Matt Goyer’s Real Estate Blog

On someone’s blog today I saw a link to this blog post, Social browsing vs. technology-enabled navigation:

The research found that the contact lists is what forms the social network backbone of the site - and they call this new way in which people interact with information social browsing.

Apparently people use social browsing more so than searching for information using tags, groups, calendar, maps or any of the other ways through which Flickr offers users to search for subscribe to content.

The research in question is this paper, Social browsing on Flickr [pdf]. The blog post also references this paper, Social Networks and Social Information Filtering on Digg [pdf].

I’ll try and read those on the plane tomorrow.

Sellsius has a post about how Why The Internet Buyer Is The Preferred Client. It seems to draw on conclusions from the California Association of Realtors study, 2006 Internet vs. Traditional Buyers Survey. I’ve e-mailed CAR to see if I can get the full study.

In the meantime here are some relevant stats:

IB spend 2.2 weeks, on average, with their agent before buying, while the non-internet buyer (so called traditional buyer) spent 7.1 weeks with their agents.

IB previewed 6.7 homes while the traditional buyer previewed a whopping 15.4

PEW, Looking for information about a place to live [PDF]:

39% of internet users have looked online for information about a place to live - double the overall number of Americans who had done son in 2000.

This is why I work for Redfin and maintain Urbnlivn.

Let’s see if we can now double that number in half the time .