Inman Conference 2008 coverage

The largest conference on the topic of (residential) real estate and IT is the Inman Real Estate Connect which was held this week in San Francisco 2008' . I guess there were more than 1 000 participants. Not only from the USA but also Australia, New Zealand, Spain and UK.

Below are the highlights of the week (in no particular order) from the perspectiv from a Swedish Product Manager.

Meeting up with all online friends
Meeting up all people whose blogs you are reading and the people behind many of the services in person has been indeed rewarding. Truly inspiring.

A demo of next generation websites
Tyler Davey from Infusion gave a preview of the new Radisson site that will be released in the autumn. Built in Silverlight and extensively using Microsoft Virtual Earth; the user experience was incredible. Tyler also mentioned that the incredible software Photosynth will be included in Virtual Earth. See this video and get blown away by the photosynth technology.

The Swedish connection
In the presentation "25 Online Real Estate Sites You Don't Know About But Should" Brian Boero, 1000Watt Consulting, started of with showing the Swedish real estate search engine Booli!

A demo of Trulia iPhone Application
Trulias very own Mr Social network Rudy gave me an demo of their iPhone application (YouTube movie). Very impressive. I believe devices with location functionality will have a great impact on the way we find real estate information.

Walkscore
You know that the Americans find the gas price high (still less then half of prices in Sweden) when services like WalkScore is being created. Nevertheless, a great service that measures the walkability of an address.

Webbased solutions to get rid of Excel
As a Product Manager of Datscha it is great to see that there are more people how believe that a web solution is better then the best Excel spreadsheet. At Inman I found two services in this area; T-rex (Property Management) and eRealInvestor ("Analyze your own property and investments and optimize your returns!")

The techiness of the attendees
As an official geek, it was great to see how many attendees that took their notes on a laptop and where present online even at the conference.

During the entire conference there was an active discussion on Twitter.
An example of the discussion.

Read the entire conversation here.

Next time you doing a presentation at a conference be aware that quite a few in audience could be twittering about you, google your facts and browsing through your LinkedIn resume. In other words, be humble and stick to the facts. 

More Inman coverage
Below a some more reading about Inman.
I'm sure there is more to come.

The Orlando Condo Blog
Joel writing for Inman 
Daneil for Inman
Drew about blogging
Matrix 

Finally...
Thanks to everyone who made this conference such a brilliant experience.

Liveblogging from ReBarCamp

Today I attended the ReBarCamp event in San Francisco.

Start of the day
First of all it's in the Swedish American Hall. Pretty wired for a Sweden who has travelled half over the world!

Anyway, there are some 100+ people here and for most of them (including me) it's there first visit to a conference set up as a Barcamp., which means that it is "user generated conferences . In other words, it is up to the crowd to on the spot create the sessions.

So there was quite a confusing crowd in the beginning, but quickly a great list of sessions were created.

Then the sessions started and the conversations for sure kicked off.
How many conversations do you find in the photo below?

Below are quick notes from some of the sessions I attended.

Blog survey
The Center for Real Estate and Social Technology (http://varbuzz.com/crest/) has conducted a survey among bloggers in the USA. They will do those surveyes every quarter.

Result from the first survey
128 responses

Agents 65%

Brokers 23%

50% using WordPress  (especially the veterans)

50% hosted

The median start date is 1 aug 2007

The median is 12 post in may 2008

Medium number of comments 3,4 per post

80% had fewer than 50 commments in may

The more posts you put in the less comments per post

1315 uniqe browsers per month is average

Ideal for traffic is 5 posts per week

35 medium RSS subscribers is average

Full RSS feed --> more readers

Video 101

The crew from Zipvo organised an open discussion about video.
It seems to really start coming off over here.

The discussion was primarily around;
   1. type of camera
   2. "start now, even if the quality isn't there, you will learn"
   3. the business model for the video platforms out there

Podcasting

A great conversation that covered everything from showing audio software to discussing why to use podcasts on an agents site.

The answer for the latter question was according to one of the participants;
   "The consumer will come to your site for three reasons;

       1. to figure out what his house is worth

       2. to view the listings

       3. to learn about the community

   And it is in the last point that you could successfully add Podcasts."

The sum up was (as for video session above) start easy and focus to improve.
An easy starting point is TalkShoe.

Beer with bloggers
After all the sessions the crowd went to the bar next door for the Inman Conference kick off party "Beer with bloggers".

Thanks Zillow for the open bar.

To sum up
Not only did I learn a lot about the US market and what topics are 'hot', also had the opportunity to meet up with people I prio only know through their blogs.

Furthermore, I did also get a hand on experience of BarCamps. For sure liked the concept! Tomorrow starts the Inman Conference. A more 'normal' conference. I sure that will be as great as of today.