The Reluctant Blogger

Someone needs to explain this to me. In this age of Craigslist where real estate and rentals are posted completely free of charge by owners, why is there still a need for real estate agents and rental brokers? Why aren’t people using what is free and instead enriching people who really don’t add much value to the transaction?

Why I bring this up: Recently my wife and I purchased our next home. Before I moved in with her in our current place, I owned my own apartment, and she owned the one we currently reside in. Given the current state of the real estate market, we decided that instead of selling each condo, we would find tenants for each and rent them out. Easy enough; we posted on Craigslist, and there was moderate interest, but no one bit.

Then rental brokers found the Craigslist ad. It turns out that brokers now monitor Craigslist for apartment listings, and then re-list these apartments as their own. (There are actually separate sections on Craigslist – one for rental by owner and one for rental through an agency). And the surprising thing to me is that once they list it on their own services, we got a lot more interest. And were actually able to rent both places. However, the difference is that now there is a broker fee: a full month rent split between the renter and the landlord has to be paid to the agency.

This is patently stupid.

If people would just put a little more effort in, they could find those apartments that are free of broker fees, and save themselves half a month of rent. Its ridiculous to me that with all the free services out there one could use to list or find an apartment, people are still paying what essentially adds up to a middle man.

So JobVent.com was recently profiled by TechCrunch. Not the most flattering review, but in the case of JobVent.com there’s no such thing as bad press. The TechCrunch review led to one being written by a Salon.com blogger, which was a little more forgiving.

A lot of the comments regarding JobVent.com were that the design is terrible. I’ll be the first one to admit that. I’m not a web designer. I’m a developer. But don’t get me wrong; in the development and maintenance of JobVent.com there has definitely been a design philosophy that we’ve kept to, and I think it has served us well. That philosophy has been: keep it simple.

No, JobVent does not look like your typical Web 2.0 style site. I do not use flashy icons that look like glossy 3-D buttons. JobVent is about information, and that is exactly what is presented: raw, un-edited information provided by JobVent.com visitors. I’ll want to eventually update the design to make it appealing to a broader audience, but 1) my own design skills are somewhat lacking to make this a reality 2) JobVent.com doesn’t exactly earn enough in ad revenue to support even the smallest of redesign contracts 3) I’m incredibly busy with other stuff right now such as PicMe

The design shouldn’t be an issue anyway: look at Craigslist.com. I tried to use pretty much the same design elements as Craigslist when I initially put JobVent.com online: simple text based links to accomplish everything you want on the site. And you know what? It works. There are thousands of reviews about thousands of companies on the site; if JobVent.com were designed truly poorly, the site wouldn’t have the needed to functionality to obtain all those reviews from non-technical users all over the internet.

On the competitive front, the listing by TechCrunch and Salon.com helped traffic. A lot. For about 2 days. Traffic is still a little higher than normal, but for 2 days or so we had about 3 times as much as our usual traffic. I actually thought a listing like that would have resulted in more, but Google analytics tells me otherwise.

Ok, so I haven’t mentioned it yet in this version of the blog, but I run a site called JobVent.com. Over the last two years it has gotten rather popular; current statistics show that thousands of people are finding the site every day. Its been in the media, and now copycats have started to show up. None of them (aside from the exact copy in Bulgaria) offer the same level of organization and anonymity that JobVent.com offers, but as they say, plagerism is the most sincere form of flattery.

Somehow I find it difficult to be greatful for the flattery.

JobVent.com really does’t make much money; in fact the only revenue stream is from google ad placement and limited direct ad sales. Its just enough to keep me interested enough to keep the site running, but its far from being anything like a salary. Its a hobby, which now, because of copycats who want an easy buck or two from adsense, I have to defend. Now I have to divert funds that the site generates back into keyword purchases on adwords such as “I hate my job” and things like that which will help people find JobVent. Not that it matters. JobVent has actually gotten to the point where more people are finding the site on google by typing in “jobvent”. Ahhh, name recognition.