By popular vote, technology marketing company RentJuice and multiple listing service analytics and security company Real Metric LLC are winners of contests held during Real Estate Connect in San Francisco. Both will receive $1,000 cash from Inman News.
RentJuice won the "Connect Create" developer challenge — in which four developer teams built brand-new real estate-related Web applications in 48 hours — with its CallJuice product. CallJuice routes client calls to predetermined phone numbers so brokerages "never miss a lead again," said Matt Gidney, the company’s vice president of sales and marketing.
"It’s a free, online way to create a phone number and have it route to every agent in your office so no call ever gets lost," Gidney said.
"You can see how many calls you’ve had, how many you’ve missed, the average call length, and the average response time. You can see the lead source, (so) you can tell if a call is from your most expensive listing or your hairstylist."
Conference attendees and Inman News readers chose the developer challenge winner through a text-messaging service provided by KWKLY. RentJuice received the most votes, followed by SocialMadeSimple‘s SimplyReferred , Xedia Media‘s RealtyVoyager, and a video-creation tool by Stupeflix. Click here to see the companies’ presentations.
An in-house review by the Inman News editorial department favored the Stupeflix tool. "We liked Stupeflix’s innovative concept for quick and easy video presentations. There is ample raw potential there for how this on-the-fly video tool would be widely used for its sheer simplicity," said the Inman News editorial department in its review of the developer contestants.
"The Stupeflix video-generating tool snoops for photos and relevant text and agent and company contact information and wraps that into a cohesive and impressive short video with an automated voiceover. The Stupeflix tool could prove useful to agents in preparing property presentations to clients on short notice and while out in the field."
RealMetric LLC, participating in "New Kids on the Block" session — during which six real estate-related startups presented their products and business plans to conference attendees — was selected by popular vote for the $1,000 cash prize.
Justin Tracy, the company’s chief technical officer and co-founder, described Real Metric as "the first MLS-centric IDX analytics tool."
The company tracks every property view across an MLS’s Internet Data Exchange (IDX) network and checks for listings "scraping" in order to ensure data isn’t being taken by third parties without permission.
"We can tell the MLS exactly how many property views a listing got, so it can prove to the home seller what the agent’s really doing for (the seller). So, we say, ‘Your house got 2,000 views over the last six months across these 800 websites.’ It’s really great for the Realtors to really prove their worth to the public," Tracy said.
Tracy called scraping a widespread problem.
"We’re currently doing this in the Greater Hudson Valley MLS. We’re tracking around 800 websites and there’s about 20 or 30 that just magically got this IDX data from somewhere. (The MLS) called them up and said, "What are you doing? Where’d you get this? Who forwarded this to you?" They never before had that type of transparency," Tracy said.
Other "New Kid" participants were: Get Full Disclosure, which aims to simplify the sharing of disclosures, title reports, and other real estate documents with other agents; Spatial Match, a geospatial search tool that can be embedded into any real estate agent or broker website and allows users to simultaneously search more than 100 different community and lifestyle data sets in real time; listglobally.com, which allows agents and developers, at $90 for 90 days, to list properties in 20-25 leading market portals around the world; Neybor, a centralized marketing platform for the real estate industry that offers single-property websites, virtual tours and listing syndication; and Gist Inc., which brings a range of contacts and online content into one place, including news, blogs, tweets, Facebook updates, e-mails, links and attachments.
Real Metric was the top vote-getter.
