CLASSIFIED INTELLIGENCE REPORT – June 8, 2005 – VERSION 6.11 – Page 23
Don’t turn around . . . the Ubertor’s in town
BY BRIAN BLUM
It sounds like either the title to a John Belushi-inspired Saturday Night Live skit or the set up to an industry insider joke, a kind of “two real estate agents walk into a bar” zinger. But the proprietors of a new real estate
consulting company are spot-on serious about their business.
Q: What do you call a Super-Realtor?
A: An “Ubertor”
Ubertor is the new name for Combustion Listings (www.CombustionListings.com) , an online consulting firm and software developer that aims to help Realtors up the ante on the competition. The name slaps the German prefix of “uber” – meaning above or on top – onto the “tor” of Realtor.
With more than 4,000 Realtor clients, Ubertor – despite the amusing new name – has been growing rapidly. Their differentiation: constantly emphasizing the cutting edge.
Ubertor, like real estate-focused marketing firm z57 – see CIR 5.17, Sept. 14, 2004 – creates Web sites for Realtors. Both build real estate specific functionality into their offerings, tools to manage listings, track how many times features such as the mortgage calculator have been clicked, and the like.
But Ubertor seems to prefer exploring a bit off the beaten track. For example, Ubertor aggressively pushes Realtor blogging as a simple but effective way for Realtors to generate additional traffic and higher search engine rankings.
“Most real estate sites have canned content,” explained Steve Jagger, co-founder of Ubertor. “Google doesn’t like that. Search engines want unique quality content, updated frequently – which is what blogs do by their very nature.”
All very well, but what would a Realtor write about in a blog? As we reported in our coverage of the California Association of Realtor’s latest “Internet vs. Traditional Buyer” survey (see CIR 6.08, April 27), 71 percent of Internet home buyers only interviewed a single agent before making a choice on who, to work with – and that agent tended to be the first one who responded. Blogs, by contrast, are all about building a relationship over time. So we had to ask: Does anyone really care?
“Well, they can write about what kind of sales they’re involved in, what they’re up to on a day-to-day basis,” Jagger said.
Sure, but let’s be honest: The real draw is not the blog chat but the listings. And to emphasize that point,
Ubertor’s most powerful module is one that automatically posts new listings from a Realtor onto his or her blog.
Indeed, a Realtor doesn’t even have to touch his blog for it to sport the frequently updated blog entries that Google is more prone to display. The same module works on the “regular” Web pages Ubertor builds for its clients as well.
Also, Ubertor is rolling out an e-mail alert feature, so that home buyers can subscribe and be alerted when a new home is posted on the Realtor’s blog.
While blogs may be primarily a trick for pumping up traffic, Ubertor uses some nifty technology for making the user experience more interactive once home buyers and sellers come to a Ubertor-powered Realtor’s site.
Ubertor employs the same AJAX technology we wrote about previously when describing Paul Rademacher’s HousingMaps.com (CIR 6.08) which displays Craigslist real estate listings on GoogleMap pages. (Ubertor is rolling out its own GoogleMaps module as well, but Jagger wasn’t ready to talk about it.)
AJAX essentially allows Web pages to load more like offline applications without the annoying wait-andrefresh process associated with most database-driven search pages. A demo of this can be seen on the Ubertor built www.HistoricModern.com site.
Follow the links for Properties, then choose Property Search. Select an area such as Scottsdale, then start drilling down. The screen will show in near real-time the results of your search, and even better, will only display search options that match results in the database.
“If there are no 1,500 square-foot townhouses for under $100,000, there won’t be an option to search for it that then comes back with 0 Results, Jagger said. “This really simplifies the search process.”
Ubertor is also pushing the envelope with its slide show feature. While nearly every real estate software system allows Realtors to post images, slide shows and even virtual tours, Jagger claims Ubertor is unique in that it allows Realtors to add MP3 audio narrations automatically into the slide show. Realtors record the narration live while watching the slide show, making the timing a cinch. With a digital camera, laptop and a wireless connection, the whole show can be created on-the-fly from the home itself. A demo can be found at http://demo2.ubertor.com/ViewProperty/18/Active/#viewdetail.
Ubertor was founded in 2000 in then 27-year-old Jagger’s parents’ house and was initially known as Combustion Hosting. He and partner, Mike Stephenson, didn’t intend to get into the real estate business. But after they signed up a couple of Realtors by chance who wanted Web hosting, they quickly realized there were some major inefficiencies in the way their Realtor clients were managing their listings.
“They were getting listings faxed,” Jagger told us. “There’d be a 48 hour delay in getting the listing posted, then there’d be spelling mistakes. They needed an engine so they could load their listings themselves.” Combustion took on that task and it wasn’t long before the company was growing out of Jagger’s bedroom.
The Vancouver-based company employs 22 today and has since sold off the hosting business to concentrate solely on the real estate space.
While any Realtor can become an Ubertor customer, the company has focused its sales effort in several locations – its home base in western Canada and the Phoenix market which Jagger says has a heavy Canadian buying contingent.
Ubertor’s software doesn’t offer any serious lead-generation functionality to date. A recent upgrade now allows independent graphic designers and Web site builders to plug in Ubertor’s most popular features rather
than forcing them to use Ubertor’s software and templates. Ubertor runs free training sessions in its Vancouver office and on the road.
While Jagger wouldn’t reveal revenues, he suggested it’s not hard to calculate. With 4,000 clients paying between $37-$57 per month, that’s a potential revenue stream of close to $2 million a year. Well on its way to true, “uber” status.