There has been a flurry of announcements over the past year from Homestore and Realtor.com, heralding products to come including the development of a transaction management system, the purchase of two leading real estate related software companies, the development of broadband and wireless access products, and more. What are Homestore's and Realtor.com's strategy and how will Realtors benefit?

Steve Ozonian, president of Realtor.com, says the big picture is so large that it might be hard for agents to put everything into one view, but the best way to look at the company's strategy is to look at the platform design for eRealtor.com. He says, "We are trying to improve an age-old process that has been very frustrating for broker-owners, agents and all the constituents that have to co-participate in a complex process with over 21 steps. There are some logical buckets where things flow together."

To help agents understand the site's breadth of services and how new initiatives will be integrated, Ozonian explains that Realtor.com's strategy has evolved around the four basic phases of home buying and selling. He calls these phases Find, Communicate, Buy/Sell, and Own. Consumer services and products for Realtors that are designed to interact with those phases are supplied by Homestore product director Errol Samuelson and listed after each phase.

Find Phase

Realtor.com is the largest home search site on the Internet and a natural migration point for Internet home buyers. "The first phase is finding a home," says Ozonian. "If you think about it, Homestore and Realtor.com have led the industry as it relates to providing quality content. That's proven by our huge traffic volume. Over 50 percent of the buying public started on the Internet when looking for a home. We educate and provide information to consumers on their terms, 24/7, with a huge amount of very valuable content. That way they feel much more powerful in what they want to do and they move forward. We get a good grade in this phase and we have led that charge."

• Realtor.com (listings, regional portals for brokers, ad management solutions which create submit and manage offline advertising, I-LEAD Realtor Web pages)
• Springstreet.com (rentals)
• Homestore.com (services portal)
• Homefair.com (relocation tools)
• FireTap Communications (broadband access for Realtors and their consumers)
• Wyldfyre (MLS information system support and services)

Communicate Phase

Realtor.com offers numerous lead generation tools including Web pages that help steer consumers to participating Realtors. Realtors, however, must learn what to do with the online consumer once they capture the interest of one. By being enabled with Internet education, broadband access and wireless technologies via Homestore's FireTap Communications division, and online marketing and communication tools from Realtor.com, Realtors will be better able to serve online consumers.

"The next phase for consumers is to find a Realtor," continues Ozonian. "It is important that Realtors understand that this is a key phase where they need to communicate effectively both offline and online with the consumer. That is critical in terms of maintaining the Realtor's value in the entire process. This is the point where they help the consumer understand all the information they have been getting relates to a community or set of homes that they are interested in. The e-PRO and other training and education programs in the area of using technology to interact with online consumers is imperative. The real challenge is to take relationship skills and marketing skills and combine them with a wise use of technology so that they become an advocate and counselor for the community. The communicate phase has a lot of challenges associated with it. Realtors have to understand technology, how to enable it, and how to meet consumers on the consumers' terms. We've spent a lot of time on this strategy on how technology will affect business."

• Top Producer (client and business management software)
• Wyldfyre Listings
• I-LEAD pages
• FireTap Communications

Buy/Sell Phase

The consumer has found information on the Internet and contacted a Realtor. Now s/he is ready to buy or sell a home. Through the new eRealtor.com transaction management platform, Realtors will be able to control and streamline the transaction process from contract to closing, making it faster and more efficient. The platform has been enhanced with products and services from Homestore subsidiaries such as Top Producer, which allows an agent to manage their client contacts and prospects as well as their daily business functions and more. Wyldfyre, another software subsidiary is working on integrating MLS information management solutions as well as wireless access to data.

"Customers have to go through this long, mysterious process and hope the home closes," says Ozonian. "Consumers have been frustrated with this phase for years. It's clumsy, because the vendors can't talk to each other. It requires numerous original ink signatures. Once you could buy a home with one contract. Today, you have a full book of pages to execute a contract. This is the phase where the strength of browser-based Internet applications that serve as the transaction engine will allow all the partners in the contract/closing process to seamlessly integrate with each other. Data elements captured in the client management in the find and communicate phases will flow into the buy/sell phase. The complete engine will use the database to populate all the forms that are needed, such as requests for services, and the same data set will flow to escrow and title and other services providers to enable the closing. In addition, there will be a lot of new decision support tools for the real estate professional and consumer because there will be online status reporting with various views of the transaction. The system will ping them to provide information or decisions about various things that need to happen while the closing is taking place."

• Zipform (electronic contracts)
• eRealtor.com (transaction management)
• FireTap Communications

Owning Phase

Now the customer has closed the home, but our job as an industry isn't done. The consumer still needs to move in, hook up utilities, remodel part of the house, change some landscaping, buy insurance, and the list goes on," explains Ozonian. "The real estate industry needs to focus on providing assistance by independent professionals with services that help them own the home. The customer wants to enhance the value of the asset they have purchased.

"The issue of wealth protection and wealth maintenance and growth is becoming a more significant issue," continues Ozonian. "Consumers are more concerned about what their portfolio contains, including the home. To help them maintain and improve that asset value is an important thing to do for them. When we look at the breadth of the eRealtor platform, we don't look at one thing for finding, or closing a home. We focus on the framework of products and services from the time the customer gets onto the Internet to moving into the home. When you look at the Web site, the organizations that are wholly owned by homestore like Top Producer, Wyldfyre, FireTap and eRealtor.com, are units that accomplish these core competencies."

• FireTap Communications
• Homestore.com
• Top Producer

Published: September 6, 2000

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