| Airbnb: Do-it-yourself real estate rentals and Buyer beware of bathroom leak |
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It was the fall of 2007. Roommates and fellow Rhode Island School of Design grads Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky had just quit their jobs and the rent was coming due on their San Francisco apartment. A design conference was in town and hotel rooms were scarce."We started looking around our apartment and had all this extra space in our living room and our bedrooms," Gebbia said.They also had three air mattresses. Gebbia and Chesky decided to offer their extra space to conference attendees who had yet to find a place to stay, and they threw in a free breakfast. "We had this concept ... of an 'air' bed and breakfast," said Gebbia, now Airbnb's chief product officer. Hewill be speaking at the Real Estate Connect conference in San Francisco next week.Gebbia and Chesky set up a website and spread the word through design blogs. Emails from conference attendees needing lodging poured in. The roommates chose three, and the idea for Airbnb was born. [Read the full article] Social media presents an opportunity for connecting directly to an audience via a variety of social channels. But for multi-office brokerages and franchises there's an added challenge: How do you keep the message consistent to customers?If each office or agent is out there on individual Facebook pages, then the possibility for inconsistent messaging and off-brand communication is a definite possibility.This is especially true in an industry like real estate, where every agent is, in effect, an individual brand (that's why their picture is always bigger than the company logo on their websites).And most innovative agents aren't likely to wait around for the office to put together a social media strategy.On the flip side, maintaining all of these social channels is work. It takes time to source and create content to share with an audience. Facebook, Twitter and other social channels are a beast that needs constant feeding and constant content. [Read the full article] Editor's note: This continually updated list, powered by app-ranking site TopAppCharts.com, displays the most popular free and paid contacts management apps for the iPhone, based on a search of the keyword "contacts" at TopAppCharts.com:All rights reserved. This content may not be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, in part or in whole, without written permission of Inman News.Use of this content without permission is a violation of federal copyright law.Editor's note: This continually updated list, powered by app-ranking site TopAppCharts.com, displays the most popular free and paid contacts management apps for the iPhone, based on a search of the keyword "contacts" at TopAppCharts.com:All rights reserved. This content may not be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, in part or in whole, without written permission of Inman News.Use of this content without permission is a violation of federal copyright law. [Read the full article] 
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