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Regards-

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Let’s look at markets in North America, Asia, Europe, South America and understand how the greater global economy can impact even the smallest local markets.
Let’s learn how brokers and agents around the world are retooling, relaunching and reacting to ever-changing global real estate markets.
Let’s understand how new technologies like smartphones, video and social media are knocking down traditional barriers and borders around the globe.
Global Connect will be all of that and more… Mark your calendars, we’re bringing the world to New York City, January 7-9, 2009. You can learn more on the Real Estate Connect NYC 2009 web site. With much more to come.

I’m also looking for speakers, topics and anything else FOREM readers can contribute. I’m honored that this blog reaches the far corners of the globe, and over the years I’ve had many conversations on line and off with readers from around the world.
So whether you’re in Rotterdam or Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town or Chennai, Tokyo or Toronto; if you’re working on a cool technology, doing something innovative with your business, writing a blog or just have a interesting new idea – let me know. I want to hear about all of it. I want to bring you to New York.
Please contact me at joel [at] inman.com or phone me at +1 (971) 228-5704.

This should be a lot of fun. Hope to see you there.

The Mediapod flyer incorporates all the expected marketing elements, like a company logo and phone number but the first sign that this is something different is that rather than a static head shot, Mediapod gives agents the ability to embed a video that introduces themselves. Very slick.
(Another clever touch is that the agent’s contact information includes email and phone links that dump you directly into the respective application on your iPhone.)
Still pushing the multimedia angle, inside the property information section of the flyer, in addition to the standard information (price, square footage etc.) prospective buyers can listen to a pre-recorded audio introduction by the agent about the specific property.
Another slick touch is that buyers can also choose to view surrounding schools, restaurants, parks and shopping outlets from a drop down menu and then have those instantly mapped into the Google Maps application on the iPhone. (To which you could then get directions, using iPhone’s location awareness.)
If you don’t have an iPhone, you can see how it works watching this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BADS5uwuC-o
A few downsides however. The implementation of the property photos seems a little weak. I would love to be able to pull up the photos full-screen and be able to scroll through them using the beautiful touch screen interface of the iPhone. Though I suspect this may be due to the limitations of the iPhone SDK rather than the Mediapod platform.
Also, any existing virtual tours of the property are disabled – but this again is due to a limitation in the iPhone OS which has put the kibosh on Flash. Presumably though, if the home has a video tour associated with it, that could play through.
Finally – the basic design of the page could use a bit of a face lift… it didn’t knock me off my seat. But I guess that’s something that could be customized for each agent anyway.
All in all, Utopria’s offering is a fantastic demonstration of what makes the iPhone such a powerful consumer tool – and I suspect it is the first shot in a coming fusillade of iPhone-based property marketing tools.
I’d say it’s well worth exploring as part of your marketing tool set, especially for any agent who’s looking to establish a differentiating wow factor for their sellers or one who works in a tech heavy (Silicon Valley, Seattle, New York) area.

Of 80,000 that operated at the beginning of 2007, only around 40,000 have survived and some 100,000 employees lost their jobs, according to the Superior Council of Real Estate Agents, a nationwide grouping.

However, many of the agencies that collapsed are small — sometimes just a person with a cell phone — that emerged to cash in on the Spanish construction boom over the past five years or so, the council’s president Santiago Baena told the newspaper El Pais.

“The ones that closed are the upstarts, the ones who came into this sector because they saw easy money,” Baena said. Larger, well-established companies have closed some branches but are still intact, he added.

In the heyday of the boom, real estate agents say buyers enticed by rock-bottom interest rates would line up to purchase homes. Builders did not even bother to construct model homes; they just showed customers crude blueprints.

Housing prices rose 17 percent in 2004 and 9.1 percent in 2006. But interest rates have jumped three points in as many years, there is a glut of housing on the market and banks spooked by the subprime crisis in the United States are now much tighter when it comes to lending.

The government says housing prices in 2007 will post a more modest 5 percent rise. Final figures are not out yet.

Baena said many more agencies will close in Spain in the next three or four months but that this is good because the sector had become “a joke,” with too many people trying to make fast money, sometimes with shady deals.