Altos Research is the premier source for real-time real estate research. Our real estate data and local real estate reports are used by financial firms, investors, and thousands of real estate professionals around the country.
This blog is primarily authored by Mike Simonsen, co-founder and CEO of Altos Research. Other ways to be in touch:
As you know, Altos Research specializes in real-time market analytics in the housing market. What's less obvious are some of the cool ways people use our stuff. As any successful startup, I suppose, we have lots of customers using our real estate data in ways totally unexpected initially.
Recently, people have been asking us for a more complete list of the Altos Research services and a little about who uses them. I thought I'd assemble a list here for easy consumption, organized by the types of folks on our customer list. (Apologies in advance that this post is a little more salesy than usual. Just looking to provide a little insight into our company. Do check out some of the sites I link to below. There's a lot of great work out there.)
Usage: Home Buyer and Seller information, lead generation, blogging
Reference Customers: We have hundreds of professional subscribers, but a really great usage of the system for driving web leads is done by the Harper Team in San Ramon, CA. Our friend Chris Iverson with the Ventoux Group at Keller Williams in Palo Alto is highly effective at integrating market analytics into his listing presentations and working with buyers. He teaches a class on the topic. Chris Schweiger in Scottsdale is one of many Altos-bloggers. [A more complete list of Altos-bloggers coming soon.]
Usage: People want to know more about the market than their competition and don't need the personal marketing/branding benefits of our Pro subscription level. When we started this company, we naively thought this group would be our bread and butter. In truth, our local market free research pages drives a lot of our web traffic and is only indirectly responsible for driving our major sources of revenue. Note that we're now available in over 20 metros around the country (Here's Portland!) We open up more each week.
Some of these folks will add the AltosCharts to their subscription so they can build their own reports, query different stats on the fly and learn about any zip code in their region.
Reference Customers: We have tons of basic subscribers all around the country now, even some international (folks who tend to be researching the condo markets in Las Vegas and Miami. Surprise, surprise). My favorite quote was from a real estate investor, Dan, who said, "I LOVE your reports! I'd have had to spend a YEAR compiling this kind of information for myself!" [his caps, not mine.]
Usage: Trading and fundamental analysis. We have a growing stable of Wall Street players that feed on our data pipe--from the bulge-bracket banks to long/short hedge funds. The most obvious application for our real-time market data is the housing futures markets. I write occasionally about how our data leads the Case Shiller Index by three months in basically all the markets we cover. The Radar Logic RPX is actually getting more attention on Wall Street these days and we'll be publishing some latest analysis there very soon too. Our trading clients tend to use our market data as an input into massive "quant" analytics systems. They suck in CSV files, where ours is one of many input sources, bringing a unique perspective.
In addition to the real estate derivatives markets, some of our Wall Street subscribers use our data for fundamental analysis in their equities trades. For example, if you're a hedge fund thinking of going long a regional bank in the South East, you might want to understand how the trends in the local housing market are going to impact their loan portfolio.
Reference customers: Most of these folks prefer to remain, ahem, anonymous. Though a good example is Tradition Financial Services, one the leading real estate derivatives brokers, who use our data for spot-pricing the housing market and publishing research for their derivatives clients.
Real Estate Web Sites and Consumer/Investor Portals
Usage: We're seeing a number of really innovative startups working on providing great decision making tools for consumers and particularly investors in real estate. These folks turn to Altos to easily answer for their site visitors/members, "Hows the market?" They integrate AltosCharts into the user
Reference Partners: DeedQuest is doing some cool real estate investor products. CondoDomain is building a national condominium site for consumers.
Usage: These partners provide web sites, marketing, blogging, lead generation tools to real estate agents. We love our partners. We find great symbiotic relationships, because we're all helping real estate pros market more efficiently in an internet world.
Who knew the real estate ecosystem was so complex? And we've only just scratched the surface. 2008 is rocking already. We'll have some big announcements, new partners, and new products coming this year. Stick around!
Last week at the Inman Connect conference in NYC, one of the most-talked-about sessions was Brian Boero's "50 Tools and Technologies to Help You Win in a Slow Housing Market."
Brian is a partner at 1000Watt Consulting and a sophisticated marketer. The slides from Brian's rapid-fire presentation are now available at Inman. In it, he gave a nice (and totally unsolicited) plug for Altos Research (p49). Quite simply, "Know more about the market than your competition."
Inman's a marvelous confab for real estate professionals. The great thing about this message is that it applies to all our clients: Realtors, Wall Street traders, home buyers and sellers, investors, lenders, et al., captured in one pithy phrase. This from I guy I'd never met till I thanked him for the mention. Rock on.
This post is written by our client John Keith a real estate broker in Boston, Massachusetts. We first met John when Scott sat next to him at the opening keynote of the Inman Connect conference in San Francisco this summer. At the time, we were just opening up our coverage in Boston and John jumped at the chance to work with us. We're glad he did.
John's blog is excellent. He's been very effective integrating the Altos market analytics information into his posts. So we asked him to write a post for us about how he uses the Altos Research services in his business, his blog, and with his clients.
John also generously included an endorsement, which I'm more than happy to include here. Note: I've done a tiny little bit of editing, and I added the images. Everythig else comes directly from John. Enjoy:
About John Keith
I am a Boston real estate agent. I have a blog devoted to Boston Real Estate, at bostonreb.com.
My blog has a main page with daily updates of news and information about the Boston real estate market. In addition, on this page, visitors can search through all the condos and single-family homes listed for sale in our local Multiple Listing Service. Also, visitors may click through to pages of information I have written that are of specific interest to buyers, sellers, investors, etc.
I signed-up as an Altos Research client several months ago. I thought it would be a great way to provide another much-needed service to my site's visitors. More importantly, I figured it would make me be seen as an "expert" on the Boston real estate market. Therefore, visitors would be more likely to inquire about using me as their real estate agent, increasing my business (and my revenue).
After being an Altos Research client for several months, I have seen very positive results and can say I'm very happy I have made the investment.
How I Leverage Altos Research in My Blog and Business Now that I have access to them, I've tried a couple different ways of using the reports and graphs.
Right now, I have it set up so that there is one main graph on my blog's main page, for the city of Boston as a whole. It updates automatically, once each week's reports are finalized at Altos (every Monday evening).
I also have a link on my blog's main page directing visitors to another page where they can download any of the Altos weekly market reports (I subscribe to eleven Boston ZIP codes).
Banner for John Keith's blog BostonREB.com. Note the MLS Search, Market Reports, and New Developments dedicated pages. These are the three things that everyone wants to know about. The Market Reports, of course, come from Altos.
This past week, I added separate neighborhood-specific pages to my blog. [ed: here's The Fenway, for example.] These pages have blog entries devoted to each major Boston neighborhood. The idea is, visitors to my site will start on the main blog page, then click through to read more about specific neighborhoods.
I have an AltosChart on each of these neighborhood- specific pages, set up to show market data just for that neighborhood, by ZIP code. Probably some time in the near future, I'll be adding a link on these pages to each neighborhood's Altos market report (using each neighborhood's ZIP code).
I'm also about to set up an MLS search, preset by neighborhood, showing just listings in that specific neighborhood.
I expect this to have great results. The majority of visitors will continue to begin their visit on my main page, but then they will want to visit the page focused on just their neighborhood(s) of interest. By having the MLS search and AltosCharts on each neighborhood's page, I'm providing visitors with useful information.
How Strong the Call-To-Action? It's an open question as to how much information and data to provide to everyone - whether or not to have the Altos Research reports available to everyone, or whether I should force visitors to contact me for access to the reports (a "call to action", it's called).
Certainly, by making people contact me, I'm creating a two-way relationship - it encourages communication, which, hopefully, would lead to new business.
However, I also believe in making as much information as possible available to as many people as possible.
Most people visit my website multiple times, over a period of days, weeks, and/or months prior to contacting me to be their real estate agent. They already know me quite well from my blog, before they make an inquiry. So, there may be little to lose by having the reports readily available to the casual visitor.
Each week, I upload all the updated reports (by neighborhood and city-wide) to my servers. I receive reports for eleven ZIP codes, which covers the majority of the "downtown Boston" market.
There are actually 29 ZIP codes in the city of Boston, and I've considered getting reports for each of them. I would like to be "complete", even though I don't handle real estate sales in the other neighborhoods. This would increase traffic to my site, which would increase my exposure to potential clients and make me seen as the expert in ALL of Boston.
Measuring My Return on Investment I think the cost of the reports is easily justified. First, I enjoy reading the reports, myself. It presents data in ways I don't collect, myself. As well, it provides useful information to my existing clients. And, it provides useful information to potential clients.
Again, it makes me become known as an "expert" in Boston real estate - as the primary source for data and information on the Boston real estate market.
As of now, only a couple of other Boston real estate agents offer the Altos Research reports, which is fine by me, but I expect more agents to begin offering the reports to clients, which will increase competition. I'm glad I'm doing it, first.
Over the past couple of years, you’ve probably modified your marketing expenditures by increasing your spending on Internet-based marketing – developing your website and increasing your online presence while retaining your traditional print and snail-mailing activities.
Now that sales are down, you’re taking a look at the most efficient way to spend your marketing budget.The natural reactions is the old – “last on the boat is the first off!” meaning that you're thinking about cutting back on your online spending to rely on the "tried and true" print mediums.
Maybe that’s not the best course of action.
When the real estate marketing was hot, it was easy to pass by some of these great blog posts and news articles comparing print to online real estate advertising. Here are just a few articles that provide mounting evidence with real statistics showing that your advertising and marketing budget is best spent online.
Many of you are not only real estate agents, but your own personal website developer and programmer.(Not that working with clients and finding new ones doesn’t take enough time!)As a way to help with developing and managing your website, we’ve collected a list of helpful online tutorials and websites dedicated to providing you with step-by-step help and hints on HTML.
1. W3Schools is an Internet Developers Portal that is designed to help everyone learn how to develop their website.Their section on HTML provides very basic steps to help you:
2. HTML Code Tutorial is the official website of The Idocs Guide to HTML:
4. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards. W3C's mission is “to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web. There is a great introduction to HTML on their website.
With the general slowdown in housing markets, many of are considering ways to maximize your marketing budget. Here are a couple of questions to help you with this exercise:
1. How much of your budget is spent using technology and online marketing tools?Here’s an article published in 2005 that couldn’t be anymore timely if it was published this morning.Real estate information is online. Your customers are online. If you are thinking about cutting back on your marketing budget, be sure that you expenditures match with the behavior of your potential clients.
2. Are you giving people a reason to visit your website?More importantly – are you giving people a reason to visit your website again? You can add fresh content to your site with a weblog. Several sources for free weblogs include:
Blogs are free to set up and operate – you just need to spend 15-30 minutes/day posting an entry. Don’t be intimidated – just start one and let it roll from there.
3. How “findable” are you online? Have you set up a profile on LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, ActiveRain, and other online communities that can link you to potential clients?
4. Finally, here’s a checklist of Real Estate Marketing Tips to consider provided by Arming Your Farming.
For many of the real estate professionals out there, August is the time of year to take a look at your marketing and web/online strategies as you gear up for the Fall season and plan ahead to next Spring. In developing and re-developing your online strategies, a key factor in effective implementation is whether or not you can be found online.One way to increase the number of home buyers & sellers that find you on the web is through “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO).
In short, SEO is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to your websites and blogs. (thanks Wikipedia!) For real estate professionals, this means increasing the number of prospective home buyers and sellers that can find you via a web search on Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and other search engines.
Think of it as the “Findability” of your web site!
The good news is that you don’t have to pay an expense tech consultant to help you with this (though you can if your budget allows!).
So you ask – “What are some quick and easy ways to begin to increase your SEO for your web marketing?”
Ask yourself – “What are the top 10 search terms that a home buyer or seller will use in searching for real estate and/or an agent in your area?” Be sure that these terms are well-integrated into your web site and URL.
Add a catchy title and key phrase to your website that includes key search terms that you developed. (i.e. “Mary Smith, Anytown’s Real Estate Agent”).
If you are not planning to add a Blog to your site, be sure to constantly update your website with new content on a regular basis.This includes information such as real estate market information for you area or maybe a Commentary section to your site where you add new content at least once a week.
Be sure that the “key words” on your site are in TEXT, not in static images like .GIF or .JPEG files.Many website that include an agent’s contact info integrated into a nice looking .GIF or .JPEG file.The problem is that Google and other search engines cannot read this information and the information in a static image will not be found, thus hurting your Google page rank. An easy test is whether or not you can copy and paste text from your web page to a word document, such as your name, areas that you cover, and email address.If you cannot copy and paste, then Google can’t find it.
We recently put together a tour of our product offering for real estate pros. It's yet not as polished as we'd like it, but I thought I'd drop it in here to get some feedback from our regular readers.
If you're a realtor and wonder what the heck Altos does for a living, check out this slidecast. [The presentation is really targeted for real estate professionals. It doesn't contain a lot of details on the market analytics, rather focuses on how our clients use the system in their marketing.] At some point we'll integrate it into our main site for all to see.
Following the postings summarizing the Inman conference's BloggersConnect workshop, we've had requests from many of you for some more information about "widgets."
In short, a widget is a graphical web tool that you can insert into your website or blog. I like to think of it as a "little critter" that sits on your website. It has the ability to "think" because it is programmed to show specific information or behave in a certain way.
In the case of the Altos Charts widget - once you create an Altos Chart, it sits on your site and asks itself - "Am I showing the most up-to-date data available?" Then it runs back to the database to check, then runs back to your site to display any changes.
A more specific definition of a widget and a list of widgets available for real estate marketing and blogs is located at Future of Real Estate.
Realivent lists a series of more specific widget and plug-in types in on their blog.
A couple of books were mentioned throughout the Bloggers Connect workshop on Wednesday. Just in case you missed the titles and authors, here’s a few that were mentioned:
A real estate blog is an opportunity to build a relationship with a visitor.
A quality real estate blog is maximizing its search engine optimization, guides the visitor to a “call to action” and invites the blog visitor to participate with comments.
You absolutely must have a “call to action” on your real estate blog.
Write a blog business plan – what do you hope to achieve over the next 6-12 months?What type of real estate business do you want to build?
from Brian's rapid-fire presentation are now available at 