Trying to figure out whether social media is capable of doing any good to agents’ bottom lines has been a perennial topic of interest for the past several years — maybe because even now, eight years after Facebook’s launch and six years after Twitter’s, the jury is still out. Some agents have successfully made connections and drawn leads from their social sphere, while others find the services more of a time suck than a productivity boost.
But of all the new sites and services that have come along trying to tap into “social” perhaps none has had a faster rise and attracted more interest that Pinterest. Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest have all built tools to easily incorporate photos into posts, but unlike the first two services — in which images mostly come second to text and mostly consist of the poster’s own snapshots — Pinterest was intended from the beginning to allow users to gather material from across the web, long a common practice for all kinds of designers looking for inspiration. By centering their site around third-party, often brand-centric content, Pinterest has invited plenty of criticism from angry copyright holders, but also seemed to open a direct portal to consumer’s purchasing habits in a way friend- and news-centric sites find hard to match, or mimic.
And what kind of material can be more inspiring for budding interior designers than, well, other people’s interiors? At least that’s the bet two big names in the web real estate space seem to be making, with online brokerage Redfin and listings portal Zillow both launching Pinterest-cloning products this week to help users collect gawp-worthy interiors from among their stock of listing photos.
People’s desire to drool over amazing properties is the fuel for any number of real estate sites (including, occasionally, our own) but both Zillow and Redfin seem to be hoping to turn window shopping impulses into a more concrete call to action. Zillow’s Digs (which comes in both website and iPad app forms) links photos with the names of their designers, contractors and architects who helped create the space, as well a providing one of its trademarked estimates to help consumer figure out what it would cost them to replicate the look. Redfin’s “Collections,” in contrast, allows tastemakers ranging from modernist architects to the founder of “I Can Haz Cheezeburger” to curate a selection of photos to illustrate a beloved design theme. (Including one blogger’s collection of Sunny Roof Decks In Boston)
Zillow and Redfin may be on more solid ground than Pinterest was when it comes to the photos they’re using. But it remains to be seen whether potential home shoppers will want a single-serving app to organize their home décor ideas instead of porting all the food-for-thought imagery to existing Pinterest boards.
But both sites’ ability to come up with separate apps to tap into this aspect of the home search process should be a different kind of food for thought for Realtor and brokers — if the new products work, both sites may be able to win consumer’s loyalty well before they even begin their next home search. In an era when most brokerages are already having trouble standing out in organic web search, that ought to be a worry.
