So Who Moved My Cheese? has become a staple in modern management bookcases, a parable about management inexplicably involving a maze, some cheese, some mice, and some people. The whole fairy tale is distracting and strained – it doesn’t really work to explain the concepts of the book, so I’m just going to ignore it in this review.

The purpose of the book is to educate the reader on the choices we have to deal with change in our lives.  The concept is fairly obvious, namely that we become attached to the status quo, particularly where a particular methodology has been successful for us.  Therefore, the more successful we become, the more attached we get.  The more attached we get, the more we resist the possibility of changing – “why change something that’s been working for me for so long?”  Moreover, we become blind to the need to change, because we view new experiences through the prism of our past experiences.

How to avoid this?  The authors suggest the following:

1.  Accept that change happens, and that it’s unavoidable.

2.  Anticipate potential changes, by keeping your eyes open and avoiding becoming blinded by your own success.

3.  Monitor change, by carefully attending to signs that your way of doing things is becoming outdated.

4.  Adapt to change quickly, and take control of your reaction to change.

5.  Change when needed, and don’t let your attachment to your old ways inhibit your ability to change.

6.  Enjoy the experience of changing.

7.  Repeat the process.

That’s it.  Those are the lessons.  If you can read through those seven bullet points, I just saved you from having to read the book.

Takeaway

Even though I don’t like the book, the lessons are valuable for real estate agents who confront massive technological change in their business every year.  Essentially, the book tells us that we have to adapt to changes in our business, and that we can’t be tied to the old ways of doing things. I’m not sure that’s a lesson that people haven’t learned, but maybe it’s worth repeating.

The fundamental lesson of Whale Done is the insight that we can get better results from the people we manage if we “accentuate the positive” by drawing our colleagues’ attention to the things they do well.  The authors point out that the more attention we draw to a behavior, the more likely it is that the behavior will be repeated – thus, if we are constantly playing “gotcha” with employees who make mistakes, we’re actually heightening their attention to the wrong results.  Instead, the authors suggest that we constantly encourage employees when they do something right, as a means of giving them motivation to do it right again in the future.

Indeed, the authors break down potential responses to an employee behavior in four ways, based on whether the employee has done something wrong or right.

If the employee does something RIGHT, there are two potential responses:

1.  No response

This is what we generally do when employees do something right – nothing.  We ignore it, since, after all, people are supposed to do things rights.

2.  Positive response

This is what we SHOULD do when employees do something right – give them positive reinforcement, thus giving them an incentive to do it right again in the future.

This is what Blanchard calls the “WHALE DONE” response:

• first, praise people immediately
• second, be specific about what they did right
• third, share your positive feelings about what they did
• fourth, encourage them to keep up the good work

The ultimate goal of the positive response is to help people become self-motivating, where they associate good feelings with doing their jobs correctly.

Conversely, if the employee does something WRONG, there are two potential responses:

1.  Negative response

This is what we generally do when employees do something wrong – give them negative feedback in the hope that they’ll avoid the mistakes in the future.  The authors believe that this is counter-productive, because it unnecessarily draws the employee’s attention to the mistake.  This is what the authors call the “GOTCHA” response, and is unhelpful.

2.  Redirection

This is the strategy that the authors encourage when an employee makes an error – re-direct the agent’s attention  either back to what they were supposed to do, or to an alternative task.  The idea is that you want to focus attention on the task yet to be performed correctly, rather than harping on the mistakes already made.  Ultimately, it’s more effective than a negative response, which undermines confidence.

Redirection is accomplished as follows:

• first, describe the error as soon as possible, clearly and without blame
• second, show it’s negative impact
• third, if appropriate, take the blame for not making the task clear
• fourth, go over the task in detail, making sure it’s understood
• fifth, re-express you confidence and trust in the person

The intention of Redirection is to set up a positive response in the future, such that employees learn, like the whales, to repeat the good behaviors.

Takeaway

For the most part, I’ve always loved Blanchard’s lessons, even while I find his parables a little difficult to read.  Although it has more application for real estate managers than agents, the foundational idea that we can all do a better job of promoting good behaviors by praising good decisions rather than harping on errors is a good lesson to learn.  Anyone who has trained a dog, for example, has heard the same lesson from modern pet training techniques: praise the good behavior, ignore the bad behavior.  A reinforcement of that lesson is worth hearing, although I generally don’t think that Whale Done is so persuasive on the topic.  Not a must-read, but not a bad book.

The book’s been a huge success, probably because of its provocative title and message.  Certainly, it’s success doesn’t come from the nuts and bolts financial advice that Kiyosaki gives, since Kiyosaki does a better job of explaining his philosophy than illustrating how to put those philosophies to work for you.  For example, the thrust of his book is that you want to work for yourself, building assets that throw off positive cashflow to the point that your “passive income” covers your expenses.  That is, say, if you own an apartment building that throws off $100,000 of cash every year, and your personal expenses are under $100,000, then your passive income (assuming you don’t work full time maintaining the building) pays your expenses, giving you the ideal of financial freedom.  That’s essentially the point.  Sadly, how you get to the point in your life when you can buy an apartment building throwing off $100,000 of cash each year goes unexplained.

Lack of specifics notwithstanding, and putting aside some of the controversy surrounding whether Kiyosaki is basically a charlatan who made up his “rich dad” and made his money in multi-level marketing scams, the book provides some fundamental advice that’s at least worth repeating:

• Pay yourself first.  This is a concept that comes from any number of financial planning books (all the way back to the Richest Man in Babylon), but it’s a worthwhile reiteration: always put a portion of your income into savings before you pay your bills, to give you the discipline to save.  If you pay yourself first, and don’t have enough money to pay your bills, you’ll either cut your expenses or you’ll find some way to scrape together more money.  Never shortchange your long-term future, which relies upon regular savings.
• Separate your assets from your liabilities.  One of the more provocative, unconventional concepts of the book is that your personal residence is not an asset, it’s a liability.  Kiyosaki takes a narrow view of an asset, saying that an asset is something that puts money in your pocket, rather than taking money out.  A personal residence, according to Kiyosaki, is a liability, since it costs you money every month.  That’s an interesting concept, challenging the conventional wisdom that “your house is your greatest investment.”  Obviously, the point of the conventional wisdom is that you have to live somewhere, so you’re better off living someplace where your monthly payments build equity for you rather than your landlord (indeed, Kiyosaki’s fundamental tool for building wealth is to buy investment property).  But Kiyosaki makes a very good point that too many people sink too much of their money into their primary residence, when it might be better invested.
• Invest instead of save. Kiyosaki takes a somewhat unconventional view of savings versus investment.  Essentially, the point would be that if you have, say, $10,000, you can do one of three things with it: (1) spend it on “doodads” like flat screen televisions that will depreciate in value, which is a waste of money in his eyes, (2) save it someplace where you can get a conventional rate of return, which is a waste of an opportunity, or (3) invest it in a business.  His orientation is to invest in business opportunities (or real estate) that will throw off positive cashflow to get you to the ideal of your passive income overcoming your expenses.  So if you want a $40,000 car, he would counsel to take the $10,000 you have to spend and invest it in a business that will throw off enough cash to cover your monthly payments on the car.  Thus, you’ll still have the $10,000, but you’ll also have the car.  That might seem oversimplified, but so is the book.

The bottom line on Rich Dad is that it understates the element of risk in investing, making it seem as if putting money into small businesses or investment real estate is a no-brainer way to make double-digit returns.  Most people following his advice without proper training will probably go broke, with just enough people muddling through toward success for him to use as “success stories” in follow ups or on his website.  I liked some of the philosophies in Rich Dad, and the premise is brilliant, but at its core the book is empty of practical advice.

Takeaway

Rich Dad Poor Dad is a great book.  Not “great” in that it’s a good read, because it’s not.  And not “great” in that the author actually provides any help in showing you how to become successful, wealthy, happy, or whatever.  But “great” in the sense that it evokes a simple aspirational message that we should all be focusing on our financial futures by creating investments and businesses that will generate sufficient income to cover our expenses.  This is most easily done, of course, with real estate, which is why real estate is always going to be such an attractive investment vehicle for everyday people.   The larger message should resonate with every real estate agent: if you want to build wealth, invest and build your business.

I can’t really recommend Rich Dad Poor Dad because I know too much about how Kiyosaki has tried to take the simple concept from the book and turn it into one of those financial coaching businesses that’s more exploitative than enriching.  And there’s certainly a lot of smoke about whether he has made up most of the story.  All that said, though, there’s a powerful and simple message in the book, which makes it a reasonable read if you’re willing to go elsewhere (and to more reliable sources) for your specifics.

How do you accomplish this? Well, Bach makes it seem easy, but essentially you need to adopt frugality as your core value: save instead of spend, and do without.  It’s not exciting, but it’s obviously effective so long as you don’t read the book after already running up $25,000 in credit card debt.  The key points of the book are as follows:

• It doesn’t take a lot of money to be rich, just a little money saved every week for a looooong period of time.
• Pay yourself first, the familiar advice that you need the discipline (Bach downplays the difficulty of this) to take a portion of your income and direct it to savings.  The automatic aspect of this is Bach’s focus, the idea that it is easier to do this if you set up automatic diversions of a portion of your bi-weekly paycheck to your savings or investment accounts.  He argues that you’ll get used to the diversion, and learn to live within the means of what you have left.
• Own your own house, and pay down the mortgage as quickly as possible to free up more money to eventually save (he advocates paying your mortgage every two weeks rather than once a month, to get an extra payment in every year).
• Incorporate the “Latte Factor” (a registered trademark, no less!) into your life, the idea that going without a $4 coffee every day can ultimately be a huge financial savings (i.e., $4 a day, times 365 days a year, is $1500 a year saved, over 30 years with compound interest is something like a gazillion dollars…).

The key insight, and main focus, of the book is the need for an automatic system of taking money out of your paycheck into your investment or savings account before you can touch it.  Bach argues that you don’t need discipline to save if the money is taken out of your paycheck automatically.  He further persuasively argued that time spent on budgeting is a waste, because most people can’t stick to it.  Rather than budget, set up a system so you never get your sweaty, greedy hands on your own money, but instead have it diverted to savings or investment to build your retirement accounts.  As Bach says, “Automation plus compound interest equals serious wealth.”

Another helpful part of the book is the explanation of the “rainy day fund,” the amount of money you put away to cover monthly expenses in the event that your family has no income coming in for an extended period.  Bach advocates figuring the amount you’re comfortable with on your own, by figuring out how much you need every month to maintain your lifestyle, and then figuring out how much you need in a money market reserve account to cover at least three, and preferably as much as twelve, months of expenses.

Bach’s book is a very good articulation of the “frugality” approach to financial planning, wrapped around the appealing notion of automaticity.  It’s also a good introduction to the various retirement savings vehicles that are available (IRAs, etc.), and the extent to which a reader is a novice to financial planning the book helpfully demystifies a lot of the concepts and provides phone numbers and links to other resources.

Takeaway

Real estate agents are not generally good budgeters or financial planners, and this is a great book for providing a foundation of sound financial planning.  The basic idea: don’t set a budget, but keep some of your money from getting to you so that you don’t spend it.  The other basic idea: buy a house, live it in for a long time, and pay it off.  That’s a pretty good message for us, and our clients.

The authors distill the findings of the book in the introduction, identifying seven common denominators among people who successfully build wealth:

• They live well below their means.  The authors advocate frugality as the cornerstone of building wealth, pointing out that most millionaires don’t spend on depreciating assets like clothes, cars, watches, and that in fact most of them live in homes that are less expensive than they can afford.  The authors present a rule of thumb that if you are not yet wealthy you should purchase a home that requires a mortgage note that is less than twice your total annual realized income (that is, if you make $100,000 a year, you should never take out more than a $200,000 loan to buy a house).
• They allocate their time, energy, and money efficiently, in ways conducive to building wealth. The authors note a strong correlation between investment planning and wealth accumulation: people that plan their financial future are going to do a better job of accumulating wealth, particularly if they start early.
• They believe that financial independence is more important than displaying high social status.  They don’t spend money to show off, and indeed might seem to make far less than they actually do.
• Their parents did not support them financially in their adulthood, so they became self-reliant.  People who get gifts from their parents tend to spend them, rather than save them, and get locked into a spiral of consumption.
• Their adult children are economically self-sufficient.  The section on raising financially independent children is a great primer for wealthy parents, with the following guidelines: never tell children that their parents are wealthy, always teach children discipline and frugality, minimize discussions about inheritance, never give cash or other gifts as part of a negotiation/coercion, etc.
• They are proficient in targeting market opportunities.  In this section, the authors discuss industries and occupations that are likely to be profitable in the next century.
• They chose the right occupation.  The authors note that a disproportionate number of millionaires are small business owners, although they counsel that this fact can be deceiving: in fact, most small businesses fail, and few small business owners become wealthy. That is, a disproportionate number of millionaires are small business owners, but that doesn’t mean that owning a small business is a guarantee of wealth-building.  (Part of the reason, the authors point out, is that small business owners start accumulating wealth at an earlier age than graduate school professionals.)  The authors also point out the value of going into a “dull” industry that elicits little strong competition.

The author’s also present an interesting insight about how you calculate your net worth, and how much of your net worth you pay each year in taxes.  The key point: once you’re in a high-income bracket, it matters less how much more you make than what you do with what you already have; try to limit your realized income, and allow your wealth to grow without incurring taxes.

Takeaway

This book is not a terribly easy read, but it is a terrific eye-opener for most people in a consumpionist culture.  The book presents the irresistible premise that you can incorporate its principles into your life, and act more like a real millionaire than a perceived one.

The lessons imparted in Fish are very simple and provocatively empowering.  The authors assert that employees in the workplace have the power to change their own attitudes about their work, creating a positive environment that will not only be more productive but happier in their lives.

Clearly, these are not novel ideas, but what gives them power is that Fish! uses as an example of this management technique the Pike Place fish market in Seattle, which is known for its lively fishmongers tossing fish to and fro.  The idea is that if these workers, who have very difficult jobs that are not particularly lucrative, can maintain an amazingly motivated attitude about their work, then so can anyone.

The four elements of the Fish! philosophy break down as follows:

1.  Choose your attitude

This is probably the simplest and yet most powerful of the ideas generated in the book.  As the authors state: “there is always a choice about the way you do your work, even if there is not a choice about the work itself.”  Workers choose the attitudes they bring to work: they’re either going to be miserable, or they’re going to be motivated.  If they choose to be motivated, and get in the habit of making that choice, they will be happier and more productive.  If you have to be at work, why not be great at it rather than ordinary?

2.  Play

The second, and more celebrated, element of the Fish! philosophy is to incorporate “play” into the workplace.  The idea is that you can be serious about your business and still have fun with the way you conduct business.  It shows that you’re not taking yourself so seriously, and that you understand the importance of good humor even in stressful situations.  The benefits of play are as follows: happy people treat each other well, fun leads to creativity, the time passes quickly, having a good time is healthy, and work becomes a reward and not just a way to rewards.

3.  Make their day

This is the core service concept of the Fish! philosophy: approach customer service with the goal that you’re going to make someone’s day.  Go out of your way to give someone a memorable experience working with you.

4.  Be present

The Fish! philosophy also incorporates an element of Zen-like attention to being present in the moment.  The authors point out that people in service professions tend to “zone out” in their work.  Because they’re so unhappy, just clock-watching and waiting for their shift to end, they don’t really pay attention to their clients or customers.  They’re not fully engaged in their work.  In the Fish! philosophy, you need to concentrate on being present in the moment, and being focused on the needs of your client.

Takeaways

This is a great book, and one that every successful real estate agent should read.  The simplest advice I’ve ever heard about maintaining a positive approach to business is this: “choose your attitude.” That’s it.  You have control over the attitude you bring to work every day.  If you choose to be positive, you’ll find that it becomes easier every day to become the kind of professional, and person, that you want to be.

Really, all four lessons from Fish! are worth remembering, including everything that Lundin has to say about great customer service.  This is a must read.

Gerber’s “e-myth” is about small businesses: the myth that people who start small businesses do so for an entrepreneurial impulse, whereas he proposes that most people start small businesses because they love what they do and want to do it for themselves. The problem, according to Gerber, is that people who love, say, baking, make great bakers but poor businesspeople. To be successful in business, you have to love running a business, not baking pies. I did like this point, which I’ve paraphrased: The purpose of going into business is not to do a job, but to free yourself up to create jobs for other people — if you’re the main person working in your small business, then you don’t have a business, you have a job, and your boss is a lunatic. I thought that was well stated.

Gerber’s main passion, though, is about establishing a “prototype” for a business, such as a franchise model, which organizes and establishes the systems under which the business will run. The point is that a franchise prototype or model sets up the systems that if operated correctly will help a business succeed, avoiding the “reinventing the wheel” phenomenon inherent in running small businesses.
The core argument is that businesses succeed when we set up thorough, tested systems to run them according to a blueprint designed for efficiency, automaticity, and order. Gerber makes a great point that you want to build a system-oriented business, not a people-oriented business, so that your system leverages the abilities of the people you have rather than requires you to hire more extraordinary people. It’s easier, cheaper, and more efficient to build one model and hire 100 ordinary people than build a bad model and hire 100 extraordinary ones. He also points out that a good business has to have a documented operations manual that sets out the blueprint.

Gerber also sets out fundamental advice for business:

• Innovate by testing new strategies for increasing efficiency or sales.
• Quantify everything. Track all your numbers, so you know what works and what doesn’t work.
• Orchestrate a system which eliminates choice – i.e., it eliminates opportunities for decisions to be made that are inconsistent with the master blueprint.

This was the best part of the book, and the salient theme of the book: work on your business, not in your business, and set up a prototype (operations manual) that automatically runs your business to avoid becoming too reliant on yourself or personalities.

Takeaway

One of my main passions is customer service systems, the idea that a customer experience can be consistently maintained by creating systems that automate client service. I read this book years ago, and went back to re-read it for this review, and was surprised at how much Gerber’s argument about a “prototype” had seeped into my subconscious as I built my own personal philosophy about building a great business. I can’t necessarily recommend the whole book, but the Part II section on creating that prototype is a brilliant articulation of how to build a sustainable enterprise.

Most of the books are about management and motivation, which is always on point for real estate professionals. A few are about financial management, which is something I was interested in learning about a few years ago and which might be useful to more than a few agents I know….

Hope you enjoy them. We’ll be publishing one a day for about a week or so.

This is just an astounding, tragic statistic, one that most people in the industry just blithely accept in a commissioned sales environment.  Yes, it includes a lot of part-time agents, or agents who are new to the business, but that’s not really the reason that most agents make what is essentially a minimum wage.

So what’s the real reason?  If I ask a group of agents why, they’ll say that most agents don’t do enough lead generation.  Some will say, of course, that their brokers don’t do enough lead generation, like Shelley Levene in Glengarry Glen Ross complaining that he never gets “the good leads.”  But no matter how you slice it, it always comes back to sales opportunities: agents would sell more houses if they had better leads.

That’s just nonsense. The problem with our industry isn’t the leads — we have plenty of leads. NAR says that 5 million homes are going to be sold this year.  (Of course, NAR also has about a million members, so do the math).

Here’s the reason: most agents aren’t very good at their jobs.  It’s as simple as that. If you’re a doctor, and you don’t have any clients, it’s not a matter of not having enough sick people. If you’re a lawyer, sitting around all day waiting for phone to ring, it’s not because people stopped having legal problems. It means you’re not very good at your job.

That’s the sad truth, but it’s not the agent’s fault.  It’s the industry’s, which has never focused training on core competencies, instead allowing licensing classes to devolve into long discourses on “fee simple absolutes,” coaching courses to be dominated by prospecting methology, and ongoing education to be dedicated to ethics, compliance, and the hot topic of the month (the eight hundred or so short sale certifications that are now out there).

And the problem certainly is not that we don’t do enough as an industry to teach agents how to generate leads — indeed, virtually the entire sales training apparatus in the industry is about lead generation, whether it be through prospecting or sphere development or marketing online or whatever.

No, the problem is competency. Agents who are good at their jobs sell a lot of houses, just like doctors who are good at their jobs develop thriving practices. Show me a group of top performing agents, and I’ll show you a group of people I’d probably be willing to list my home with.  They’re probably agents who have basic sales skills, of course, but I bet that they also know how to take care of clients, how to do their jobs.

Think about how ludicrous it is that the industry spends so little time teaching competency, instead focusing on prospecting or ethics compliance.  The industry spends all its time teaching agents how to prospect on the sales coaching side, then spends the rest of its time on the NAR side scaring everyone about ethics and compliance.  No one teaches basic competency: learning skills that actually matter in the field, and learning how to deliver an amazing client experience.

One reason, of course, is that NAR itself is an organization largely staffed by people that don’t sell a lot of houses — all those nattering busybodies filling our local boards who themselves sell three houses a year and therefore have the time to devote to going to a lot of meetings to debate policies over coffee.  Look at a local NAR board, and add up all the transactions closed in 2010 by all the members put together, and I’ll bet in most cases there are 50 agents in the local region who sell more homes than the entire group. Go ahead, prove me wrong, send me your local board members and their 2010 production. There might be exceptions, but I’m betting that I’m right about the rule.

Listen, my point is not to denigrate our profession. I love real estate agents, even the ones that for some unholy reason don’t work with my company.  But we all know that this profession has to become better at servicing the needs of clients, and it starts with each individual real estate agent.  It should be shocking — and bracing — to hear that most real estate agents don’t make as much as the receptionists.  The question is what do you do next?  Do you keep doing the same old things that don’t work for you, or do you start building new skills, following new systems, and taking a new approach to your business.

What do we do about it? If you’re an agent, take a client-oriented approach to your business.  Stop working on lead generation, unless your lead generation activities are actually providing a service to your clients. Work on your own client service skills.  Learn how to do a better job for your clients.  If you build up those skills, the deals will come.

How do you get there?

If you need to do something RIGHT NOW to get you started in the right direction, take these three simple steps:

1. Take a look at each of your listings, and make sure that all the details are correct, the descriptions are correct, and the pictures are high quality and in high-resolution.  If not, you have work to do.
2. Call every one of your buyers, whether they are active or not, and touch base with them.  Find out if they need you.
3. Do a new CMA for every one of your sellers, unless the listing is less than a month old, and send it to them.  Set a date to meet with them to review the results of your marketing plan, review the pricing environment, and decide whether you need new pictures and a new description.

And if you want to start building your knowledge and skills, keep tuned to this blog.  We’ll be publishing a lot of information and advice about how to build your skill base and take a client-oriented approach to your business.  If you want to catch up, read up on some of the back posts, which will tell you where I’m coming from.

The fact that you want to become better is the most important thing to keep in mind right now. If you want to succeed at this business, and are willing to do the things that will help you succeed, you will.

But what I’ve been doing recently is looking at real estate. Not just because I’m a broker, but because, like a lot of people, I just like looking at real estate.  When I started using the iPad2 for home search, I used the Zillow app because it was the only one available, then tried out to Trulia when that came out, and immediately test drove Realtor.com’s app when I saw Brian Boero’s post that it had finally been released.

Having used an iPad2 to look for a home, using all the major iPad apps, I can tell you that tablets are the future of real estate search. It’s really a new search paradigm, built from the Godlike perspective of looking down on an area and seeing what’s available on a big map, rather than setting up a set of criteria and reviewing a list of responsive properties.  Right now, most people start a home search online by building up — identifying what they want (location, price, bedrooms, bathrooms), generating a list, and then reviewing the list.  On a tablet, you don’t build up, you narrow down — you start by looking at a map and seeing every property for sale on that map screen, then you winnow it down by putting in restrictive criteria.  The tablet flip the search experience from a building to a narrowing process, and that is bound to change the kinds of homes that buyers end up becoming interested in.

Moreover, tablets provide a gamechanging experience for most consumers through GPS search, something that most consumers never had on their laptop.  My wife and I drove through the New Jersey shore with an iPad2 in her lap, using Realtor.com’s app to constantly refresh homes for sale that met our basic price and size criteria.  We did drive bys of about 25 properties, something that would have been impossible to set up using more traditional real estate sites.

Finally, the iPad experience is much more immersive than a laptop or computer.  It’s just seductive, almost addictive, to poke, prod, and swipe the screen looking at properties on the big map.

Having spent so much time playing on them, I thought I’d put together a review of the Realtor.com, Trulia, and Zillow apps (the only other major company with a search app is Coldwell Banker, but as of now it only has CB listings on it, which is pretty limited to most buyers who don’t say to themselves, “I really just want a Coldwell Banker listing”).

I broke down the reviews like so:

• Overall Impressions
• Main Display
• Property Details
• Search Experience
• Other stuff I liked and didn’t like.

To test the apps, I not only had my experience searching for shore properties, but also looked at properties in my market area. I didn’t find a major difference in the inventory, although I didn’t really look that hard at the issue.

Overall

Overall, I will say that I liked all the apps.  They all provide truly immersive experiences, to the point that just looking at random real estate is one of my favorite things to do on the iPad.  The extent to which I’ve elaborated on differences is a little bit of hair splitting, because any one of them would be great for most home buyers looking for a home.

In my experience, though, I found myself liking and using Realtor.com the most. Realtor.com has the ugliest main display, and I don’t understand why they are still using those thumb-tacks on the map to display properties when a house icon indicating price is so much more effective. But the drawing tool in the search function is a game-changer, and so far only Realtor.com has it.  I thought Trulia provided a terrific experience, but the lack of saving features kept it from being a contended. And I was a little disappointed in Zillow, which had the best overall display but was too heavily about Zillowish stuff (i.e. Zestimates and agent advertising) and not enough about what the client actually wants in a search app.

Main Display

All three sites follow the same basic format, with the main display a map that shows properties for sale and a list along one side of the screen with more details about the the listings. All three allow you to view the map either as a street view (like a map) or a satellite-hybrid view (a Google Earth photo view with streets superimposed on it).

I thought that Zillow’s layout was terrific, very clean and easy to follow, with more space given over to the listing details rather than the map. That allowed for larger pictures and important information like property address to be included in the list of properties.

Trulia’s display was laid out the same way, but less space was given for the actual property details, including not providing the property address in the list unless you click on the property. That’s a pretty serious omission. The pictures were also significantly smaller, making the list view less helpful.

Realtor.com’s list view provided address information along with other pertinent sales information, but its pictures were even smaller than Trulia. I also didn’t like that Realtor.com’s default view of the map showed the listings as virtual “thumbtacks” without displaying prices. The other sites show the listings as tiny houses showing the price of the home, which is much more helpful. (You can see the tiny houses with prices on Realtor.com in the “scout” view, but I don’t know why that’s necessary). I did, though, like that Realtor.com allowed for a “gallery” view if you want to see the properties laid out for you rather than see them displayed on the map.

The Winner: Zillow

This was a close call.  All the displays are inviting and intuitive, but I thought Zillow found the best balance between space given over to the map and detailed information on the property displays.

Property Details

Although the main display of the apps are similar, the way they display actual property details is very different. In Trulia and Realtor.com, clicking on an individual property takes you to a new “property display” that shows the pictures of the property and all the details in a tabbed format. But Zillow works entirely through the list view along the right hand side of the screen, so if you click on a particular property the list view disappears, replaced by the property view. You then scroll through the details from top to bottom.

The Winner: Realtor.com

Realtor.com has the best property display, hands-down. When you click on a property, you default to an “overview” that has the property description, listing date, and the broker information along with a reasonably-sized picture. Realtor.com also gives you a large section (probably too large, frankly) to take notes, give a rating, or send the listing and a separate details tab to look at a bunch of jumbled details about the property (I wish it were organized better, and highlight the more important areas of taxes better). Most importantly, Realtor.com allows you to save the listing, which is crucial during a home search and is something that Trulia does not have yet (but promises at some point).

Trulia has the prettiest display, making the pictures more prominent than Realtor.com, and it has a great section on Tax and Price History that Realtor.com should add. But it is missing some really important property details that are included in Realtor.com. Most importantly, the inability to save a listing makes the app a nice way to surf around, but unusable for a prolonged property search. They indicate they’re working on that.

I really did not like Zillow’s property display. They limit you to looking at the property in the narrow bar that normally contains the property list view. That’s okay, since you can scroll down to get details rather than touch on different tabs. And you can save favorites, which is so important. But some property details were missing, and the setup was a little awkward when looking at individual properties. You use the same motion to swipe through photos as swipe through properties, and the display is narrow, so people like me with fat fingers are likely to accidentally swipe out a property when they’re just trying to swipe through pictures. Also, Zillow’s silly Zestimate functions are too prominent. Zillow’s “zestimates,” particularly the “Rent Zestimate,” might as well be a random number generator for all of their accuracy.  They’re a waste of valuable real estate (ummm, forgive the pun) on the app.

Search Experience

All three apps need some work refining the search experience, at least in my opinion. They all want you to search on the map, to the detriment of traditional searches based on parameters like town location that are often important to buyers. For example, a buyer wanting to stay in the town of New City (which is where our main headquarters is) in order to get the local school district will have difficulty limiting her search to just New City using all the apps, since the apps want you to use the map to define your search area.

My feeling is that map searching is an amazing thing, and one of the reasons to use these apps, but many buyers still define their searches primarily on town lines. I would suggest they make the location search easier and more prominent to accommodate those users.

The Winner: Realtor.com

Realtor.com wins for its overall more nuanced search capability, including being the one app that allows for restricting searches by area designations. Realtor.com not only has more detail based searching (such as restricting searches to homes with pools), but it was the only app that you could use to search for a particular town, and which would only show you homes in that town even if you moved off the map.

But it not only has the best area-based search, it also has the best map-based searching, simply because it has its “drawing” function that allows you to literally trace a circle on a map and search only for properties within that circle. I love that function. Although I think you need area-based searching, I think that if you’re going to have map based search, the best way to do that is to actually define your area by hand when looking at a map.  I think that it’s enormously helpful to buyers who are really just looking in a neighborhood.

For example, I was doing a search for near-beach properties at the New Jersey shore, and was able to use the drawing function to only show me properties that were near the beach, as opposed to using a town-based search that would show me everything in the town. This is the perfect application of map-based searching, and it seems to be a Realtor.com app exclusive.

My problems with Realtor.com? I found some oddities in the location-based searching, including properties from out of the area. It’s also unclear to me why Realtor.com won’t show you all the properties responsive to the search, instead giving you a prompt to “Show More Listings” without any indication of how many listings you’re not seeing.

Trulia

Trulia’s search function was great if you want to start with a map-based search. As you move on the map, the search refines itself to show you responsive properties to your search terms (price, size, etc.) within the map space. My problem is that if people want to limit a search to a town, they can’t move around on the map without refining the search to the map space. So I started a search in New City, got only New City properties, then moved south on the map only to find that the search terms automatically refined to include the map area, which included areas outside of New City.

Also, Trulia doesn’t allow you to save properties that you find in the search, or to save your searches. That’s a deal-breaker. You can’t do a rigorous home search without the ability to save properties or save your searches. Hopefully, they’ll fix that soon, because the map interface is great.

Zillow

Zillow search function is the weakest of all the apps, because it is entirely map based. You can’t search for particular towns, you can only set the map for an area and then “filter” the search for your basic parameters (price, type, size, etc.). This can be a little limiting. If you want to search for homes in Town A, you can put “Town A” in the search bar above the map and the map will go to Town A. But if the map also happens to include part of Town B, Town B listings will also show up on your search. That’s not as useful to most buyers, who often need to limit their searches to particular towns (to stay in a school district, for example).

The search (really, the “filter”) function is also littered with typical Zillow nonsense like viewing “Zestimate Homes” or “Make Me Move” homes. I’m surprised they ported those over to the app, since they’re deemphasizing them on the site.

Miscellaneous

Here are some other things I liked and didn’t like about the apps:

Realtor.com

• I liked the prominent placement of the listing agent on the property detail page.  I just feel like these apps should reward the listing agents that provide them with the inventory that drives their sites. From the service perspective, it also makes sense to direct interested buyers to the person who knows the home best, rather than to someone whose primary qualification is the willingness to purchase advertising space.
• I liked the ability to take notes on the listing, or assign ratings. Very prominent.  Maybe a little too prominent, because it takes up a lot of space on the property details display. But a serious buyer will like that feature, particularly to share notes with a co-purchaser (i.e., like a spouse sharing the account).
• I liked the ability to go to a “gallery view” of properties, which the other apps did not have.
• I liked the ease of saving and going back to saved searches.
• I liked sharing shortcuts available on the settings section, which allowed me to set up my wife as my sharing “friend,” so I didn’t have to put her email address in every time I wanted to send her a property.
• I didn’t like the necessity to go to “scout” view to see the home prices listed with the icons on the map, and didn’t understand what scout view even was.
• I really didn’t like that the app would not show you all the properties on the map, but simply indicate that “more listings were available.”  That’s not helpful.  Put them all on the map, even if it creates a big mess, and I’ll zoom in to clear it up.

Trulia

• I liked Trulia’s contact page, which provides a simple contact form that goes to the listing agent (at least on the properties I checked).
• I liked Trulia’s property display, putting the pictures in a more prominent place and displaying them in a larger size. The other apps give you smaller pictures, but allow you to click on them to go into a slideshow mode.  Trulia starts in the slideshow mode.
• I liked the tax and price history, although the data was often incomplete or wrong.  but when it was there, it was very insightful.
• I liked the idea of Trulia’s research-y sections, involving cool shaded overlays on the maps to show you different average price ranges, and the ability to see neighborhood lines, restaurants and other amenities, and school locations.  Most of that stuff didn’t work for the areas in which I searched, but I figure they’ll build it out.
• I didn’t like Trulia’s separation of core “property facts” from the agent-written “property description,” or the need to toggle tabs from one to the other.  They really should be combined in some way.

Zillow

• I liked the prominent placement of “last sale” and tax info, which was tougher to find on the other apps.
• I liked Zillow’s provision of comparable sales, which if available I could not find on the other apps.
• I liked that Zillow allowed me to search by sold properties, which I could not find in the other apps.
• I didn’t like Zillow putting “Zestimates” above the property description in the scroll list of information about the property was a ludicrous, self-serving choice. In particular, including a rental “Zestimate” on most properties is a waste of space, and probably should be an option for people who self-describe as investors.
• I really didn’t like Zillow’s business model of putting competing broker advertising on a listing, directing consumers to approach buyer agents simply because those agents are paying for advertising on Zillow. Typically, Zillow suggested three “buyer agents” with contact information and a picture, then buried the actual listing agent’s name and contact information at the bottom without a picture. It’s simply wrong to take listing data from participating brokers, stock your website with that data for free, and then sell advertising space on that broker’s listing. It’s why many brokers will probably pull their listing data from Zillow, which will make Zillow a much less useful search tool in the future, although probably too late to impact their public offering.

Conclusion:

I should disclose that I have absolutely no idea what, if any, relationship my real estate company has with any of these organizations, although I am pretty sure that we give at least some of them a good deal of money to enhance our listings. I have no connection with anyone at the sites or the apps, and didn’t tell anyone I was writing this to get their insight into the app. I just used them the way consumers would use them.  So if you think I’m completely wrong, I came to my misjudgments honestly.

Also, if I have gotten something wrong factually, or if the apps are updated such that I can amend some of this, I hope someone will let me know. I’m happy to discuss this in comments.

UPDATE: this post has been modified slightly from the original.