Excerpt from: Real Estate Industry Leader's Roundtable
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| September 24, 2007 | | The Evolution of Real Estate Aggregators. |  John Helmering has been selling real estate in Colorado since 1988. He is a Certified Residential Specialist, has served locally as a director for the Vail Board of Realtors, and is a founding member of the Workwide Recreation and Resort Sales Council. John has been recognized nationally as one of the top100 producing Prudential Real Estate Affiliates and has opened several new offices in the Vail Valley, working in the capacity of managing broker. John's passions and pursuits include out of the box marketing, the changing real estate industry and real estate technologies.
In 2005, John Helmering co-founded Real Estate Blogsites™ a service firm that has established itself as the leader in business blogging solutions for the real estate industry. His company has worked in providing corporate and agent blogging solutions along with education for some of the top real estate firms and organizations in the country. His client list includes the National Association of Realtors, Real Living, Exit Realty, Howard Brinton's Star Power, Allen Hainge's Cyberstars, and the industry's largest virtual real estate community-the Real Estate CyberSpace Society. In his real estate interview at Real Estate CyberSpace Radio he discusses the following real estate information: The Evolution of Real Estate Aggregators - A number of aggregators outside real estate from industries such as media and travel recognized an opportunity to present property information to buyers online; however, these vendors found that real estate is not the simple commodity they envisioned.
- It is important for an agent to be involved in transactions most of the time because matching buyers with properties is so subjective; agents will always be needed to facilitate transactions.
- Early aggregators include HomeGain and Lending Tree; they charge agents a fee for referrals.
- Some of the newer, Web 2.0 aggregators-such as Trulia, Google Base and Edgeio-allow property listings to be included in a database for all consumers; these sites, which send buyers and sellers back to real estate agents for free, perform a real service for both consumers and agents.
- REALTOR.com, the most famous aggregator, is very agent-centric; since that site was inaugurated, outsiders have been trying to capture real estate space.
In this briefing he also covers the following useful real estate topics: - Web 2.0 Defined
- Social Networking
- "Findability" Online
- Real Estate Blogsites™ (REB)
- More Cutting Edge Tools
- A Blogging Deal
- Real Estate in Perspective
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