Altos Research has released four new WordPress Plugins that make it dead simple to go deep in to the numbers and create data rich local market blogs.
Altos is among many real estate data providers out there, but is unique in that many of its core products cater to individual Realtors rather than large institutional or corporate clients.
These new plugins allow subscribers to easily embed Altos charts on new posts or pages on their blogs through a very easy interface. The upshot to all this?
It makes it dead simple to create new web properties dedicated to answering real estate consumers’ biggest question right now… “How’s the Market?” – Market blogs are on the rise.
LoCo Market Stats is an Altos-powered blog that is doing just that. Realtor Heather Elias is using the charts to illustrate a week-by-week snapshot on the Loudoun County Virginia real estate market.
Realtor Eric Stegemann at stlhomedata.com is taking a slightly different tack – and using one of the plugin’s most powerful features; which is the ability to create static pages per city or zip-code and then have the data flow in to each page dynamically – like this one he created for Valley Park, Missouri. This means that, unlike the static charts, each time the page is reloaded, the data is refreshed.
Call it the fire-and-forget method to building out market blog.
Real Estate 2.0 is probably best characterized by the explosive growth of social media that allowed Realtors to begin to publish real estate related content to web. I believe the next phase in this phenomenon will be tools that allow individual brokers and agents to begin to expose, publish and interpret the data that drive local markets. This is the premise underlying ventures like the RPR (see NAR Leaps into the Fray — In a Big Way) and what every MLS executive in the country should be thinking about right now.
The winners in this game will be the ones that blow open the doors to the deepest, richest data but, more importantly, make the it easiest, cheapest and most intuitive for the masses to share.
With this release, Altos stands at the head of the pack. At least for now.
