If you did not have an opportunity to attend the Inman News conference, Connect - you missed a great session titled The Future of the MLS. The video of that session is reprinted here courtesy of Inman News
If you have had the fun experience of losing a drive anytime you know how frustrating it is as well as potentially damaging to your business. I have lost a number of drives over the years on PCs but luckily my data was backed up or the content was not that important. Then, I lost my drive I was using to back up my PCs and due to needing to free up some space, I didn’t still have a copy of some of the files on my PC. What to do? Call the Drive Doctor! The good news is there [...]
Part Five of a Five part series “Roadmap to using VOWs in your business.” In this fifth of a series of five articles about Virtual Office Websites or VOW’s we are going to discuss the ways to use a VOW to work more effectively with past clients. Many REALTORS fail to stay connected to clients they have already done transactions with. Evidence of this is borne out in NARs 2008 Homebuyer and Seller survey. 9 out of 10 consumers would use their agent in a future transaction but only 1 in 10 use the agent again for buying and only [...]
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I joined twitter in June, 2007. Here is my first tweet. Trying to figure out why Brad Inman has selected a guy like Hugh MacLeod, a self professed twitter-head to be the key note speaker Connect1:42 PM Jun 26th, 2007 from web In retrospect - I Brad was onto something very early on, but oddly enough he did not post to Twitter until April 18th, 2008. We posted a very successful post here on the blog called Twitterstate: twitter for real estate. The post is indexed on the first page of google, yahoo and other search engines for the keyword [...]
This is the beginning of an article found on Blown Mortgage that frames this discussion quite well…. “Stimulus funds need to be infused into the economy as quickly and efficiently as possible in order to stimulate growth,” said David Williams, leader of Deloittes Financial Advisory Services practice. “However, the legislative process as well as the publics desire for transparency surrounding how stimulus funds are allocated do not bode well for getting stimulus funds into the economy quickly.” That isnt happening, according to the Wall Street Journal. In fact, the Wall Street Journal reports the largest banks receiving Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, funds actually offered [...]
As a consultant we are afforded the opportunity to look deeply into the life of technology companies. WAV Group has structured sales departments, restructured help desks, co-authored product roadmaps and evaluated code bases. Even with the best product and the best people in the industry, the biggest challenge to running a software company is setting goals and staying on track. Project Management is the cornerstone of this endevor and among the best products is At Task. I read this press release this morning with interest when learning that Real Estate Technology supplier Wolfnet, developers of MLSfinder IDX and other products [...]
Many people have scorned Real Estate agents for being laggards in relationship to adopting technology and moving offline advertising buget online. A new study shows that they are actually leaders and probably leaning more toward online spending. Today, our friend Gordon Borrell from Borrell Associates released stunning news regarding how Small to Mid-Sized businesses (SMB) view the internet and what their online spending budgets are like. According to the study, the average SMB spends 11% fo thier ad budget online. Real Estate agents spend 47% of their ad budget online! Take that! The Borrell report looked at $16.6 million SMBs [...]
Part Four of a Five part series “Roadmap to using VOWs in your business.” In this fourth of a series of five articles about Virtual Office Websites or VOW’s we are going to discuss the ways to use a VOW to work more effectively with home sellers. The value of a home is exactly equal to the amount a willing seller and a willing buyer agree to at a given point in time. It can sometimes be difficult or impossible to convince a seller of a realistic asking price, especially if they purchased their home within the past few years. [...]
Thanks to @bhgre_sherry aka Sherry Chris of Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate for sharing a new website called wefollow.com. Following people on twitter has always been a bit random for me. I mostly follow people who publish inforamtion about all things real estate. My twitter goal is to stay in touch with new thoughts, new products, and new thinking that supports progress in the real estate industry. And to a great extent - I am often more likely to only tweet when WAV Group publishes a blog post or whitepaper that I hope folks will enjoy. Thanks to Digg Founder @KevinRose who [...]
I have always been inspired by TED talks and make a point of watching 6 - 10 a month. Today I reviewed a TED talk from Tim Berners-Lee - the inventor of the world wide web in 1989. He drafted the first standards for HTML, HTTP, URL structures, etc. Here we are, 20 years later (incidentially I graduated from Shattuck-St.Mary's highschool in 1989). My how things have changed. Tim's first vision was for sharing documents (web pages or web paper) on the internet. His new vision is for sharing RAW Linked Data. In the wake of the NAR/DOJ settlement that [...]
The MLS industry is in an extremely tenuous position today, feeling pressures from 3rd party vendors, state associations, neighboring MLSs and declining membership. Like any business channel, multiple entities in the MLS world are competing for a finite number of customers and business space. To make things even more difficult, a percentage of MLS leadership changes from year to year with election of new officers and directors. MLS staff has to adjust to different leadership styles while often having to re-educate the new regime on where things stand. It can be a difficult scenario for staff and the elected leadership. How can an MLS establish continuity [...]
