NAR and NAHB spending on Capitol Hill compared to Google and Facebook

Over the years, Google has gained substantial attention because of their close ties with the American government and Facebook has gotten quite cozy with the current administration, even playing host to a town hall meeting with President Obama earlier this year.

Now, the two companies are making headlines for their increased spending on lobbying. In the second quarter of 2011, for the first time, Google’s spending on lobbying was higher than Microsoft’s, and the two companies have just broken their own quarterly lobbying spend records.

Google’s lobbying spend for Q2 2011 was $2.06 million, up 54% over the past year, while Facebook’s lobbying spend was $320,000, nearly matching their entire lobbying effort for 2010.

When we heard these numbers and read opinion columns opining about the large amounts of money the two companies are spending and the feigned outrage is interesting to us.

Our immediate thought was “why the outrage over two million dollars, haven’t these people ever heard of real estate lobbying?” We analyzed real estate spending back in 2010 and many people were shocked at how many industry dollars go toward Capitol Hill.

Take a look at this comparison chart to see if you believe Google and Facebook’s spending is outrageous, and take special note that for the recent year, not all numbers have been reported which is why we included 2009-2010 to give you an idea of an annual spend. We separated out contributions from lobbyist spending, because many Realtors think that all political spends coming from their trade association are for political offices, but the spend by NAR on lobbyists is one of the largest in the entire nation (take special note of the second line of this chart).

Not only are political contributions and spending on lobbyists dramatically higher in the real estate industry compared to technology as demonstrated above, contributions are spread more evenly between state and federal contributions in real estate. Support for Democrats and Republicans varies widely, even within leaders in each sector and NAR appears to be the most fair, indicating that it is often an office that is supported rather than the idea of an individual.

What do you think of the political contributions and money spent on lobbyists in each sector and even within the real estate industry? Tell us in comments your thoughts.

This article published on Friday, July 22nd, 2011 at 2:32 am | Contact the editor Tags: featured, real estate lobbying, Real Estate News, Technology

Category: News

AgentGenius Editor-in-Chief: Lani, named one of Real Estate’s 100 Most Influencial, as well as 12 Most Influencial Women in Real Estate, is a business writer hailing from the great state of Texas in the city of Austin. As a digital native, Lani is immersed not only in advanced technologies and new media, but is also a stats nerd often burried in piles of reports. Lani is a proven leader, thoughtful speaker, and vested partner at AGBeat. You’ll often find her on Facebook and Twitter, so feel free to reach out and get to know her.

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Google Plus at 18 million users, projected to hit 100 million soon

Paul Allen, the well known “unofficial Google Plus statistician” and founder of Ancestry.com is reporting that Google Plus has reached 18 million users making it the fastest growing social network in history. Although growth has subsided from its early boom, in a short time, Google Plus has as many people as the entire combined population of Chile.

Google critics point out that Google Plus’ size is still only 2.4% of the size of Facebook while supporters note that the current size of Google Plus is astronomical based on how long it has been around.

Further, Allen reports that Google Plus has been dominated by male users but that women are catching up rapidly, conflicting with reports that contradict Allen’s report, and he notes previous reports are “flawed.” Currently, Allen says that 66.4% of users are male and 33.6% female.

Google Plus has announced they will soon be making gender an optional choice in profile pages not only out of respect for modern gender issues, but for privacy. We believe, however, that based on user behavior, Google will still profile users and segment them based on demographics to feed their advertising platform.

If the current rate of growth continued at approximately 763,000 new users every day, Google Plus would only take four to five months to reach 100 million users, putting them squarely against Facebook and Twitter.

By default, Google has always undone the progress of companies that provide similar offerings and sometimes they run parallel (like Google Docs versus Microsoft Office) while others are supplanted by Google (for example, Google Plus is now believed to be capable of supplanting Skype).

Google is in growth mode and there is no question that their current moves are making waves and threatening companies in the technology sector, regardless of whether or not Google has set their sights on those companies.

This article published on Thursday, July 21st, 2011 at 12:11 am | Contact the editor Tags: featured, google, google plus

Category: New Media

Tara Steele is the News Director at AgentGenius, covering real estate news, technology news and everything in between. If you’d like to reach Tara with a question, comment, press release or hot news tip, she frequently checks her email, simply click the link below.

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Google Labs winding down, what will the repercussions be?

Google has undoubtedly undergone a major change in recent weeks, both affirming some analysts and surprising others. As a part of consolidating their various projects and setting priorities for the overall brand, Google has announced they will be winding down Google Labs although in-product experimentation like labs in Gmail will not be ending.

“While we’ve learned a huge amount by launching very early prototypes in Labs, we believe that greater focus is crucial if we’re to make the most of the extraordinary opportunities ahead,” said Bill Coughran, SVP for Research and Systems Infrastructure.

Many of the Google Labs products are already Android apps available on the Anddroid Market, another reason the Lab is no longer necessary.

“We’ll continue to push speed and innovation—the driving forces behind Google Labs—across all our products, as the early launch of the Google+ field trial last month showed,” Coughran said.

For many years, we have watched Google Labs as they launch projects in beta to test user interest and to gauge which features work and which features do not, and often, products are scrapped altogether or products are folded into existing products.

Google Labs has created successful Google products such as Google Reader as well as Google Goggles.

Nicholas Jackson at TheAtlantic.com wrote, “Without Google Labs, you can expect to see Google continue to launch new products — or continue to try out new things with Google+ — but only because it has to to remain competitive. Without the testing ground and public development period that other prototypes have been subjected to, though, you can also expect to see more failures. Brutal, public failures. Remember Google Buzz? Some genius had the idea to launch that messaging tool without running it through Google Labs first. Look what happened.”

This article published on Thursday, July 21st, 2011 at 12:05 am | Contact the editor Tags: featured, google, Technology

Category: New Media

AgentGenius is a rapidly growing real estate social media, tech, news, and opinion site built and designed by and for the on-the-go agent. Our mission is to be a positive force in the industry, led by people inside of real estate. We aim to keep you up to date on trends that we study closely in order to forecast what’s next on the horizon.

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Google+ Hangouts – how to find Hangouts or host your own Hangout

So far, the culture of Google+ has not yet established itself as much of the discussion inside Google’s newly launched social network is mostly about the social network itself as people feel their way through features that they recognize from other social networks while discovering new features.

It appears Google’s intentions for their video chat featured called “Hangouts” was meant to be informal, given the name and the tagline that “Hangouts are the best way for you to say, ‘I’m online and want to hangout!’”

Nonetheless, while users are experimenting, we encourage experimentation with business in mind so you’re not addicted to a time suck of a website that yields no business results.

In order to start a hangout, as the video illustrates above, click the green “Hangout” button in the right sidebar of your main Google+ home page. The button does not appear when you go into Sparks or your own profile, only on your main page. You’ll get a popup that instructs you as to getting set up, and it is very self explanatory and requires little to no tech savviness.

If you’d rather experiment with Hangouts hosted by other people first, there is a site that will show you all of the Hangouts currently being hosted and we encourage you to find one that suits your interests, even if it’s dogs or travel, just to get the hang of being on camera and how the functions work before hosting your own.

Video conference calling is the default use we see for Google+ Hangouts and getting buyers together with agents, and we know that the rise in virtual brokerages will take to Hangouts for meetings and the like.

There are, however, creative uses for Google+ Hangouts, just think of it as a visit to Starbucks. We’ve written in the past about hosting coffee chats with the local community and in this case, Google+ is your local community.

Set up a Google+ Hangout for a specific time (recurring if at all possible) that you will host and each week try a new theme. One week can be “Demystifying the insanity that is short sales,” or “Open questions about complicated mortgages,” and invite your favorite lender in on the conversation. If you work with relocating clients a lot, if you’re friends with a client who relocated using you, host a “Relocating to Memphis, from the mouths of natives and newbies.” See where we’re going with this?

If a theme isn’t your cup of tea, perhaps a “Stump the Realtor night” on Google+ with prizes for any local who has the toughest question. Maybe host a local trivia night with you asking the questions and assigning points to people who yell in the right answers. Get interactive, there is are a lot of levels in which you can connect with others and although face to face is still the tride and true best method to market, computer face to computer face is even better than typing finger to typing finger.

Remember, Google has said that they will delete any profile set up on Google+ that is a business, brand or not a person as they are testing a separate module for that, so don’t waste your time. You’ll have to host under your real name and as yourself.

We will soon be announcing Google+ Hangouts hosted by AGBeat writers and staff via their personal accounts and we have some great ideas we cannot wait to share with you; we anticipate that other tech and national real estate sites will soon follow suit. Stay tuned for more details and tell us in comments what creative uses you will use Google+ Hangouts for!

This article published on Monday, July 18th, 2011 at 12:03 am | Contact the editor Tags: featured, google, google plus, google+ hangouts, Real Estate News

Category: New Media, Video

AgentGenius is a rapidly growing real estate social media, tech, news, and opinion site built and designed by and for the on-the-go agent. Our mission is to be a positive force in the industry, led by people inside of real estate. We aim to keep you up to date on trends that we study closely in order to forecast what’s next on the horizon.

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