Over the weekend I received a marketing email from a real estate company advertising their new mobile app. I didn’t download it.

Nowadays, every company and brand seems to have a mobile app. If you don’t already have one for your organization, I bet many of you have thought about creating one. This is natural given how profound the shift to mobile has been.

But I can’t help but feel like we are overestimating the kind of attention that many of these apps will receive. App usage is highly concentrated. We’ll spend hours on Instagram, but almost every other app in existence gets ignored.

I love how marketer Seth Godin puts it: “the two scarce elements of our economy are trust and attention.” Attention is not scalable. Each of us have a finite amount of attention to give. And there’s lots of competition for it.

At the same time – to borrow Godin’s thought process – a lot of people will sacrifice trust for the sake of attention. We overpromise because we become desperate. I mean, if you think about it, every company or organization is trying to figure out how to get you to pay attention to them.

But I’d like to think that trust can also help you garner attention. Once I trust someone or some organization, I’m more likely to give them the time of day. They’ve earned it. And I feel like that’s where things are headed in today’s information economy.

Trust and attention. Think about it. They’re pretty powerful things, no matter how you spend your days.

A new startup out of San Francisco, called Rentberry, has just launched, allowing tenants to openly bid on rentals in the city. Think of it like a rental auction. Landlord lists property. And then tenants compete for it by submitting offers. 

Not surprisingly – especially since we’re talking about San Francisco – there’s concern that this will do nothing but drive up the city’s already high rents.

But I think the key detail is that the platform will make public the total number of applicants. As a tenant, it’ll even tell you how your credit score compares to those of the other bidders (presumably, so you can gauge how aggressive you might need to be on your bid).

The real estate industry is rife with information asymmetries. So anything that improves transparency is something that catches my attention. If you’ve ever bought or rented a place in a competitive market, you know that one of the worst things you can hear from the broker is: “We have another offer.” (Even worse: “We have 12 other offers.”)

It’s frustrating because it now means you’re competing. But even more frustrating is the fact that you have no way of assessing whether or not that statement is fact or fiction. Yes, I realize that there’s a code of ethics that’s supposed be followed, but you and I both know that games are played all the time.

In fact, I think someone could easily make a full career out of just trying to correct the information asymmetries inherent in the real estate industry. Who knows what sort of impact they might be having on the market. So I’m excited to see how things pan out for Rentberry.

One of the things I try to be aware of is the language that I use to describe things. Because the words and conventions we use can impact how we perceive things and they can also reinforce certain inherent biases. (I have a good friend who is an expert on this topic, so he has heightened my awareness.)

For instance, I find that we tend to equate home and house. In other words, we’ll use the descriptors detached house and detached home interchangeably. And when we say that someone is a homeowner, it can sometimes, or often, mean that they have purchased a house.

The same does not seem to be true for apartments and condominiums. Rarely do I hear people say that they live in an apartment home or a condominium home. It’s just an apartment or condo.

This is meaningful because the emotionally charged word is home. It signifies a subjective (and usually comforting) experience, whereas the word house, I would argue, represents a building typology. And so by conflating the two, I often feel that we’re promoting a cultural bias that privileges houses as the ideal building typology. A true home is a house.

The other word that I often think about in my business is unit. When we talk about multi-family buildings we often – and I’m definitely guilty of this – refer to each suite as a unit. We’ll say things like: “This is a 200 unit building and the unit mix is as follows…”

Again, I am absolutely guilty of this. But at the same time, I often think about how this word, unit, is probably the furthest thing away from a home. Who wants to live in a unit? That doesn’t sound very pleasant. In fact, it sounds clinical. People want to live in a home. Now that’s a word with positive psychological associations.

And so by reducing each home to a unit, I think it could be making us lose sight of the fact that each suite will eventually be lived in by someone who will then make it their home. Yes they can be considered a customer who are paying for a product (a great place to live), but I don’t think that should take anything away from its homeyness. 

I live in a condominium and it is my home. What about you?

Image: Flickr