About Steve Cook

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So far Steve Cook has created 15 blog entries.

Are You Market-Smart? Prove it with a Branded Market Report

Never has so much information been available to consumers on the residential real estate economy, especially on market trends important to buyers and sellers.  Buyers and sellers are self-educating themselves about market conditions long before they hire a real estate agent. This wealth of information can be confusing and even contradictory, proving once again that there’s a big difference between information and knowledge.  Perhaps that’s why consumers want agents who are as smart—or smarter—than they are about market trends.

By |2018-08-12T08:40:02-07:00October 3rd, 2017|Main category|0 Comments
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BrokerSumo’s Simplified Commission Management Platform Helps Brokers and Teams Retain Top Agents

Sacramento, California—August 1, 2017— BrokerSumo, a leading back office, commission management and accounting platform for real estate brokerages and agent teams, is helping smaller brokers and real estate teams compete successfully for top producers by simplifying the management of commissions to make sure they are paid accurately and promptly. As real estate agents change firms faster than ever,[1] keeping accurate and current commission data has required spreadsheets and manual calculations, and even the largest agencies with IT staff and full-time accounting support struggle to keep agents happy.  Small, independent brokers and real estate teams have been at a competitive disadvantage for attracting [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:22:43-07:00August 1st, 2017|Main category|0 Comments
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CoreLogic Upgrades Trestle

Close to 100 multiple listing organizations representing approximately 500,000 subscribers have signed up for Trestle IRVINE, Calif., March 22, 2017— CoreLogic® (NYSE: CLGX), a leading global property information, analytics and data-enabled solutions provider, today announced the launch and immediate availability of an upgraded version of Trestle™, the national data marketplace created by CoreLogic to address the fundamental data access problems that real estate brokers, technology providers and multiple listing organizations struggle with every day. The upgrades support core contracting and data distribution via the Trestle platform. The endto-end workflow makes it easier for technology providers to establish business relationships with [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:22:54-07:00March 22nd, 2017|Press Releases|0 Comments
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InstaView 3.0 Introduces First Structured Data to Virtual Tours

Independence, Ohio— January 23, 2017. This week InstaView 3.0, the newest release of Property Panorama’s category-leading virtual tour platform, became the first virtual tour to publish Structured Data. Structured Data allows search engines like Google to render Agent Profiles, Office Profiles, Open Houses, and Property Detail summaries within search results, dramatically improving the search optimization of real estate listings. "Structured Data makes it easier to find and deliver information and is driving more consumer engagement with our new InstaView tours. InstaView tours are already receiving six times more unique visitors than any other listing marketing tool," said Property Panorama CEO [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:22:56-07:00January 24th, 2017|Marketing, Virtual Office Website Series|0 Comments
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The Power of Sharing

Today, many leading news sites and blogs welcome by-lined posts and articles from respected professionals willing to share valuable knowledge and insights with their readers.  Good, free content helps boost their SEO, readership, and prestige. For companies who sell to brokers, agents, lenders, and consumers, the explosion of real estate blogs locally as well as nationally creates unprecedented opportunities to build brands, advance careers and position products and services.  The only cost involved might be the time of a professional writer experienced in the residential real estate to turn concepts into great copy. The publishers who operate these sites make [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:01-07:00November 17th, 2016|Marketing, Strategic Planning|0 Comments
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The Battle of Consumer Profiles

Long the bible of consumer data in residential real estate, NAR’s venerable Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers now has competition. With the 2016 Profile, which was released on Halloween and is based on a massive survey of both buyers who have participated in recent residential transactions, NAR celebrated 35 years of annual publication.  When the Profile was launched in 1981, Ronald Reagan was inaugurated for his first term, “Raiders of the Lost Ark” opened in theaters and the median value of a home was $55,300.[1] in recent years, the Profile has been the source of information that defines residential real [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:01-07:00November 17th, 2016|Broker Technology Research, Suveys and Research|0 Comments
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Down on the Farm with Data

The most famous mash-up of valuation data and marketing applications was Zillow’s “Zestimate,” the centerpiece of Zillow’s national launch in 2006.  Zillow’s PR folks at the time positioned their new tool aggressively.  I was VP of Public Affairs at NAR at the time, and I will never forget the phone calls we received from national reporters suggesting that maybe now consumers would no longer need Realtors to sell their homes because they could find out their home values online. Though the early Zestimates needed further refinement, there’s no doubt that the launch was a tremendous PR success.  Automated valuation models [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:03-07:00October 19th, 2016|Broker Technology Research, Broker-Agent Information|0 Comments
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Six Ways to Get The Most From PR Wire Services

Public relations wire services like Businesswire, Marketwired or PR Newswire pre-date the Internet, but they hardly resemble their early versions.  Back in the day, they were born to feed releases directly to wire terminals in news media news rooms and investment news services like Dow Jones and Bloomberg.  A major source of their business was—and still is—publicly held companies required by securities laws to release news that materially affects their stocks.  They also have a long history with political campaigns in need of a way to reach news outlets quickly. The online world has created a greatly expanded role for [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:03-07:00October 19th, 2016|Press Releases|0 Comments
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Five Surefire Ways to Keep Your News Releases From Being Used

Why does your news release meet with silence while your competitor makes headlines regularly? There could be more than one answer to that question, but the place to start is the quality of your news releases. Some basics: News releases differ from advertisements, where someone is paying for the time or space to say something, and blog posts, where you can also say pretty much what you want because it’s your website. In both cases, readers know that they are reading an opinion that may be factual but lacks the credibility that comes from being published by a respected outlet [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:05-07:00September 14th, 2016|Press Releases|0 Comments
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What Does Your Website Say About You?

Websites are the public faces of real estate professionals.  No other single marketing tool comes close to equalling the importance of a  website.  They deliver the first images and words about an agent or a brokerage that prospective clients and customers see. If a site doesn’t connect with  consumers in a matter of seconds; that first impression could be a real estate professional’s last chance to win a new account.  Sites that consistently fail to be compelling can do serious damage to a perfectly competent real estate practice. Yet hundreds of thousands of agents and brokers publish sites that miss [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:07-07:00August 16th, 2016|Broker Technology Research|0 Comments
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Social Networks vs. Local Expertise: A New Challenge for Brokerages

The opinions and experiences of friends and acquaintances have always shaped the way people think about buying, owning and selling homes.  New research suggests that the social networks that influence attitudes towards real estate decision-making today are more likely to be national, not local, and the consequences could be serious.  Thus, consumers are making critical decisions about buying, selling, owning or renting in part based not on conditions in the markets where they live but on the experiences of friends who may live across the continent. The new way people think about real estate presents real challenges to real estate [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:08-07:00August 16th, 2016|Broker Technology Research|0 Comments
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Mastering Market Literacy

Perhaps the most valuable lesson that real estate consumers learned from the housing crash was that home values can fall as well as rise.  More than seven million families lost their homes to foreclosures and short sales; a brutal wake-up calls that though homeownership is safer than most investments it still involves risk.  Today’s buyers are very aware that a single wrong decision or factors beyond their control can cost them dearly. That is one reason 90 percent of today’s buyers think it is very important to have an agent with knowledge of the real estate market.[1] Successful listing presentations [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:11-07:00July 21st, 2016|Marketing|0 Comments
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