Combustion adds fire to real estate Web sites

By Jessica Swesey – Inman News – Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Combustion adds fire to real estate Web sites
Real estate innovator: Company trains agents how to stand out (Inman.com)

In the Internet age, many successful businesses started from someone’s garage, dorm room or living room. Think Amazon, Google and eBay.

Combustion Labs, a forward-thinking Vancouver, B.C.-based company that’s adding spice to the real estate industry, is no exception. Its story begins in 2000 in 27-year-old Stephen Jagger’s room at his parent’s house, where he and his business partner Michael Stephenson, 29, planted the roots of a company now making a mark on the real estate Web site business.

The company is pushing all sorts of innovative Web marketing ideas for Realtors, including Web sites that agents can easily manage themselves, built-in blogs, photo slideshows with audio descriptions and even craigslist.org. Combustion also is cooking up new search technology for home listings.

“We run classes in our office theater three times a week and the big push at the sessions is for Realtors to add their listings to their Web site, their blog and craigslist,” said Jagger, general manager of Combustion Labs Media, and co-founder of the company.
Stephen Jagger – co-founder of Combustion

Combustion Labs started as a Web hosting company in 2000, headquartered in the aforementioned bedroom in Jagger’s parents’ house. Now up to 22 employees, the company outgrew its former quarters and occupies an office in Vancouver.

A few of the company’s hosting clients were Realtors, which eventually led them to focus on real estate software and Web site services, Jagger said. Two years ago, they sold the Web hosting business, and now Jagger and his team of 22 are looking to change real estate.

“Real estate is a great business, but there are a few deficiencies in how it’s run,” Jagger said. Nearly every Realtor has a Web site, but just having one isn’t good enough anymore, he added, and things like loading listings to craigslist and blogs are what make agents stand out.

Combustion’s real estate software and services are dubbed Ubertor, which Jagger says derives from the German “uber” and “t-o-r” from “Realtor.” “Ubertor – it’s like ‘super-Realtor,'” he said. Ubertor started as a listings engine and has expanded to include listings management and client management, among other things. The company currently has about 4,000 Realtor clients, Jagger said.

Combustion has a new tool built into its Web site services that will automatically load listings to an agent’s blog once its been entered into the agent’s Web site.

“We find that Realtors who promote their listings with these three mediums gain much more exposure over those who don’t,” he said.

At one of the Vancouver training sessions, an agent, Marty Pospischil, stood up and said he had just listed a home with a new client who said he chose him because he was blogging. The client liked that Pospischil was giving up-to-date real estate information on his blog.

“What’s happened since I’ve been blogging is two things,” Pospischil said. “One, my clients are actually reading it – about 5 percent – and second, my ratings in search engines have gone way up.”

Until about two months ago, Pospischil said he didn’t even know what the term “blogging” meant. But with Combustion’s support, he now blogs regularly.

The Combustion team encourages agents to write blog entries about their new listings and link to them or upload them to their blogs, but Pospischil said he’s using his a little differently.

Pospischil’s blog offers prospective clients information about the market. He said he’ll link to a listing to support a point he’s making. For example, a recent blog entry questions whether the region is still experiencing a seller’s market, and discusses a multiple-offer scenario on a house listed for sale, then links to that listing.
Jagger noted other marketing benefits to blogs, such as search engine placement. “The search engines love quality content – unique content,” he said. “With blogging, it’s very difficult to cheat…plus, Google knows the time stamp.” And search engines tend to rank more frequently updated Web sites higher than static ones.
Another big push from within the company is for agent clients to utilize the power of craigslist to market their listings. Pospischil said he’s been uploading listings to craigslist for a few weeks after learning about it from Combustion.

“We take advantage of (craigslist) because it’s free – how can you lose?” Pospischil commented. Also, he said his agents have an advantage over competition when they give listing presentations and show this as an extra marketing avenue. He said it takes less than 10 minutes to create a listing on craigslist.
Michael Stephenson – co-founder of Combustion

Combustion hosts training sessions in the company’s Vancouver office and online to show Realtors how to use craigslist. The company also travels to other markets to host training sessions for its products.

Combustion also has been making a mark with photo slideshows on Realtor Web sites. The company recently launched slideshow technology that makes it easy for Realtors to create professional-looking slideshows of their listings, and record an audio description of the property to play when Web visitors view the slideshow. A demo of the slideshow technology can be seen online.

The company has just added an upgrade to the audio slideshow, enabling agents to load an MP3 audio file into the system without having to deal with a lot of confusing technology, Jagger said.

“Realtors seem to be loving the idea,” Jagger said of the voiceover slideshows. “It adds another layer of personal touch to the site, especially the unique properties.”

Realtors using Combustion’s service aren’t forced to use template-based Web sites that potentially could look almost identical to those of other clients, Jagger said. Realtors who may already have a Web designer can still use Combustion’s services to power their sites.

The company also is working on technology for property searching currently being tested by a Phoenix site, HistoricModern.com. Using a technology dubbed Ajax, a real estate Web site’s search system can become more intelligent, adjusting search options according to what’s available. For instance, if the site doesn’t contain commercial listings for a specific city, it doesn’t show up as a search option.

“The biggest flaw in property search is you fill in a huge page of property search info, then hit ‘submit’ and you end up with nothing,” Jagger said. The Ajax technology “basically allows the system to think on the spot.”

Copyright 2005 Inman News