Value of Buyers Agent Diminishing, Study Reveals

WAV Group has had the pleasure of working with the Houston Association of REALTOR®’s Consumer Research Panel for over a year now. The panel has helped the organization uncover many meaningful insights that have helped share technology strategies, advocacy efforts, and educational efforts. Today, the Houston Association of REALTORS® released the findings of their “DIY: Do It Yourself” consumer research panel study. The purpose of the study was to gauge how important Houston area consumers feel agents are to the transaction.  The survey, which was fielded to the 7,000 consumers that are now a part of the industry’s largest consumer [...]

MRIS Seeking Seasoned and Strategic Director of Marketing

Director of Marketing, Communications, Events & Education Position and Company Overview Metropolitan Regional Information Systems, Inc. (MRIS, Inc.), located in Rockville, MD, is the largest real estate information service in North America serving the information needs of nearly 40,000 real estate professionals in the Mid-Atlantic. The company helps facilitate over $60B in residential real estate transactions each year and provide breakthrough technology designed to create value and innovation for the real estate industry. The company offers a leading edge suite of real estate marketing tools and technologies to its customers available both via subscription and a la carte purchases. MRIS [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:24:13-07:00April 25th, 2014|Clients, Main category, Marketing, Our Services|0 Comments

Broker AVMs

One of the core services of brokerages and their agents is pricing property. In the olden days, it was less scientific than it is right now. On an individual property, agents deliver CMAs or BPOs. Today, using MLS data, brokers are now automating their services. Sometimes this service is called Automated Valuation Modeling, or AVMs. There is a healthy and robust marketplace for AVMs in the financial services industry. Banks want to know the debt-to-equity ratio on homes they hold mortgages on. They also want to use AVMs as a method to validate home appraisals. The government uses AVMs to [...]

Technology Game Changers

There were two announcements made this week that I think will have some pretty significant impacts on real estate. Wolfnet announced that they are now fully live on the national IDX data feed for Canada. Moreover, every application that Wolfnet offers has now been tailored to the needs of Canadian real estate. Wolfnet has long been a leader in property search solutions in America, notably serving search solutions to every Keller Williams agent in addition to many other brands. Now Wolfnet’s Canadian customer will have access to the same benefits. The second announcement came from W&R Studios, makers of Cloud [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:24:13-07:00April 17th, 2014|Broker Technology Research, Main category|0 Comments

WAV Group Releases Broker Technology Adoption and Satisfaction Study

WAV Group partner Victor Lund is pleased to release the results of our recent survey to measure what technologies brokers have adopted and how satisfied they are with each. The survey also measured how likely a firm is to replace a technology supplier in 2014. In order to understand how technology plays a role by size of firm, answers were collected in ten groups ranging from firms with 1-9 agents to firms with more than 1500 agents. This report is provided to the industry with our compliments. WAV Group performs this type of research across the real estate industry to [...]

Calculating ROI on Syndication to Publishers

WAV Group provides enterprise brokers with a monitoring service to measure their listing syndication strategy. It is a thorny and emotional topic where risks and rewards are balanced delicately. Undoubtedly, this week brokers who do syndicate to publisher websites are reviewing their reports from last month. Here are a few things you should look at. Listing Views Obviously, you want to know the number of times that your listing was viewed on each publisher website. The easiest way to view listings by the publisher is to look at reports from your listing distributer – like Listhub, Point2, reDataVault, etc. If [...]

Protect Broker Data with Anti-Scraping

If you are a broker or an MLS, you must treat your data as an asset. By and large, our industry does a great job of protecting the front door of data access, but the back door of data scraping is wide open. It begs the question, if you care about data protection, why are you only scrutinizing the legitimate data users without hunting for the nefarious and illegitimate data thieves? Thieves that want to steal data send robots out onto the internet to do their pickpocketing, and they do it quite well. Reviewing Distil Networks’ reports with Matt Cohen [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:24:14-07:00April 9th, 2014|MLS Insights|0 Comments

Early Success Can Be Tricky – Take Care!

We work with all types of companies and organizations and have the opportunity to see many different approaches to successfully delivering products and services.  Successful companies have many similarities and when you look into them closely you see certain constants.  These companies almost always have strong leadership, values and a clear vision that is understood by everyone that works there.  When you look back at their evolution you see a company that stayed on track to their core mission.  You’ll see a company that understood the basics and paid attention to detail, their customers, what the market was asking for [...]

“Full Service” Starts With Serving Your Agents

Agents need help. I guess that I did not truly understand how much until a series of events collided this week. The first lob was the announcement that Century 21 is launching a new program that allows agents to subscribe to a "Marketing Assistant" program for $300 per year. The marketing assistant will be fully trained on all of the services offered on the brand's Century21Online portal. In launching the portal, Century 21 CMO made a prophetic statement: "The last thing that agents need today is another tool." She is right. Outside of core technology solutions, agents can be heavily [...]

Transaction Management Update

WAV Group performed Transaction Management research in 2005 and in 2009. The goal of the research was to survey trends in Transaction Management adoption. On Wednesday of this week, RE Technology will be hosting a candid conversation with DocuSign’s lead Transaction Management Vice President, Glenn Shimkus. There will be a 30 minute discussion of today’s Transaction Management challenges and a 15 minute overview of their new enterprise solution (They have had an agent solution for some time now). Here is the webinar information – please join us! Brokers: Accelerate Your Business with DocuSign for Real Estate RE Technology invites you [...]

Top 5 Articles of the Week

As you may or may not know, RE Technology was founded by the WAV Group partners to support the role of MLSs and Associations in delivering a wide array of information and education about real estate technology. On May 5th, the company turns three years old! Since 2011, we have been able to deliver over 100,000 pages of valuable information that helps practitioners learn about technology and the companies that provide technology services to power their business.  Each week, RE Technology sends a report to more than 4500 executives and staff of the nations MLSs and Associations of REALTORS® offering [...]

Getty Images for Brokers

If you are like most brokers, you have received at least one threatening letter from Getty Images for using one of their images. Good news is that Getty is now allowing people to use their images for FREE! I guess all of that lawyering worked out. Or, perhaps they realized that chasing everyone for using their images was more costly than it was worth. I do not know of anyone who did anything other than ignoring the notices. In any case, Getty has changed their business model. They now allow anyone to embed their photos, but you need to do [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:24:15-07:00March 19th, 2014|Broker-Agent Information, Main category|1 Comment