorithm, and off-line, through the human contact with your local real estate professional.

I decided to play the interviewer at my Open House yesterday. Yes, I am one of those real estate agents who believe in holding Open Houses as one way to market and expose a home to potential buyers, and to answer questions swirling around in the minds of buyers and sellers in the Irvine neighborhoods in which we market and sell homes. Yes, It’s real life, real-time interacting with your potential home buying/selling community; “pressing the flesh,” so to speak. And to be quite honest we have actually sold quite a few of our listings and/or our collegues listings through the contacts we have made holding Open Houses. However, yesterday, I decided to ask John and Jane Doe, and Mary Q. Public the following questions:

1. On which sites do you search for properties, and

2. If you could make one change that would enhance your online home searching experience, what would that change be? And the answers were enlightening:

The over 40 demographic, named Realtor.com and Homeseekers.com as the top sites used to search for homes. The under 40 set, said they searched for homes most frequently on Redfin, Zillow, and ZipRealty. Of the group polled, I asked if anyone had used Trulia. In this particular group, no one had searched on Trulia or had even heard of this site. I found this “trulya” surprising, since this site ranks quite high on Google for home searches of all kinds. Only one person used a brand-name real estate company to search for homes, and that one person found it to be a frustrating experience first and foremost because they were asked to “register” in order to perform any home searches. As a matter of fact, all the people polled said that they would not use a real estate site that forced them to sign in or register; they would just navigate away from that site, until they landed on one which provided free access to information and home searches.The number one complaint, and the most often cited criticism of real estate sites in general was the lack of up-to-date, reliable information. What consumers were led to believe were available homes for sale, turned out to be homes that were already in escrow or sold homes. The real estate sites that provided RealtyTrac information (homes in default or REO/bank-owned properties) were cited as being completely out-of-date in many instances.

As a veteran real estate agent, the message reverberated loud and clear: “Innovate or Disintegrate,” as Jessica Swesey writes in her fairwell article as a columnist for the Inman News.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my years as editor of Inman News, it’s that companies that do not innovate die–or worse, become irrelevant, which is much like being buried alive.

I hope that those in the real estate industry see the changing market as their opportunity to innovate. The Internet, open source, social media, the sub- prime disaster and housing downturn have changed consumers forever. Real estate needs to adapt to these changes.

Those who do not innovate will become irrelevant to these changing needs.

Indeed, real estate agents must embrace the new medium of the Web 2.0 by creating a voice through a network of interactive communication and participation, and by going beyond the static page of a Web 1.0 presence to deliver rich original content and information to the home buying and selling public.

In the 1960’s, Marshall McCluhan, a media analyst, wrote a book from which the title became the common vernacular for the transformative power and influence of the medium of television, still in its infancy: namely, The Medium is the Message.

Every generation has their medium and those who succeed in embracing the medium connect with the people with whom they communicate. In the realm of politics, President Franklin Roosevelt used radio–the medium of the day to connect with the depression-era populace by way of the intimate Fireside chats.

President John F. Kennedy used the new medium of the time, television, to connect with an unprecedented seventy-seven million Americans (over 60% of the adult population,) to win the Kennedy/Nixon Debates in the eyes of the public and ultimately win the Presidency. At the time, CBS news correspondent, Charles Kuralt, declared that “Kennedy’s skill with the medium helped to make television the nation’s ‘new front porch’.”

Fast forward almost half a century, and the political pundits are now attempting to deconstruct Barack Obama’s below the radar successful candidacy for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency.

In Frank Rich’s Op-Ed article entitled, One Historic Night, Two Americas, he points out that “the Obama forces out-organized the most ruthless machine in Democratic politics because the medium of their campaign mirrored its inclusive message.” In other words, they empowered the ordinary citizen rather than relying on the typical top-down hierarchical structure of the past.

“Such viral organization and fund-raising is a seamless fit with bottom-up democracy as it is increasingly practiced in the Facebook-YouTube era, not merely by Americans and not merely by the young.”

Out with the old ways of doing business; in with the new social media.

He goes on to point out the similarities between Hillary Clinton’s and John McCain’s strategies in their respective “cultural tone-deafness” and “stodgy generic web site(s) ” in which their “blogs, video and social networking are static and sparse,” and how both Clinton and McCain repeatedly invoke “I,” in their respective speeches, while Obama’s message invokes the inclusiveness of the “Yes, we can” mantra: speaking to a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-generational inclusiveness–a post boomer, post-partisan inclusiveness that jettisons the baggage of the Me-Generation and embraces the You-Tube, MySpace, Facebook generation. “His [Obama's] vocabulary is so different from that of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain that they often find it as baffling as a foreign language.”

In Rich’s opinion Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain see change as “nothing more than a marketing gimmick,” while Obama uses the message of change as a sea-change of all inclusiveness and optimism. “On one side stands Mr. Obama’s resolutely cheerful embrace of the future… On the other is John McCain’s promise of a wise warrior’s vigilant conservation of the past.”

Parallels may be drawn in the real estate industry as real estate agents continue to cling to old ways of the “I’s” instead of focusing on the all inclusive “we” or “you.” Indeed, there are the veteran real estate agents who remain comfortable with the methodologies of the past–reluctant to embrace the new technologies–even the most basic ones in the face of the public’s desire to have a free flow of information available to them when they want it and on their terms.

Others of us are empowered, energized, and willing to embrace the kind of change necessary to educate ourselves as we move toward understanding the new message of inter-connectivity and seek to immerse ourselves in this new medium, resolving to deliver the information that the buyers and sellers desire in an interactive Web 2.0 way.

The real estate agent who seeks to remain vital in this rapidly changing industry needs to evolve and embrace the new message of total transparency with the free flow of real estate information, including real-time market trends and statistics, accurate and available “sold” data, access to real-time mortgage rates, original hyper-local community information, instant chat and instant messaging. We need to embrace and disseminate the information through the new medium of Web 2.0 real estate whether it be in the form of an interactive web site, blog, and other social media, such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, LinkedIn, and the newest micro-blogging phenomenon, Twitter.

For those real estate agents who wish to experience the new Medium and Message first-hand from the internet gurus, such as Pat Kitano of TransparentRE, Kevin Boar of 3OceansRealEstate, and Dustin Luther of 4Realz, check out the Real Estate Connect Conference in San Francisco from July 23rd – July 25th. You will be inspired to find your own voice and re-construct your business for the new Web 2.0 real estate community.