A Few Thoughts on Lasso
Lasso is a new tool that lets you bookmark listings across ALL websites, and takes notes and discuss them with their friends, family, or co-workers.
I know many here read 1000Watt, too. Brian mentioned a few thoughts on Lasso in his most recent Friday Flash update. I spoke with Aaron Sperling last week, and thought I’d share a few of my thoughts on his new product as well.
Bookmarking listings, and discussing them, is not a new concept. Numerous products have come and gone over the years in the real estate listing bookmarking space — Dwellicious is the first one that pops to my mind. AgentFolio being a more recent one. Most, or all, of them have relied on MLS/IDX for data. By not going that route, Lasso creates a massive empty canvas problem for their product. When people show up, they have nothing to look at without first lasso’ing properties from across the web. Few people know what to do with an empty canvas. But virtually everyone enjoys looking at a beautiful canvas full of X.
Lack of automation is going to be a barrier for agent and consumer adoption. For instance, I grabbed a listing URL off of Zillow, and tried to “lasso” it. I got the following screen:
Too much work, so I dropped off. Of course, I’m not actually buying a house right now, so if I was, maybe I would have gone through the pain of manually entering these fields.
The real question is, “Why not just email the link to my friend instead?”
Lasso is an interesting feature, for a portal or software vendor with existing distribution. But my gut is it’s not a business by itself. A better way to bookmark properties, and discuss them, is a “nice to have” not a “pain point”. As such, I don’t believe consumers will find and use Lasso on their own, so success will be reliant on agents/brokers adopting the tool and pro-actively putting it into the hands (phones) of their clients. Will that happen? Maybe, but I’m not convinced.
What do you think?
Will Wertheim
Posted at 15:16h, 10 MayNo pain to point to. I’ve had IDX with bookmarking for years and can’t think of it ever being used to any effect. Maybe it was just the swiftness of the market but people want to look at the home now… not go back to a listing removed because it was sold/expired/terminated. And they don’t share great finds with friends.
Drew Meyers
Posted at 16:19h, 10 Mayso it sounds like you don’t even think this is an interesting feature?
Will Wertheim
Posted at 16:29h, 10 MayI wouldn’t say that. 1000watt covered it. You’ve now covered it. My comments merely echoed your own opinion. As for interesting features, sadly, I have no ideas. The real pain points are APIs for data interpetation CRMs for agents to keep on top of and identify business. All else is fluff (maybe fun but still fluff). Tell me, what was the last truly great pain point solved in the real estate space?
Drew Meyers
Posted at 16:33h, 10 MayProbably Zillow exposing home value estimates to consumers.
Or something in the digital signature space (and area of the industry i’m not super knowledgeable about)
Will Wertheim
Posted at 16:57h, 10 MayZillow was/is more smoke and mirrors than a pain. AVMs are far from reality and the zestimate continues to deceive many home owners to a true market value. In my opnion the last great pain point was indeed digital signatures. I was a big fan of Real Estate Dashboard (now GoPaperless) and await their use again. Sadly, in Ontario digital signatures are not permitted for real estate transactions, yet.
The next big pain point are the MLS systems and their refusal to uniformly use multimedia and their maintenance of shoddy photos.
Drew Meyers
Posted at 16:59h, 10 MayAnswering “what is my home worth?” – without giving up contact details to a real estate agent was a massive consumer pain point.
Drew Meyers
Posted at 17:01h, 10 Maywhat is the mls pain point though? it’s really just by external vendors, etc who want to use the data but can’t. there isn’t really an agent pain point directly related to the MLS (aside from a generic “shitty software” problem), right?