Disqus - Latest Comments for tribuseric

Re: Introducing Cloudflare Registrar: Domain Registration You Can Love

Eric Stegemann — Sat, 25 Jul 2020 13:03:59 -0000

Nearly 2 years later and you still can't register new domains?

Re: Introducing IP Lists

Eric Stegemann — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 09:08:45 -0000

Would love a User Agent block list. Currently we have to add them individually to every domain! When a new one is needed we have to go through hundreds of domains to add them individually.

Re: New – Savings Plans for AWS Compute Services

Eric Stegemann — Thu, 07 Nov 2019 13:20:39 -0000

Hallelujah!
Please roll this out to RDS / Caching

Re: Cleaning up bad bots (and the climate)

Eric Stegemann — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 19:58:50 -0000

Will a bot using this tool be shown in the firewall events tab?
If not - how do you know that a bot has been blocked?

Re: The Launch of TRIBUS Capital

Eric Stegemann — Tue, 06 Nov 2018 18:51:48 -0000

Thanks CJ

Re: The Mayday Button, for Real Estate?

Eric Stegemann — Fri, 13 Jul 2018 13:17:07 -0000

5 years later after this post, and I think the idea is finally starting to spill over for clients. They are hitting the button on bots / chat more frequently. Companies like https://roof.ai/ can build custom answers and then hand off to an agent when the time is right and help them connect with the best possible person that knows the market they have questions about like the back of their hand.

Re: Expanding Multi-User Access on dash.cloudflare.com

Eric Stegemann — Wed, 02 May 2018 11:12:06 -0000

While it seems you can invite other users in, it doesn't seem that there are any settings to control which domains they have access over. So any user still has access to every single domain instead of just their domains?

Re: The Impact Social Proof Has on Real Estate Tech Vendor Selections

Eric Stegemann — Fri, 02 Mar 2018 14:02:21 -0000

Nothing drives me crazier than real estate tech companies that post they work with Re/Max or Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, when really they work with a single franchise of the company. It's disingenuous.

Re: Real Estate Brokerage SEO Is Evolving

Eric Stegemann — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 15:20:08 -0000

All too often, Brokers forget the value of organic SEO for their sites. Spending just a little time on it can reap big rewards!

Re: The Mayday Button, for Real Estate?

Eric Stegemann — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 11:31:02 -0000

Drew,
I know many of our clients offer this as a chat service. It works really well in connecting with someone. I think why Mayday works, is that you already have purchased their product and they are there to help. In real estate, you haven't already, in most cases, started working with a Realtor regularly if you're on a website. So you don't have that connection, and most prospects would feel that's freaky.

We're currently rolling this out inside of our CRM though (without the video, but with an instant get help button and we even have an algorithm that guesses when someone might need help and it pops up to offer it to them).

Re: Tribus CRM

Eric Stegemann — Fri, 15 Nov 2013 17:01:31 -0000

Hi Mike,
Eric from TRIBUS here. I just wanted to take a moment clarify a few items. The main reason we don't offer a trial period of the product is due to the training and support in helping you get it setup to make the product work for you. We are in no way a turn it on and have it work product unless you purchase our "Do It For Me" (DIFM) package. Most of our clients need to spend some time tweaking the system to work for them, much like with Infusionsoft or Salesforce.
I also took a look at your account and it appears you signed up under the Beta program with lower pricing back on June 21. We didn't officially release the product until early November out of Beta and so there were some items that weren't fully functioning back in June. If that wasn't made clear to you I apologize. It looks like that was discussed with you back on 9/28/2013 and that we apologized for the misunderstanding and offered you a full refund of all monthly fees paid. According to your above comment, it looks like you may not have realized we credited you those amounts. But I also confirmed they were credited back on your card, please confirm. If you don't see that, please call into our support department at 877.894.2824 and hit 2 and they will be glad to work with you and your credit card company to make sure you receive the funds. I again apologize for the inconvenience - we are a very customer service oriented company and take it seriously when a client has a problem. I hope you'll find that we rectified it to your satisfaction by providing you a full refund of your monthly charges.

Re: Zendesk Event

Eric Stegemann — Sat, 02 Nov 2013 22:11:12 -0000

I spent Friday discussing with the Zendesk marketing team in San Francisco that one of the reasons we signed up with them was due to your integration with them!

Re: IDX Websites, Mobile, and Heretical Questions

Eric Stegemann — Wed, 21 Aug 2013 15:51:34 -0000

Rob -
It's not that. It's that IDX / Property Search / Property Drips is THE most important way to solidify a relationship with a prospect you don't already have a great relationship with. Consider when I ran the brokerage, we had people all the time that we setup via our IDX to receive properties that called 12-18 months later and said we're ready to buy. Why did they call us back? Certainly not because the agents were doing a great job following up with them, instead because they felt connected to the agent because they felt they were emailing properties to them regularly! Outside of that, after a first communication, the listing is as Marc Davison puts it "the money page." It's where the buyer makes a solid connection with the agent and says ok, I'm ready to go to the next step. Consider most buyers start looking 12-18 months before making a purchase. The listings they regularly get from your site is there way of staying connected over the long run and building rapport in the short run. Giving your traffic up to the syndicators is in essence handing over a lead and praying they will call you when they're ready to buy.

Re: IDX Websites, Mobile, and Heretical Questions

Eric Stegemann — Wed, 21 Aug 2013 15:36:57 -0000

Ryan - not sure which of my points you're aiming at:
1) being found implies that Google feels you have something valuable to share with people. They know that this is relevant to listings and local information that you have written. If you have one or the other you're going to miss lots of traffic
2) How do you get people to want to use your site if there aren't listings on it? With millions of pageviews we've seen this year, it's consistently the number one thing across all of our sites. Local info gets visitors to your site, listings keep them there. Zillow will even tell you this, it's why they write articles about celebrities. People don't stick around 14 minutes on Zillow because of that, they get there because of the celeb post and then decide to look at their houses and other available homes.

Re: IDX Websites, Mobile, and Heretical Questions

Eric Stegemann — Wed, 21 Aug 2013 15:27:57 -0000

Rob, traveling today - however, I'll just throw scenario out there:
You meet someone at an open house, you talk to them and they ask for your information, they look you up that night online they go to your site, see it doesn't have search and consider calling you. But it's 10 pm. Instead they bounce over to Zillow / Trulia / Realtor.com and decide to search there. They plug in some requests, and like most clients aren't sure exactly how the whole Realtor process works. They put in a request, talk to the other agent, and when asked they explain they do not have a legal agreement with another Realtor. Now that client is working with the other agent.

This isn't an "out there" - this is common place in the information age of "I want it now" for almost everyone not in your SOI.

To bring an old vendor line into it, but something that's very accurate: You could pay for IDX / agent website for 2-3 or more years with a single deal probably. Why would you ever take the risk of losing a single client on such a low investment, high reward proposition?

Re: Coordinated effort to target real estate scrapers underway

Eric Stegemann — Thu, 01 Aug 2013 16:09:54 -0000

We've been doing this for our broker and agent clients for over a year now. We've collected thousands of IP address including from inside Wells Fargo, Fidelity, and Northrop Grumman that have attempted to scrape our broker clients' websites. Our sites communicate with each other to build herd immunity to the problem. We welcome additional services like Distil to the mix to help protect MLSs, brokers, and agents.

Re: Zillow updates CRM platform

Eric Stegemann — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 16:23:20 -0000

Thanks! Eric from TRIBUS here. We're really excited about the SquaredR acquisition. We want to help simplify agents' lives and their team is amazing at helping agents bring it all together.

Re: Custom Real Estate Site With IDX

Eric Stegemann — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 18:25:26 -0000

Thanks so much Erik! I'll be sure to let our design team know you liked their work. Please let us know if we can ever help you freshen up your site!

Re: NAR will consider giving realtor.com more leeway to compete with rivals

Eric Stegemann — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 15:56:46 -0000

I previously added some additional thoughts to the conversation yesterday here as well where we contemplated the possibilites for how NAR would work this all out: http://www.brokerageu.com/r...

Re: Custom Real Estate Site With IDX

Eric Stegemann — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 13:50:16 -0000

Eric from http://www.TRIBUSgroup.com here. Our team created the Doma Properties site. Thanks for the message about the service being down. We were performing some upgrades and improvements to our sites over the weekend. The site should be functioning correctly now. Take a look through.

Re: TRIBUS launches real estate CRM, bets big on gamification

Eric Stegemann — Wed, 15 May 2013 14:47:40 -0000

Hi Coach,
Thanks for your comments. The participation and buy in of agents IS a big deal. We've spent two years working on it.
It is amazing how far contextual ads have come, but that brings up another note: Have you ever seen someone try to figure out Sugar? Wow it's like poking yourself in the eye repeatedly. And that's coming from a tech guy! We built TRIBUS CRM to be the exact opposite of that on purpose.

Re: Why the MLS Needs to Tell Google Who Owns the Listing

Eric Stegemann — Mon, 06 May 2013 16:26:14 -0000

I would argue that this isn't a commercial advantage that ZTR has right now. But by making them not be able to rank for any of their search terms and losing more than 30% of their revenues / traffic overnight. They'll come out swinging. Including finding any argument why NAR is being anti-competitive possible.

Keep in mind too that while the listing on the MLS is owned by the broker, when that broker shares it to ZTR the information is technically owned by them (read the TOSs - this is why Zillow can display your listing photos on their Digs service or Trulia can show the photo on their page seeing which kitchen you like better.) So once the data hits those sites, within their own rules, they can basically do what they want. What rules would you setup that would tell them they had to do anything? All you could do is go to the MLSs and say they had to make rules for when the data comes right from the MLS. To which then ZTR will just say they won't accept feeds from them anymore. I think you overestimate the value of a bunch of people sitting in a room working on SEO. Yes they have them, but their entire strategies are built around the listings and around their sharable content. Without the ability for them to generate inbound links to their listings (or internal cross linking of listings), they will literally lose a very large percentage of non direct typed in traffic within 3-4 weeks. This would be the doomsday scenarios that ZT have mentioned in their 10Ks and R mentions in their ways that they would lose out on their agreement with NAR (sub 500k visitors / month).

PS: I promise I'm just being pragmatic here. Something needs to be done, but the collateral damage needs to be carefully considered.

Re: Why the MLS Needs to Tell Google Who Owns the Listing

Eric Stegemann — Mon, 06 May 2013 15:56:44 -0000

Ok - MLS's aside. You've just told ZTR that they can no longer rank for any individual address searches. Effectively dumping their traffic / income 30+% (our last report showed that was the percentage of traffic they got for address based searches). But then you're also going to have to take out neighborhood etc based searches because the neighborhood / city pages that they rank so well for are essentially just a collection of the listings in that market. I don't exactly see them saying "hmm ok they're your listings after all." I'm just playing devi's advocate here. I do believe the broker should have better control over what's going on. I'm just being a cynic that anyone is just going to let this happen. I think you'll see mounds of ZTR lawyers come out of the wood work speaking to DOJ attorneys should this happen.

Re: Why the MLS Needs to Tell Google Who Owns the Listing

Eric Stegemann — Mon, 06 May 2013 15:07:11 -0000

Bill,
In this case you're absolutely right, and that might provide LOTS of value to the brokerage! But I challenge you to call up any MLS CEO and say "Are you willing to give up all of the SEO on your public facing website to push your broker members." Their answer will be "No and here's why, our site is better and we have better consumer engagement" yadda yadda yadda. Perfect example- har.com I guarantee you they aren't going to do anything that loses them their 1 million visitors. Doing rel=canonical would basically de-index every listing on their site.

However, perhaps I misread something are you suggesting that Broker A has the listing and Broker B displays it on their website via an IDX agreement. That Broker B must then do rel=canonical back to Broker A on the listing? This would effectively kills the SEO of every single small brokerage. So while they may have a better mousetrap (their website and their interface), they won't be able to get anyone to it without using traditional advertising. SEO for that brokerage site would be dead as would online competition. The biggest broker in the market would reign supreme and Google rankings would be based upon how large that broker was.

If you're saying ZTR do it, there is no way they would do that either due to the exact same reason. Overnight death of their pageviews / ad revenues. What is being asked for is effectively the death of the agent / small broker SEO'd website that is if I'm understanding you.

Re: Why the MLS Needs to Tell Google Who Owns the Listing

Eric Stegemann — Mon, 06 May 2013 12:46:42 -0000

Bill,
I'm not sure how an MLS would do this outside of placing the listing on the MLS public facing website which already hurts the broker, and then doing a rel=author link. All this will do is help the MLS public facing site outrank ZTR.

What it effectively would do is stifle all SEO competition from the agents and brokers out there that currently use SEO as an advantage.

In addition, something I've seen as a flawed argument for authorship in listings from the begining is that Google sees the listing on Zillow as completely different from on Trulia and on the broker site. Therefore unless you were able to speak directly to Google and have them change the way they handle listings and have a new method of proving who owned the listings (which they'd have to change their entire search algorithm to do that), they'll still see listings from Zillow as authored by Zillow and the listing on the MLS website from the broker / agent. Then Google will decide who has more domain authority for that particular listing.

One final item of note that I think was glossed over above: small listings would be heavily impacted by any decision such as this. Currently smaller brokers are competing by being more nimble and tech savvy. A change to allow this for a big broker would not be zero - sum. By having the authorship connected to the MLS public facing website, and then if they connected that account to the company's website, that company could see a disproportionate increase in their rankings due to the authorship appearing so heavily on other places. Google has started to understand if you like things posted by someone. Therefore if a broker has 1000 listings and another has 10, when you view listings by the large broker, Google understands that and will potentially present options to you down the road that would be more heavily weighted to that broker instead of the smaller broker.