Note – This is a work in progress. My five year blogging anniversary was yesterday. I hoped to have this finished, but I ran out of time. I want to add more links. There are undoubtedly typos. Most of all, it needs more contributions from you. Please comment.
There were real estate industry bloggers well before me. Kristal Kraft, Mike Mueller, Alex Stenback, Dan Green, Jim Duncan, and of course Hanin Levin were all up and running earlier than I was. What I know best is what happened since the day I started. That was five years ago today.
January 31, 2004 – The RE.net is born.
Hanin Levin’s first list of real estate blogs on grow-a-brain represents the birth of a network of real estate professionals connecting to each other with social media use as the glue that binds. For the first couple years, being linked on grow-a-brain marked your arrival into RE.net. It wasn’t even called RE.net at the time, but nevertheless, it all started with this post.
January 2005 – Lenderama launches.
As an account executive for a wholesale mortgage lender, mortgage brokers were my clients. I had about fifty of them, and figured if half of those fifty read my blog, it would be worth my time. By the summer of 2005, lenderama was averaging 2000+ unique visitors a day, and I knew web 2.0 was going to be a huge part of my life going forward. The launch of lenderama is important to me because I launched it, but I also believe it marks the forst business to business format of a real estate industry blog.
March 2005 – RE Blogs launches.
Inspired by the monthly grow-a-brain updates, I decided to build a dedicated website that conically documents the existence of real estate blogs. My initial search uncovered 56 active real estate blogs world wide.
March 2005 – Rain City Guide launches
By April, Dustin Luther contacted me about being listed on RE Blogs. His site was originally intended to be a cheap way to jumpstart his wife Anna’s fledgling real estate business. Rain City Guide was pivotal to RE.net because Dustin combined localized content with industry talk. It’s location in Seattle made it a natural home for real estate technology discussions. Soon, Dustin recruited other contributors to write on Rain City Guide. Very quickly, RE.net’s earliest adoptors found themselves networking with each other here on a near daily basis. RCG is RE.net’s first social network.
May 2005 – The Phoenix Real Estate Guy launches.
Jay Thompson’s launch of The Phoenix Real Estate Guy eluded me at first. Like hundreds of other awesome blogs we won’t mention here, it’s focus was first on being a great local real estate blog. But unlike most local RE blogs, Jay took an ever increasing role in talking about the industry. While he’s written on BloodHound, Agent Genius, Geek Estate, Inman, and more, TPREG is home to one of RE.net smartest, most prolific, most passionate, and all around great guys.
January 2006 – Sellsius Blog launches.
Joseph Ferrera and Rudy Bachraty created the first full fledged celebration of RE.net when they created the Sellsius Blog. It’s a blog about web 2.0 in real estate. Unlike, RCG, it wasn’t bound to a local real estate market and quickly became a fun hangout for real estate agents to talk about blogging, social networks and online marketing.
Spring of 2006 – Rise of the RE.net
Zillow and Redfin launched their first blogs in February of 2006. By June, The Real Estate Zebra, Transparent Real Estate, Future of Real Estate Marketing, My Tech Opinion, The Real Estate Tomato, and Trulia Blog had all launched. Conversations about real estate started bouncing from blog to blog. Networks grew stronger. Local real estate blogs had jumped from 56 to well over 1000. Real estate blogging had arrived.
June also marked the birth of Bloodhound Blog. Heavily inspired by Rain City Guide, but written with brutal beauty, this blog represents more good ideas and bad blood than all the RE.net combined. The term “RE.net” was coined Greg Swann, founder of BHB. Gregg is and always be one of my favorite people populating this space. He draws people out of there confort zones. Inspiring fans and dissidents with every word. The easily offended always have a hard time on Bloodhound, but in the arena of pure ideas, there is no better discourse in RE.net than on Bloodhound Blog.
June also marks the launch of the Active Rain network. This blogging based network quickly became the gateway drug for entry into the RE.net. Many RE.net members going forward will tell you they cut their teeth on Active Rain including Jeff Turner, Kelley Koehler, and Ginger Wilcox.
2007, Year of the Snark.
It all started when Kelley Koehler moved from Active Rain to her own blog. First on Blogger in January, but then to WordPress by early spring. @housechick officially joined Twitter on May 22nd. Marking the first day Twitter was cool.
By March. Teresa Boardman launched The Real Estate Weenie. Actually, it wasn’t really launched. It was discovered. The blog was supposed to be a joke. Greg Swann at BHB was highly critical of it’s creation to the point that it inspired Teresa to move forward and actually write on the blog. As far as I know, the resulting ill discourse marked the first “blog war” of RE.net. I thought the blog was funny.
By the end of the year, 2007 was the snarkiest on record. I ran a contest to find the funniest of them all. The finalists can be found in this post.
Inman News buys in.
In January of 2007, Inman News re-launches what used to be Brad Inman’s personal blog into a group real estate blog including contributors like Mary McKnight, Pat Kitano, Joel Burslem, and myself. This marks the first day my mother was actually excited this whole blogging thing. Further more, Inman announced a new pre-conference ahead of Inman Connect San Francisco. This announcement set in motion a seminal shift of RE.net as a near exclusively online network to one that included and ever increasing number of face to face interactions.
In anticipation of Inman Connect, Active Rain launched the Project Blogger contest. “Veteran” bloggers adopted protégées to coach. The new bloggers competed against each other in a series of posts judged by different bloggers every week. The winner, Mary Pope Handy was eventually announced at Inman Connect that summer.
By May, Joe and Rudy at Sellsius announced Blog Tour USA, a cross country tour starting in New York and ending in San Francisco at Inman Connect. As the tour zig zagged across the country I contacted Joe to find out what they had planned in Denver. Joe told me to plan something, so I did. With Kristal Kraft’s help, I organized Blog Fiesta. With over 40 bloggers, the Denver stop was the best attended of the tour. But all along the way, you could feel the drive to meet in person gain momentum.
By the time the RE.net met in San Francisco that summer, a network of face to face connections had already taken root.
Also Notable in 2007
Group blog Agent Genius launches in October as a result of an action from the National Association of REALTORS® requiring blogger Benn Rosales to stop using the name REALTOR Genius for his personal industry blog. Inman picked up the story, and the resulting notoriety allowed Benn to not only change the name of the blog, but to add several notable authors to further contribute to it. http://agentgenius.com/real-estate-news-events/agent-genius-brings-it-to-you-with-fresh-new-faces-perspective/
The REALTOR Genius story also motivated Jay Thompson to launch NAR Wisdom. A soapbox where he would vent his frustrations with the association. Jay later wrote a post called “Why NAR needs a Social Media Director”. This post caught the attention of NAR CEO, Dale Stinton, motivating him to leave a comment on that blog, and to eventually hire me. Thanks Jay!
Dustin Luther re-launches 4realz.net as a home for his thoughts on the real estate industry in November.
2007 was a huge year for RE.net. To end it all, I launched The Secret Diary of Greg Swann. This anonymous blog played tribute to my friend Greg, while allowing me to blog about the topics of the day. Or so I hoped. In reality, all the RE.net really wanted to do was figure out who was running it. It took only a week for Dan Green to catch me. Still, nothing ever happens between Christmas and New Years, so this was great fun for all who participated.
2008 – Let’s get Face to Face
After attending the inaugural BlogWorld & New Media Expo in November of 2007, My business partner and friend, Jason Berman teamed up with me to do something completely original. A social media focused event about real estate. Sure, Inman had done Blogger’s Connect, and even NAR created a bloggers lounge (via CRT), but those were real estate events about social media. We wanted to focus to be on social media, not real estate. We thought we were doing something unique. Turns out, lot’s of great minds think alike.
Dustin Luther and Jim Marks were marketing 4realzED. Matt Fagioli and Brad Nix built RE TechSouth, Greg Swann and Brian Brady decided their event would be Unchained, Jason and I were working to bring Real Estate to BlogWorld and my friend Andy Kaufman decided that a BarCamp for real estate would be cool. All of this was in the works by early 2008.
I was so focused on making RE BarCamp and REBlogWorld into successes that I don’t remember much else that happened in 2008. For me, the highlight was when I was talking to Brad Inman at the Palace Hotel during Inman Connect and a stranger walked up to the both of us and said what an awesome event it was. Brad said thanks. The stranger went on to say, “and RE BarCamp was the best part”. So I said thank you.
In October, The National Association of REALTORS® placed an ad in Monster.com for a Social Media Manager. Several blogs were criticizing NAR for not reaching out through social media channels, but I always chuckle, because I was speaking with @hilarymarsh the next day via a DM arranged phone call. She had put it out on Twitter that they were looking.
I was lucky enough to speak at the last great RE event of 2008, SPARKt in Chicago. It was where I was able to meat with Hilary for the first time, face to face. She would eventually become my boss.
2009 – RE.net attains critical mass.
RE BarCamp blew up. There were events across the country. RE TechSouth for 2008 was an amazing success. NAR adopted social media in a big way. For me, there were four absolute highlights.
First, Dale Stinton, CEO of NAR showed up at the end of RE BarCamp Chicago (hosted at NAR headquarters). He spent the next 90 minutes with anyone who wanted to stay in a Q&A session with them. I remember helping Andy plan the first RE BarCamp back in 2008. We just hoped enough people would show up that it would be worth doing again in 2009. A year later, the CEO of NAR was participating at RE BarCamp. I think this is simply amazing.
Second, Jay Thompson goes to Washington. In response to an Agent Genius driven blog post about the way IDX rules addressed search engine indexing, NAR invited long time constructive NAR critic, Jay Thompson to speak to the MLS committee concerning these rules. Jay eventually joined a workgroup to change these rules. Bu Annual, the rules changes passed. Jay created NAR Wisdom because he was frustrated with NAR. But it was a “I want you to be better” frustration. Jay’s now helping to do that.
Third, NAR decides that more bloggers is more flavor. Based on both Jay’s work, and the committee work of some key YPN board leaders, namely Shannon King, Dale Stinton decides more people like this on all of NAR’s committees is a good thing. With incoming President Vicki Cox Golder’s approval, about 80 members of YPN and RE.net were added to the committee ranks.
All three of the above mark the RE.net’s entrance into mainstream real estate. My final highlight goes another direction. Sitting in an after-party at BlogWorld 2009, I overheard,
“What are are these REALTORS doing here?”
I still smile every time I think about it.
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