The photo is of a t-shirt we found in San Fransisco in the Haight-Ashbury district, when we were in town for the Inman Connect Conference.
I must say the conference was quite an experience, and I highly recommend it for real estate professionals. There are not a lot of training courses or seminars for agents like me who work and live on the internet.
In the real estate blogosphere I think this has been the summer of blog love and of social networks, and I found that they were emphasized at the conference, as we explored web 2.0 and the idea of interacting and socializing through the internet.
There were a couple of sessions at the conference where companies like Zillow and Trulia talked about social networking between home buyers, home sellers and neighbors. Homes and neighborhoods are what both sites are about and both give visitors the opportunity to interact with one another.
My question is do neighbors want to interact with each other on line?
A brief visit to my own nieghborhood on Zillow revealed a bunch of heads with question marks on them next to nonsensical names. The discussion boards are new, who knows maybe people will start talking about houses and neighborhoods.
I belong to a few social networks. The groups I belong to are not geographic, instead they are centered around my occupation and my interests.
As a long time resident of St. Paul who has lived in the same home for 18 years, I really know my neighbors and the neighborhood. I am also active in my community. Yet I can’t see myself going on the internet and talking to my neighbors about houses if I were not a Realtor. We have some online social networks here in St. Paul but they are centered around hobbies, politics, businesses and causes, not around neighborhoods or houses.
It will be interesting to see if homes and neighborhoods really do become the center of social networks as some of the web site developers beleive. When I go to the Zillow site or the Trulia site I don’t find them very friendly or inviting and am having a hard time warming up to the question mark heads on Zillow. On the Trulia site there is no sense of place. I go online and am confronted with lenders from California. It is hard to warm up to even though I know some of those lenders personally.
The recent experiences of my 20 something daughter are a prime example of how to use a social network and find housing. She was able to get connected to someone who rented her an apartment in a foreign country through an online network that she already belonged to. She asked people that she knows and trusts for advice rather than joining a new network. She was directly connected through friends to someone they had rented from. Based on what her friends told her she was comfortable wiring money to a total stranger and is confident that the apartment will be to her liking.
I think buyers and sellers are more likely to network with their friends on other social networks like Myspace or Facebook when want to talk about real estate. They will share what they are doing with their friends instead of talking to strangers with funny names on Zillow or Trulia.