Friday Flash: Ebby goes Google, SEO mania, and tomorrow's door hanger

It’s been a quiet pre-holiday week in the world of real estate, but here are a few quick hits for you:

Ebby Halliday, the iconic Dallas brokerage, adopted Google Apps. We’ve seen a number of brokers make this move and it always seems to bring with it a powerful epiphany: the words “Someone call <IT guy name> and tell him to reboot the server” will cease to echo through company offices.

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Real estate companies have spent gazillions on SEO over the past few years. It’s understandable given Google’s power to make or break a site’s visibility. But content, the stuff that actually fills a website and makes it useful, has often been swept under the rug. I’m not talking about listings – everyone has those – but the basic decision support stuff consumers need to navigate a transaction. SEO mania has prevailed.

Check out this video from Google’s Matt Cutts with this in mind:

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Check out this list of stats from AdAge. How we sell real estate – and who we sell it to – is going to change in dramatic ways very soon. The cross-cultural, cross-platform Realtor will win the day.

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Flipboard, the company that brought magical magazine-style reading to the iPad, released an iPhone app this week. A million people have downloaded it in just a few days. If you haven’t done it yet, you should. Real estate search and discovery will look and feel this way soon. Count on it.

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PlaceIQ, a location data company, raised a bunch of money this week. I note this because what this company is doing is pretty mind blowing. They’ve divided major metros into 100 meter blocks, for which they absorb mounds of data and media to formulate a likely profile of the person or people in those places. Then they layer in real-time (and anonomous) user data gleaned from mobile devices.

The result: Your ad for an upscale condo development, real estate brokerage services, or mortgage products will get to the right type of person in the right type of place, at exactly the right time.

That’s one fancy door hanger.

Have a great weekend!