White Paper Revisioning For Sale By Owner (FSBO) Online Real Estate Marketing In the past decade, internet technology and big media have dominated the FSBO real estate marketing space. This has caused a diminished regard for FSBO sellers and for consumer privacy and safety. That should change. Here is how. By: David Sinclair Co Founder & CEO 1
Revisioning FSBO Online Real Estate Marketing Home sellers who wish to sell their homes without using a real estate agent can now advertise their homes on national real estate marketing portals. Zillow and forsalebyowner.com are two of many national real estate marketing websites that exist to make FSBO advertising easy. Approximately 8% of homes marketed each year are marketed via the FSBO model with a majority of these sellers using these national portals. This paper will examine two specific unintended consequences of this trend. It will also propose that these consequences arise because the portals business model is not altogether aligned with the interests of FSBO sellers. Finally, this paper points to the solution regarding best practices in the internet age. The interest of a FSBO seller is to find a buyer and complete the sales transaction. The competing business interest of media portals is to use listings as media. On big national portals, listings as media are presented as slick web based magazine pages on which portals sell advertisements. Both consumers and the merely curious use these large marketing sites. Consumers search for homes in a price range, homes in a specific area, and/or homes with features they desire. The curious click around sites for a variety of reasons. Media oriented real estate marketing portals are valuable and popular. They are here to stay. Presented herein are suggestions for changes that maintain the value of portals but that incorporate new, best real estate practices in real estate marketing to address these problems. The problems for FSBO sellers who list on national portals: 1. The portals do a poor job of keeping the status of a listing accurate. Listings that are off the market appear to still be active. 2. When the photographs of a listing are distributed to a variety of websites across the internet, it is nearly impossible to remove them later. Let s unpack those issues one at a time. 1. The portals do a poor job of keeping the status of a listing accurate. Listings that are off the market appear to still be active. By some estimates, 30% 40% of the listings on major portals contain inaccuracies. One of the major inaccuracies relates to the status of a listing. A listing looks like it is still an active (for 2
sale) listing when in fact the property has already been sold or taken off the market. There are two reasons why this happens. A. When a listing sells, the seller is required to make that status change on the portal where the listing was initially published. However, portals relicense data to other sites. The seller has no mechanism for easily changing the status on all the websites where that listing has been shared. B. Second, change of a listing status can take quite a while to be reflected on all the sites it was shared by the initial portal. Why is that? Maybe the delay is just administrative cumbersomeness. Perhaps secondary and tertiary feeds don t get the changes in a timely fashion or even at all. But it should be noted that portals prefer active listings. Active is a primary search criteria for consumers perusing the portals. Sold criteria is less interesting to consumers. A sold status therefore reduces the number of eyeballs on pages where portals sells their ads. There is no incentive for portals to change an active status. Inaccuracies exist and the seller has virtually no power or mechanism to fully correct them. 2. When the photographs of a listing are distributed to a variety of other websites across the internet, it is nearly impossible to remove them later. Media oriented real estate marketing portals are appealing because of the photographs. A good set of listing photos gives a great deal of information about a home s interior. For instance, photography includes kids bedrooms, valuable art and furnishings, the placement of high dollar electronics, security devices, and the type and whereabouts of windows and doors most conveniently entered by burglars. Homeowners concur that having the interior views of their homes forever viewable on the internet is a security risk both to themselves and to their eventual buyers. That risk is real. Investigators who study the behavior and techniques of burglars cite real estate listing websites 1 as common tools these criminals use to case their targeted properties. What is disturbing is that with the current listing distribution muddle, it is impossible for sellers to remove photographs from all the sites where they are posted. In the act of posting a listing online, sellers must grant the portal a license to use and distribute the photography as they see fit for as long as they see fit. Once that license has been granted, the seller has lost control of where and when their images are used and they ve lost the ability to remove the images on all the sites on which it may be posted once the listing is sold. 1 In Donovan and Bernier s Cyber Crime Fighters: Tales From The Trenches (Pearson Education 2008), Zillow was mentioned specifically. We understand that prospective buyers would want this information and see the value in its ease of use, but we are trained to think like bad guys. What a tremendous tool this would be for burglars who were looking to target specific neighborhoods and houses. Add PROOF that this tool has actually been used, that s it s more than just a possibility. 3
Let s summarize these issues. With the rise of national portals, FSBO sellers have lost the power to: 1. manage the accuracy of their listing s status on portals, and 2. control the security risks to themselves and homebuyers that results from uncontrolled, perpetual display of the private interiors of their homes. FSBO sellers need two things to change. 1. To maintain listing status accuracy, they need a mechanism to control the status of their listings everywhere those listings are posted. 2. To mitigate the security risks of unsecured interior photography, they need a mechanism for removing photography from all portals when the property is no longer active. What follows are proposed methods and mechanisms for incorporating these changes into the process of online FSBO real estate marketing. How to establish and maintain control of the copyrights to photography, clear up listing inaccuracies, and improve homeowner security throughout the life of a listing and beyond. When asset rights (the right to control the use, distribution and reproduction of a photograph) are serially licensed on multiple syndicated listings, too many entities have access to those rights. No one feels responsible for how these assets are used in all the other places they come to reside. Someone needs to take control of the assets rights. The most reasonable place to take such control is when the asset is created when the photographs are actually taken. Sellers should take this responsibility as a critical part of the listing activities they do in listing their homes. Sellers should own the photography. They should not license the rights of use, reproduction and distribution. There is an easy and a powerful first step that can be taken here. When the sellers hire a photographer, they need to do so with a Work Made For Hire (WMFH) agreement or they need to take the photos themselves. This establishes the seller as the sole owner of the assets and the rights associated with them. The common practice, unfortunately, is that sellers don t even think about this. According to copyright law, if the photographer has not signed a WMFH agreement with the seller, the photographer owns the asset and their attendant rights. Without a WMFH agreement, the seller actually loses the legal power to control the use, distribution and reproduction of those photographs right from the beginning. 4
Yet when the seller uploads those photographs to a portal, he or she does so under an End User License Agreement (EULA). That agreement stipulates how the seller may use the listing portal s technology, as well as who controls the data and the photography uploaded with a listing. That agreement can (and usually does) include language that requires sellers to represent that they actually own the photography assets and copyrights, and that they therefore have the authority to grant those rights to the portal. Most sellers never even read the EULA. They represent themselves as asset owners when in fact they may not possess ownership. This is messy and inaccurate. Even messier is that portal EULAs require unlimited and perpetual rights to use these assets. Portals in turn grant the same upstream to other portals. Eventually multiple entities have license to the rights, but no one controls how the assets are used elsewhere. This makes rampant copyright infringement easy. It means the private interior photographs of homes exist all over the internet, indefinitely, with no one actually in a position of power or responsibility for mitigating the resulting homeowner risk. Portals offer national exposure of a listing to millions of consumers. The portals value proposition is that it is in the seller s best interest to distribute the listing to as many potential buyers as possible on their consumer facing portals. We have no argument with this marketing concept. But the way it is carried out today results in the loss of seller power and control while consumers are fed a stream of potentially inaccurate listings. Additionally, listing photography exists perpetually on these sites even after a sale has occurred. To date, sellers have been unable to do anything about these problems. Sellers have felt powerless, assuming the status quo is here to stay. Let s rethink this assumption. How to have national exposure of listings without the seller s loss of power to control listing photography. It wasn t so long ago that the music and film industries faced similar problems. With the advent of file sharing across the internet, songs and movies were distributed among peers without regard for copyright protection. With file sharing, creators of entertainment assets lost control of those assets along with the royalties that were due them. Eventually technologies emerged to correct this problem at the file level. Owners began to employ Digital Asset Management (DAM) and Digital Rights Management of their portfolios. These technologies made it possible to house assets in secure databases and to tightly implement control mechanisms for their use, reproduction and distribution. The objective of DAM was not to limit wide commercial distribution of these assets. The objective was to control and monitor that distribution. The major outcome of those efforts was the concept of streaming entertainment files. When we watch a Netflix video, we do not receive a file. We are granted a viewing of the video, not possession of the asset. The streamer (Netflix) knows when and where the file is streamed and this commercial opportunity is captured to the 5
benefit of the asset owner. Additionally, the asset owner (Netflix) can stop the streaming to all end users from a single control point. This streaming process can be applied to real estate listing photography. The photos can be placed in a single, secure database where the rights inure to the benefit of the seller. The use, distribution and reproduction of those assets are thereby controlled by the seller. When images are streamed for viewing rather than distributed as actual files, the seller keeps control. When a property is sold or otherwise comes off the market, the seller will activate the technological mechanism to stop photography streams and update the status immediately and everywhere. In summary, establishing control over listing photography brings sellers new power to protect their security and to maintain listing accuracy with online real estate marketing. With these new controls, the portals become a friendlier marketing method for sellers. The portals would lose none of their consumer appeal; data and photography would still be available on active listings. Consumers would know with greater certainty when listings are no longer active. As listings on the portals become more accurate, their appeal to consumers will increase. The portals would lose control and rights to interior photography. Why do they need them? They ll still have quality photos of homes streamed for portal visitors to view when the home is for sale. The portals will actually become tools in the service of both home buyers and sellers. Now the punch line. The technological service for achieving the changes proposed above already exists! See https://fotag.io/ The next step for achieving these changes is to get the word out to FSBO sellers. It is the right thing to do. The changes suggested here reduce the tension between the business model of the portals and the goal of home sellers. These changes provide better information and better protection. This is the right direction for online real estate marketing. Let s get going and do the work! About the author: David Sinclair is an experienced, active Realtor in Charlotte, NC where he is an agent for Helen Adams Realty. He is a member of the Carolinas MLS, NAR and the NCAR. He is also an experienced entrepreneur and founder of two successful technology start ups. Mr. Sinclair can be contacted at david@fotag.io. 6