Realtorclix is a social network for Realty Agents. It is being put out by the folks at Slamwire, a coding house out of Alabama. The objective is to bring together Realtors to network, communicate and share information. I recently met with a few members of the team, and had a chance to take a peek at the product. So far, it looks like it has teeth.

Realtorclix

After a relatively painless setup process, you are presented with a dashboard that reminded me a lot of LinkedIn. The difference is that it’s much less cluttered and thus more useful. You have three choices: edit your profile, add house listings or view those listings that you already have.

This is definitely a network designed exclusively for Realtors and their hangers on. The one feature of interest to your average user would be the housing listings (location, prices and a description), but right now the only way to browse those listings is by title and category. Considering most of the titles are vague advertisements the homes (“Beautiful Starter Home!”), it’s not all that useful for someone who doesn’t know what they are looking for.

Where the software really shines is in its community interaction tools. There is a chat feature, a Forum for threaded discussions and personal blogs to show off your expertise. You can also set up events, something I am sure most Realtors will appreciate. The real networking almost always takes place in person — not to mention it’s a good excuse to get out of the house.

Buy Or Sell

What I really like about this product is that it meets a need. Agents, by their natures, are social creatures. With the housing market as it is, your value as a Realtor is in the connections you have built up. By giving Realtors a forum to communicate, you let them share information and leverage their networks. Realtorclix does this elegantly, providing a system that is a snap to set up and use — even for the least tech savvy of housing brokers.

Where they may run into a problem is with their main competition, ActiveRain. ActiveRain already has a strong foothold in the market, and it is trying to fill a similar gap. Realtorclix wins in terms of raw simplicity and interactivity, but ActiveRain has a 50,000 user head start.

Where Realtorclix could make some waves is in designing a system that is dead simple to browse. ActiveRain suffers from too many hyperlinks. As the amount of data in your system increases, you have to make sure that it’s easy for anyone who comes into it to find what they are looking for. Right now, Realtorclix doesn’t do this either. Stronger search and easier methods of visualizing data are needed and it is a good idea to get those set up from the beginning.

Another point of difference that they could eventually exploit is making their housing listings open to the public. If I could search for a house anywhere in the country, and then chat with the Realtor in real time, that would be extremely valuable to me.

Web 2.0 Roundup

The Slamwire guys have something interesting here. If they can get some traction in the Real Estate community, and make it simple enough for any Agent to make an account, they have a chance to tap into the huge number of Agents who don’t have any online presence. Combine this with giving normal users something to go to the site and see, and you have a site primed for breaking into an often overlooked market.

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