Howard Hanna Promotes 5700 REALTORS on Realtor.com

Today’s real estate broker faces some difficult decisions when it comes to online advertising. The choices are often predicated upon what your competition is doing; what sellers demand; traffic and leads generated by your website or franchise website; website owner terms of use; who gets the lead; who pays – agent or broker. It is really quite a mess. It is so bad, that many large firms have walked away from it entirely and leave it up to the agent. Other firms have taken the proverbial bull by the horn and worked hard to market listings online is a very [...]

Broker Owned Portal

I have had a lot of interesting conversations with Associations of REALTORS, Broker groups, MLSs and REALTORS about portals. The same conversation has gone on for years. Used properly, they can be productive tools for online marketing. Used poorly, they can be a problem. A chief concern among brokers is that they do not participate in the revenue from the success that portals have. Simply stated, brokers understand that content has value and they recognize that others are realizing that value on the backs of their data assets. Feel free to agree or disagree. Real estate brokers around the world [...]

Building Support Into Your Software

Technology companies are constantly battling usability in real estate. Among our user ranks, we find a great human challenge – the 55-year-old real estate professional. This is the customer. There are some firms that do it right, and others that do it wrong. I recently saw a great example of software done right, and it is worth sharing. The example illustrates how you can improve software usability by putting help options immediately next to software fields and button functionality to explain them to the user. One of the most difficult software solutions for usability in real estate is the listing [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:24:05-07:00June 24th, 2014|Main category, MLS Insights|0 Comments

Top 5 Articles of the Week

WAV Group partners, Mike Audet, Marilyn Wilson, and Victor Lund are founders of RE Technology and RETechnology.com. Today that site reaches 750,000 real estate agents and brokers through partnerships with more than 90 MLSs who deliver subscriptions to RE Technology as a member benefit. Each week, RE Technology publishes a notification to MLSs that lists the top 5 most heavily viewed articles of the week. This list goes out to our MLS partners who may, in turn, republish the articles in their own newsletter, blog, or develop content ideas for their training or communications programs. Below is the RE Technology [...]

Move, Inc. Combats Attack on its Website Services To Restore Operations to Customers and Consumers

SAN JOSE, Calif., June 19, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Move, Inc., (NASDAQ:MOVE), a leading provider of online real estate services, reports that it is continuing to combat the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which has interrupted its websites' operations since it began mid-day June 17. Move's technical team is working around-the-clock with the Prolexic division of Akamai Technologies, Inc., a leading DDoS mitigation service provider; other Internet security experts; and its network service providers to mitigate the attack and quickly restore operations. In connection with the attack, Move received a ransom demand, which it did not respond to. DDoS attacks [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:24:05-07:00June 20th, 2014|Main category, MLS Insights, Press Releases|0 Comments

Homesnap Pro Now Free to All MLSs for 12 Months

An article from RIS Media Homesnap, the real estate app that enables users to “snap any home to find out all about it,” has announced that its agent ­only version, Homesnap Pro,is now free to all multiple listing services (MLSs) for the first 12 months. Homesnap Pro combines agent­ only MLS data with an award­ winning mobile app, arming real estate professionals with the power of their MLS while they are in the field. Any MLS that wants to make Homesnap Pro available to all its agents can now do so for free for 12months. Homesnap also announced that The [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:24:05-07:00June 20th, 2014|Main category|0 Comments

Top 5 Articles of the Week

WAV Group partners, Mike Audet, Marilyn Wilson, and Victor Lund are founders of RE Technology and RETechnology.com. Today that site reaches 750,000 real estate agents and brokers though partnerships with more than 90 MLSs who deliver subscriptions to RE Technology as a member benefit. Each week, RE Technology publishes a notification to MLSs that lists the top 5 most heavily viewed articles of the week. This list goes out to our MLS partners who may, in turn, republish the articles in their own newsletter, blog, or develop content ideas for their training or communications programs. Below is the RE Technology [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:24:05-07:00June 17th, 2014|Main category|0 Comments

Coming Soon Listings On Zillow

The cat is out of the bag. Zillow has gone where no MLS has gone before. They have embraced the broker and agent demand for pre-marketing listings. They are entering a place where Zillow will have listing content before listings become available. Consumers are going to love it, brokers and agents are going to love it, and MLSs are going to hate it. The program is called Coming Soon, and allows brokers and agents to market listings on Zillow up to 30 days before publishing it in the MLS. Clean lines and business rules are the cornerstones of the MLS [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:24:05-07:00June 13th, 2014|Main category|3 Comments

Euro Net Privacy Calls Brokers to Action

I have often been heard shouting about consumer privacy in real estate. Brokers and agents toss listing content onto the web with little care for their ability to take it down. If you ask a seller if they want their home advertised online with a dozen or a hundred photos of every quaint nook and cranny of their home – they shout a jubilant YES! If you ask a home buyer if they want the photos of their daughter’s new bedroom published on 200 real estate websites, they scream a resounding NO! Brokers have not faced any legal action regarding [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:24:09-07:00June 13th, 2014|Main category, Marketing, MLS Insights|0 Comments

Technology Self Audit For Real Estate Companies

If you are a mega broker, with thousands of agents, you will have an IT department that watches over your software and technology infrastructure.  If you are a small or medium size broker, that chore usually falls to you, much like it does for us, in our consulting company.  We watch real estate technology on a daily basis and advise some of the best technology companies in the business on how to improve their product’s user interface, how to put together marketing and communication plans and many other services, and even for us, this is a daunting task.  Every time [...]

A New Way for MLSs to look at Mobile

You know the old expression, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”? Well, MRIS has taken that to heart and created a new approach for mobile that may be worth taking a look at. Their key goal with any of their online marketing efforts is to generate leads and listing exposure for their customers.  They work hard with their site MRIShomes.com to do that and they work hard to make sure their prospecting solutions within their MLS system are effective, too. Now one of the largest MLSs in the country has added a new mobile tool to their quest to [...]

The Triad of Consumers, People, and REALTORS

There were a few very interesting articles in the Washington Post this week. Unlike industry commentary about the Zestimate, this one took place in public. The Washington Post stirred the pot a bit, as only the politically divided would do so naturally. The battle was epic. At 5:30 AM, David Howell of McNearney Associates published a piece titled “How Accurate is Zillow’s Zestimate? Not very, says one Washington-area agent. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/where-we-live/wp/2014/06/10/how-accurate-is-zillows-zestimate-not-very-says-one-washington-area-agent/ At 5:31, Stan Humphries, Zillow Chief Economist responded in his article titles “How Accurate is the Zestimate? Zillow says the tool is helpful when used the right way.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/where-we-live/wp/2014/06/10/how-accurate-is-the-zestimate-zillow-says-the-tool-is-helpful-when-used-the-right-way/ You [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:24:10-07:00June 12th, 2014|MLS Insights, Press Releases|2 Comments