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IPJ Interview: Google's Sam Sebastian

Google’s director of business-to-business markets Sam Sebastian wants to set the record straight. In an interview with the IPJ, he talks about what the search giant is doing in real estate—and what it is not doing.

At the recent Inman conference, you said Google doesn’t have an “evil plan” for real estate. Can you give us a quick sense of how Google views the market?

No different than any other vertical we work in. The main goal is simply to ensure the user experience—whatever a user is typing into the Google query box—that we get to them and in front of them what they are probably looking for.

So the example in real estate is in the beginning—five or six years ago—when folks were typing in ‘homes in Evanston,’ ‘homes in Dallas,’ etc. Often times they would see a bunch of advertisements for an individual agent or for lead aggregators or lead generation companies advertising, when in fact, the consumer was looking for homes for sale in Dallas or Evanston. That was why we went the listings acquisition route and then tried through a form of SEO to present a lot of that listings data back.

It’s a pretty simple and I think innocent approach of, if a consumer is looking for something our goal is to try to give it right back to them as quickly as possible and take them off to the best source, which is what we do on Google.

What’s your reaction to the fear and other criticism in the industry?

It was funny, the reason why I really wanted to do that Inman one-on-one was that we could set the record straight on what we are doing and what we are not doing, as much as we can talk about. And I think we did that.

But in reality there were a couple of blogs that misquoted what I said. I said that in general Google does about an acquisition a month. And someone said, “Sebastian is looking to acquire one or two real estate companies a month.” So then for the next three weeks that’s all I ever saw on the blogs. And, in fact, that’s not what we’re doing. It was simply a misquote.

The real estate business has always been interested in new players coming in, or the changing dynamics of the space. Ten years ago Microsoft was the lion coming over the hill and was going to change the whole game. And then it was all of the MLS’s and Realtor.com. Then when we came out with Google Base and it was Google.

So regardless of its Google or whether it’s somebody else, there’s always an interest. And the folks in real estate just like to talk about it. And over the last couple of years I think Google gets included in that list.

It’s often characterized that Google’s relationship in the past has been primarily with smaller firms, is that accurate?

I don’t think anymore. Real estate is your typical long tail, where you have a few very, very large players and then it quickly goes—there are over a million agents in the category. So when you look at just sheer numbers, we have a lot of small broker offices and individual agents that advertise or have various different products with Google. But we also have always worked with some of the larger brokers as well.

So I think it’s just kind of a numbers thing. But what I was trying to characterize at the Inman conference was that when we started the company and the service we weren’t out there doing these big exclusive arrangements and agreements and ad deals with the select few at the top of that arch. It was kind of a democratized playing field where an individual agent could buy the same keyword and could spend as much or as little as they want on an individual keyword as a largest corporate broker. And there weren’t, I think, as many opportunities in the past that presented that opportunity. Because of that I think early on there were a lot of entrepreneurial agents who took advantage of that.

I think over time we’ve seen more of the larger, more established, traditional brokers who in the past always did newspaper advertising, they started to better understand it as well and invest in the area and engage with us.

How would you characterize discussions with the larger brokers?

They’re great. Anyone we talk to, it’s always funny, usually in big industry events or press there’s always this big defensiveness or there’s concern. But as soon as we talk to any of the prospective customers or partners, they say this is great, we love working with Google and we’ll get you a feed of our listings because you’re going to get us more free traffic and it’s more ways for us to expose the listing for our seller and our agent. I think the more and more we focused on talking and getting out there and talking to the individual players, then it kind of steamrolled and folks syndicated their listings through us.

I think the other thing that happened at about the same time was the whole listings debate opened up. In the early days, no one would give their listings to anyone other than MLS or Realtor.com. Then it slowly started opening up. You had folks giving their listings to newspaper Web sites, to the Trulias of the world, Zillow, Yahoo and various different players. And then Google was just another check box on their data form.

How big is your real estate effort?

We don’t really talk about revenue or people we have focused on different efforts. Within our sales organization, we focus on seven, eight, nine different types of verticals. So it could be retail, it could be travel, it could be finance. I run the local practice and real estate is one of the sub-sectors within local, so we focus on it from that perspective.

Our goal is to support customers as best we can and staff to those levels.

Can you give me some idea of whether that is grown or how it fits into that mix compared to a few years ago?

I wouldn’t say it has grown either dramatically up or down compared to the overall growth of Google. I mean, clearly it’s grown because Google has grown significantly over the past handful of years. But I wouldn’t say real estate has grown abnormally either way.

Can you give me an idea of how many MLSs participate?

We don’t talk about that. Again we work with any type of listing provider. We have MLS customers who send in feeds. We have got individual listing syndicator types who send in fees. Individual agents that upload their own. For sale by owners can go in and put their own listings on. Big brokerages. Franchises. We don’t lean toward one in particular. We just try to open the platform and if people want to participate they will. And we feel good. It’s going in the right direction, let’s put it that way.