Ubertor Real Estate Blog

Our friends at Inman News (a large real estate news source) have noticed us again… here is what they had to say:

New acronym for real estate
“Blog” is one of those words that grew out of modding two words together: Web and log, for blog. But “blog” also has become an acronym for some real estate brokers and agents who’ve been using the publishing tool to create fresh content for consumers on their Web sites. According to Steve Jagger, founding partner of Combustion Labs Media, “blog” in the real estate community his company serves has come to stand for “Better Listings On Google” because the ever-changing fresh content scores the agents higher spots on Google’s search results.
–Jessica Swesey, Inman News Inman Blog

Realtors ride Internet wave (article)
Package allows clients to ‘manage their world online’

Mario Toneguzzi
Calgary Herald

Friday, August 19, 2005

More Calgary realtors are going online these days as competition in the city’s red-hot real estate industry continues to heat up.

“It’s so important as far as marketing properties using the visual ways of doing it through these websites because a lot of people are just too busy. This gives maps. It gives total virtual tours of the interior of properties,” said Akbar Nimji, with Re/Max Realty Professionals, who has been a realtor for about 10 years.

“It is the wave of the future. . . . This is the future.”

Vancouver-based Combustion Listings, a software development company, has been in Calgary this week selling its software package specifically designed for realtors. It is capitalizing on a growing trend in the real estate industry as more realtors are using personal websites to sell property.

“We’re expanding into the Alberta market,” said Steve Jagger, co-founder of the company.

Jagger said about 4,000 realtors throughout North America have bought the package, with the bulk of the company’s customers — about 1,200 — in Vancouver. It has about 80 to 90 clients in Alberta. The basic plan costs $347 to set up and $37 a month.

Nimji has been using the Combustion Listings service for about 11/2 years.

“It’s been a huge, huge difference with just the amount of business I get,” said Nimji.

“(The websites) are easy to use for realtors that aren’t really computer-savvy to put in information, update it yourself whenever you want and it’s live immediately,” he said, adding he gets 3,000 to 4,000 hits on his website each week.

Combustion Listings started about six years ago, hosting various websites in more than 20 countries.

But about 21/2 years ago it got out of web hosting to focus on real estate, and got into the business of building software packages specifically for realtors. The idea began with realtors in Vancouver asking if the company could build a package so they could better manage their listings.

“That (request) spawned us into this business,” said Jagger. “It opened our eyes to this market.”

The package offers a realtor the ability to do various things by listing properties he or she has for sale. Pictures, floor plans, virtual tours, Google maps, voice-overs and booking of appointments are among the many features available.

“It gives the realtor the ability to manage their world online,” said Jagger.

He said the program just doesn’t provide realtors with websites, but also educates them on Internet use.

He said with the average realtor now just over 50 years old, “our role is trying to push the envelope of what realtors do online.”

“The benefits we give them is ease of use. All realtors need to be online,” said Jagger. “More and more people are looking for real estate online. They’re searching the web. All realtors need to have websites.”

Fred Ferguson, with Re/Max Central, has had the package since January.

“I got to understand how to market on the Internet. They actually taught me how to get people coming,” said Ferguson. “I can gauge how many people are reading my blog. . . . I can tell you that 1,800 people a week are reading my blog. I can tell you what stuff they’re looking at, what page they’re looking at, how long they’re staying. I can tell what’s doing the job and what’s not.

“I can tell you that four transactions this year have happened because people found me on the Internet. There was no other way we would have got connected. That represents a ton more income to me than what it cost me to have that website built.

“You’re judged in today’s market much faster than ever before even before you get an opportunity to speak to it or address it. If you’re not on the Internet, there’s a good amount of people that are going to pass you over,” added Ferguson.

Have a look at today’s Calgary Herald as there is an article about Combustion and our products and services. I will be posting the article here shortly.

CKNW, Vancouver’s local news radio station just interviewed Joel Carcone, one of Ubertor’s blogging Realtors about his experience and success with his blog. Joel was kind enough to mention Ubertor in the interview while he gave his personal experiences with blogging and why it is working for him.

Thanks for the mention Joel and keep blogging!

I have been talking with Gillian Shaw at the Vancouver Sun about our work with Realtors and getting them online and blogging and today, she wrote an article in the Vancouver Sun that talks about Realtor Blogs. She took the time to contact some of our clients, including Joel Carcone, Daniel Hunter and Marty Pospischil. I have cut and paste the article and posted it below.

Real estate agents building blog houses

Gillian Shaw
CanWest News Service; Vancouver Sun
July 15, 2005

VANCOUVER - If your real estate agent is one of a growing number of blogging realtors, you can get a healthy helping of industry gossip, news about the greatest listing that never made it to market, and advice on everything from interest rates to staging your home for sale.

“Blogging is a necessity and it’s another tool,” said Daniel Hunter, an agent with Angell Hasman & Associates Realty in West Vancouver. “Some of the older guys, they are like _ `Blogging, why would I want to do that? It’s just a waste of time.’ But one of my goals in this industry is always to be reinventing ways of doing things, to always be innovative, thinking outside the box and accepting change.

“If you don’t keep up you will get swallowed and stomped on.”

It’s a trend that spurred Stephen Jagger and his partner Michael Stephenson at Combustion Labs Media to diverge from their web-hosting business to devote their entire company to the task of bringing real estate agents into the digital age.

Several times a week, the folks at Combustion take classes of real estate agent clients on an online tour, instructing them in the company’s new software, Ubertor, in the joys of free listings through Craigslist.org and other digital diversions.

“We had a couple of real estate clients among our web-hosting clients and they were faxing their listings to someone to have them uploaded onto their site,” said Jagger. “They asked us to build a little engine to do that uploading and we were very successful in creating an engine that allowed realtors to manage their own listings online. It spawned this whole new software company.”

Ubertor a name combining the slang for super or ultra with tor, as in realtor is software that allows even the most techno-challenged realtors to manage their online offerings, from websites right through to their blogs.

Some 200-plus realtors are blogging among the company’s 4,000 clients and that number is growing as the bloggers discover their diary entries are boosting their online profile.

It’s not surprising that at 24, Hunter considers himself the youngest realtor to have a web log, an online diary known as a blog. As a product of the Internet age, it’s a natural for Hunter and the upcoming generations of clients to expect the digital delivery of information, just as their parents counted on the real estate paper.

“I work with a younger demographic and to be quite honest with you, they do all their research online,” says Joel Carcone, who, at 27, is another agent who counts among the twentysomething crowd and can be found blogging. “As part of my marketing plan, my blog has been effective.

“I am quite happy with it. The downside is, being a one-man army, I am the only one able to write for my blog and I am so busy I drop the ball a lot.”

It’s not necessarily a natural fit for the average middle-aged real estate agent who didn’t grow up in the Internet age, but for the up-and-comers, it’s a given.

“I don’t have a choice,” said Carcone. “In order to be very competitive in today’s business climate, you don’t have a choice but to be Internet friendly. I deal with a younger clientele because I am younger, but even with older clients we do almost all our communications via e-mail. I think anybody who says they don’t need the Internet is losing market share, plain and simply.”

It’s all about moving up the search engine list.

“Blogs aren’t something people are going to read and call you to list their home,” said Marty Pospischil, a Vancouver realtor who sold a character Kitsilano home listed at $1.2 million last weekend that he chatted about in his blog. “It is more an indirect source of information that legitimizes you as a professional.

“It increases my exposure on the Internet through the search engine results and it sends more business to my website.”

Pospischil said three years ago he tracked a mere one per cent of his business to his Internet presence, but that number has grown today to 11 per cent.

“The advantage I find is not only that it is growing, but as it grows, the cost associated with that form of advertising doesn’t grow,” he said. `I can have 10,000 hits and it doesn’t cost any more than 10 hits.”

Vancouver Sun

Tomorrow there is going to be an article in the Vancouver Sun about Realtors who Blog. It will focus on 3 or 4 of our clients.

I will post the article tomorrow when it comes out.

CLASSIFIED INTELLIGENCE REPORT - June 8, 2005 - VERSION 6.11 - Page 23

Don’t turn around . . . the Ubertor’s in town
BY BRIAN BLUM

It sounds like either the title to a John Belushi-inspired Saturday Night Live skit or the set up to an industry insider joke, a kind of “two real estate agents walk into a bar” zinger. But the proprietors of a new real estate
consulting company are spot-on serious about their business.

Q: What do you call a Super-Realtor?
A: An “Ubertor”

Ubertor is the new name for Combustion Listings (www.CombustionListings.com) , an online consulting firm and software developer that aims to help Realtors up the ante on the competition. The name slaps the German prefix of “uber” – meaning above or on top – onto the “tor” of Realtor.

With more than 4,000 Realtor clients, Ubertor – despite the amusing new name – has been growing rapidly. Their differentiation: constantly emphasizing the cutting edge.

Ubertor, like real estate-focused marketing firm z57 – see CIR 5.17, Sept. 14, 2004 – creates Web sites for Realtors. Both build real estate specific functionality into their offerings, tools to manage listings, track how many times features such as the mortgage calculator have been clicked, and the like.

But Ubertor seems to prefer exploring a bit off the beaten track. For example, Ubertor aggressively pushes Realtor blogging as a simple but effective way for Realtors to generate additional traffic and higher search engine rankings.

“Most real estate sites have canned content,” explained Steve Jagger, co-founder of Ubertor. “Google doesn’t like that. Search engines want unique quality content, updated frequently – which is what blogs do by their very nature.”

All very well, but what would a Realtor write about in a blog? As we reported in our coverage of the California Association of Realtor’s latest “Internet vs. Traditional Buyer” survey (see CIR 6.08, April 27), 71 percent of Internet home buyers only interviewed a single agent before making a choice on who, to work with – and that agent tended to be the first one who responded. Blogs, by contrast, are all about building a relationship over time. So we had to ask: Does anyone really care?

“Well, they can write about what kind of sales they’re involved in, what they’re up to on a day-to-day basis,” Jagger said.

Sure, but let’s be honest: The real draw is not the blog chat but the listings. And to emphasize that point,
Ubertor’s most powerful module is one that automatically posts new listings from a Realtor onto his or her blog.

Indeed, a Realtor doesn’t even have to touch his blog for it to sport the frequently updated blog entries that Google is more prone to display. The same module works on the “regular” Web pages Ubertor builds for its clients as well.

Also, Ubertor is rolling out an e-mail alert feature, so that home buyers can subscribe and be alerted when a new home is posted on the Realtor’s blog.

While blogs may be primarily a trick for pumping up traffic, Ubertor uses some nifty technology for making the user experience more interactive once home buyers and sellers come to a Ubertor-powered Realtor’s site.

Ubertor employs the same AJAX technology we wrote about previously when describing Paul Rademacher’s HousingMaps.com (CIR 6.08) which displays Craigslist real estate listings on GoogleMap pages. (Ubertor is rolling out its own GoogleMaps module as well, but Jagger wasn’t ready to talk about it.)

AJAX essentially allows Web pages to load more like offline applications without the annoying wait-andrefresh process associated with most database-driven search pages. A demo of this can be seen on the Ubertor built www.HistoricModern.com site.

Follow the links for Properties, then choose Property Search. Select an area such as Scottsdale, then start drilling down. The screen will show in near real-time the results of your search, and even better, will only display search options that match results in the database.

“If there are no 1,500 square-foot townhouses for under $100,000, there won’t be an option to search for it that then comes back with 0 Results, Jagger said. “This really simplifies the search process.”

Ubertor is also pushing the envelope with its slide show feature. While nearly every real estate software system allows Realtors to post images, slide shows and even virtual tours, Jagger claims Ubertor is unique in that it allows Realtors to add MP3 audio narrations automatically into the slide show. Realtors record the narration live while watching the slide show, making the timing a cinch. With a digital camera, laptop and a wireless connection, the whole show can be created on-the-fly from the home itself. A demo can be found at http://demo2.ubertor.com/ViewProperty/18/Active/#viewdetail.

Ubertor was founded in 2000 in then 27-year-old Jagger’s parents’ house and was initially known as Combustion Hosting. He and partner, Mike Stephenson, didn’t intend to get into the real estate business. But after they signed up a couple of Realtors by chance who wanted Web hosting, they quickly realized there were some major inefficiencies in the way their Realtor clients were managing their listings.

“They were getting listings faxed,” Jagger told us. “There’d be a 48 hour delay in getting the listing posted, then there’d be spelling mistakes. They needed an engine so they could load their listings themselves.” Combustion took on that task and it wasn’t long before the company was growing out of Jagger’s bedroom.

The Vancouver-based company employs 22 today and has since sold off the hosting business to concentrate solely on the real estate space.

While any Realtor can become an Ubertor customer, the company has focused its sales effort in several locations – its home base in western Canada and the Phoenix market which Jagger says has a heavy Canadian buying contingent.

Ubertor’s software doesn’t offer any serious lead-generation functionality to date. A recent upgrade now allows independent graphic designers and Web site builders to plug in Ubertor’s most popular features rather
than forcing them to use Ubertor’s software and templates. Ubertor runs free training sessions in its Vancouver office and on the road.

While Jagger wouldn’t reveal revenues, he suggested it’s not hard to calculate. With 4,000 clients paying between $37-$57 per month, that’s a potential revenue stream of close to $2 million a year. Well on its way to true, “uber” status.

By Jessica Swesey - Inman News - Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Combustion adds fire to real estate Web sites
Real estate innovator: Company trains agents how to stand out (Inman.com)

In the Internet age, many successful businesses started from someone’s garage, dorm room or living room. Think Amazon, Google and eBay.

Combustion Labs, a forward-thinking Vancouver, B.C.-based company that’s adding spice to the real estate industry, is no exception. Its story begins in 2000 in 27-year-old Stephen Jagger’s room at his parent’s house, where he and his business partner Michael Stephenson, 29, planted the roots of a company now making a mark on the real estate Web site business.

The company is pushing all sorts of innovative Web marketing ideas for Realtors, including Web sites that agents can easily manage themselves, built-in blogs, photo slideshows with audio descriptions and even craigslist.org. Combustion also is cooking up new search technology for home listings.

“We run classes in our office theater three times a week and the big push at the sessions is for Realtors to add their listings to their Web site, their blog and craigslist,” said Jagger, general manager of Combustion Labs Media, and co-founder of the company.

Stephen Jagger - co-founder of Combustion

Combustion Labs started as a Web hosting company in 2000, headquartered in the aforementioned bedroom in Jagger’s parents’ house. Now up to 22 employees, the company outgrew its former quarters and occupies an office in Vancouver.

A few of the company’s hosting clients were Realtors, which eventually led them to focus on real estate software and Web site services, Jagger said. Two years ago, they sold the Web hosting business, and now Jagger and his team of 22 are looking to change real estate.

“Real estate is a great business, but there are a few deficiencies in how it’s run,” Jagger said. Nearly every Realtor has a Web site, but just having one isn’t good enough anymore, he added, and things like loading listings to craigslist and blogs are what make agents stand out.

Combustion’s real estate software and services are dubbed Ubertor, which Jagger says derives from the German “uber” and “t-o-r” from “Realtor.” “Ubertor – it’s like ’super-Realtor,’” he said. Ubertor started as a listings engine and has expanded to include listings management and client management, among other things. The company currently has about 4,000 Realtor clients, Jagger said.

Combustion has a new tool built into its Web site services that will automatically load listings to an agent’s blog once its been entered into the agent’s Web site.

“We find that Realtors who promote their listings with these three mediums gain much more exposure over those who don’t,” he said.

At one of the Vancouver training sessions, an agent, Marty Pospischil, stood up and said he had just listed a home with a new client who said he chose him because he was blogging. The client liked that Pospischil was giving up-to-date real estate information on his blog.

“What’s happened since I’ve been blogging is two things,” Pospischil said. “One, my clients are actually reading it – about 5 percent – and second, my ratings in search engines have gone way up.”

Until about two months ago, Pospischil said he didn’t even know what the term “blogging” meant. But with Combustion’s support, he now blogs regularly.

The Combustion team encourages agents to write blog entries about their new listings and link to them or upload them to their blogs, but Pospischil said he’s using his a little differently.

Pospischil’s blog offers prospective clients information about the market. He said he’ll link to a listing to support a point he’s making. For example, a recent blog entry questions whether the region is still experiencing a seller’s market, and discusses a multiple-offer scenario on a house listed for sale, then links to that listing.
Jagger noted other marketing benefits to blogs, such as search engine placement. “The search engines love quality content – unique content,” he said. “With blogging, it’s very difficult to cheat…plus, Google knows the time stamp.” And search engines tend to rank more frequently updated Web sites higher than static ones.
Another big push from within the company is for agent clients to utilize the power of craigslist to market their listings. Pospischil said he’s been uploading listings to craigslist for a few weeks after learning about it from Combustion.

“We take advantage of (craigslist) because it’s free – how can you lose?” Pospischil commented. Also, he said his agents have an advantage over competition when they give listing presentations and show this as an extra marketing avenue. He said it takes less than 10 minutes to create a listing on craigslist.

Michael Stephenson - co-founder of Combustion

Combustion hosts training sessions in the company’s Vancouver office and online to show Realtors how to use craigslist. The company also travels to other markets to host training sessions for its products.

Combustion also has been making a mark with photo slideshows on Realtor Web sites. The company recently launched slideshow technology that makes it easy for Realtors to create professional-looking slideshows of their listings, and record an audio description of the property to play when Web visitors view the slideshow. A demo of the slideshow technology can be seen online.

The company has just added an upgrade to the audio slideshow, enabling agents to load an MP3 audio file into the system without having to deal with a lot of confusing technology, Jagger said.

“Realtors seem to be loving the idea,” Jagger said of the voiceover slideshows. “It adds another layer of personal touch to the site, especially the unique properties.”

Realtors using Combustion’s service aren’t forced to use template-based Web sites that potentially could look almost identical to those of other clients, Jagger said. Realtors who may already have a Web designer can still use Combustion’s services to power their sites.

The company also is working on technology for property searching currently being tested by a Phoenix site, HistoricModern.com. Using a technology dubbed Ajax, a real estate Web site’s search system can become more intelligent, adjusting search options according to what’s available. For instance, if the site doesn’t contain commercial listings for a specific city, it doesn’t show up as a search option.

“The biggest flaw in property search is you fill in a huge page of property search info, then hit ’submit’ and you end up with nothing,” Jagger said. The Ajax technology “basically allows the system to think on the spot.”

Copyright 2005 Inman News

The kind writers at Inman.com have kindly linked their blog to our website. I was speaking with Jessica over there a few days ago about our new listings engine. (Wait till they see our new property search.

Inman News is the nation’s leading independent real estate news service and content provider to consumers and the real estate industry. Inman editorial content appears in over 250 newspapers throughout the country and is featured on over 10,000 Websites. Inman News reaches millions of consumers and industry professionals each day through clients and partners such as The Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, Washington Post, Denver Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, The Wall Street Journal Online, CBS Marketwatch, and many more.

Below Article From: Vancouver LifeStyles Magazine
February 2005

Stephen Jagger and Michael Stephenson may not have come to the business world with as much experience as the players in SPORG, but they’ve got more than luck behind them.

These two young entrepreneurs look as though they’d fit the mold of the dotcom boom and bust entrepreneur, but once they get talking it becomes quickly evident that they are not headed in that direction. As owners of Combustion Listings, they have created the hottest thing in real estate since the mortgage broker.

Combustion (www.combustionlabs.com) started out in 1999 as a web hosting company. Jagger, 27, and Stephenson, 29, were friends from their days working as debt collectors. They saw hosting as a good niche to start a business using Jagger’s entrepreneurial training and Stephenson’s work experience designing websites. They did well right away, attracting U.S. and Canadian clients.

From the get-go, they knew they needed to appear bigger than they were. They hired a top-notch design firm to create their corporate branding, and an answering service to hide the fact that they were still working out of their bedrooms in their parents homes.

When they started hiring employees, it got a bit difficult to have staff turning up at Jaggers house in the morning, working off the end of his bed. Thats when it became time to find an office. And it wasnt long before they needed a bigger office.

Thats what led them to the real estate business. They were working with a real estate company to find a unique space when they began hearing about problems their realtors were having with web designers. Jagger and Stephenson knew they could do a better job for the same price. So they did.

They created on-line software to set up and maintain websites for the real estate industry. Combustions technology allows realtors to manage their websites without a webmaster. The listings engine allows realtors to easily add, remove and edit listings. With a variety of website templates, it becomes very easy to set up a realty website.

Combustions website boasts that they are fast, they are secure, and we’re great at what we do. In fact, we’re renowned for providing the best customer service and technical support in the industry.”

In just three years, theyve signed up thousands of realtors who are singing their praises from Langley to Florida and Vancouver to San Francisco.

“These guys know what theyre doing, and they know how to sell their product,” says Patricia Houlihan, a realtor with MacDonald Realtys West Side office (www.vancouverviews.ca). “My website was so easy to set up, easy to maintain, and I dont have to worry about it at all.”

Jagger and Stephenson say theyve had plenty of offers to take the business public, but theyre not interested right now. Its important to them to control the direction of the company.

“We saw why a lot of companies went down,” says Jagger. “We study failures, and were always researching what other companies did wrong so we can sidestep their errors as well as learn from our own.”

They learned a lot from their days as debt collectors. Like how to stay out of debt as much as possible.
“Weve been pretty much profitable since day one,” says Jagger. “We grow as we can, expand as we can, stay debt free as much as possible.”

They say their youth is an advantage in having the time and energy to build the business. “Our lack of obligations outside the company aids us to be more focused within the company,” says Stephenson.
“Were agile with this business,” adds Jagger.

“The company is our child,” Stephenson jumps back in. “We all work to bring it up. Once its grown up, once the company is a teenager, then well have our own kids and start again with them. Right now the company still needs parenting.”

Their baby may grow up pretty quickly. Revenues are currently well above $1.5 million, with growth at 150 per cent every year. Plans to expand further into the U.S. are brewing.

Combustions current open-concept offices near Commercial Drive have become too small for the growing company, so theyll be moving into custom-built premises in Yaletown next month. Their growing roster of employees will still enjoy catered lunches, personal trainers, expensive equipment and all the perks, but now will be able to walk to work.

Jagger and Stephenson come across as buddies, and even finish each others sentences. When asked about their future goals, Jagger starts talking about dominating the real estate software market and honing the products they currently offer. But Stephenson lets loose with some of their bigger dreams.

“We want to redefine the business of real estate, just like Google redefined search and EBay redefined auction,” he grins.