Real Estate Connect SF 2005 Is all About the Internet Customer; Global Technology Conference...

EMERYVILLE, Calif. -- Eighty percent of home-buyers begin their home search on the Internet, yet the real estate industry spends only 11 percent of its marketing dollars targeting online consumers. How is it possible that an industry that sells millions of homes around the world can be so far behind

Creating and implementing new business and marketing models that apply technology and innovation to help real estate agents convert millions of online real estate leads into closed transactions will be a key topic at "Real Estate Connect SF 2005," set for July 27-29 at San Francisco's Palace Hotel. The conference is sponsored by Inman News (http://www.inman.com), the nation's leading independent provider of real estate news.

"At Real Estate Connect, we highlight the innovators and innovations that are reinventing the way consumers are served and real estate is practiced around the world," said Bradley Inman, founder and publisher of Inman News. "A year ago, the talk at Real Estate Connect was about new business models that capture leads from consumers who are using the Internet to search for homes and obtain other information critical to their real estate decision-making process. Today, there are thousands of online consumer leads a day that go unanswered, so the debate has transitioned to how the industry can do a better job of converting these leads into satisfied client relationships and closed transactions."

More than 100 new real estate business models and service innovations will be demonstrated and dissected by some 2,000 industry leaders from across the real estate spectrum and around the globe. Among the dozens of industry achievers and innovators scheduled to speak are Udi Manber, CEO of A9.com, Inc., which builds innovative technologies to improve the search experience for e-commerce applications; Eric Danziger, president and CEO of ZipRealty, Inc., a national real estate firm that uses the Internet to streamline the real estate process; Van Davis, CEO and president of Foxtons North America, a growing new brokerage model; and Richard Sommer, CEO of HomeGain, an innovative online real estate marketing company. The conference also will feature Zach Kaplan and Keith Schacht of Inventables, a company that provides inspiration for next-generation products.