In a video announcement released yesterday, Tom Hosack, President and CEO and Broker of Record of Northwood Realty announced the acquisition of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices The Preferred Realty, creating what may be the largest real estate company in the greater Pittsburgh marketplace. The combined company forecasts more listings, more closings and more sales volume than any other competitor.
CoreLogic’s strategic partnership team has been very busy lately. Last month they introduced a relationship with Homes.com for MLS consumer websites and with Prospects for agent CRM. In an announcement today, they have added Elm Street Technology’s Elevate brokerage solution to the mix of offerings.
Last week I was introduced to a new application while working on a project with a client. The application is Airtable and has changed my view on using the standard spreadsheet and database tools.
At WAV Group, we like to look under the hood at what the top property search sites in America are doing to engage consumers and boost performance. In some cases, we work with the site owner and have access to their analytics (ie Google Analytics or other). In other cases, we use benchmarking tools like Hitwise and ComScore to get a glimpse into what these top performers may be doing. The results are interesting.
When Daniel Castro from the Internet Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) took the stage at Inman in New York on January, we all thought he was going to provide an academic view of our industry and provide us with some food for thought. What we didn’t know was that he was going to tell us how the consumer needs Open Data because we have somehow been holding back on them. We also didn’t know at the time that the ITIF had been promoting Zillow for many years. Castro published an articles on the Federal Government’s Economic and Statistics Administration website featuring a promotional video from Zillow in 2015 entitled “Open Data Impact: How Zillow Uses Open Data to Level the Playing Field for Consumers.”
If you have traveled abroad, you have undoubtedly experienced the discomfort of communicating in a foreign language. I can tell you that in hotel speak, a salon is not a suite. The language barrier can create all kinds of misunderstandings. Where I see this happening frequently in real estate is the amount of geek speak that is in the board room.
I look at technology products every day. I do not want to lay any hate on any particular company. But, I have observed a number of company brands who offer real estate technology that have not differentiated the company name from the product name. For clarity, Apple is a company brand, iPhone is a product, and X is a product version. Kleenex is an example of a company brand name and product name that are the same.
It’s only been a week since GDPR has become a law and we need to start this week’s discussion with a simple question. How many of you thought the GDPR was only about privacy policy change emails and subscription notifications we have received over the last few weeks? Well, that was just the beginning.
It was exciting to be invited to interview to become part of the Forbes Real Estate Council last year. The biggest attraction for me was the opportunity to be published on Forbes.com. Forbes, for me, is the gold standard when it comes to business publishing.
The Hilton Head MLS is small, but mighty. They take their job of serving the brokers in their community very seriously.
It was a great week at NAR Midyear to re-connect with fellow colleagues, have sonorous discussions about the industry, and – of course – chitchat about the current controversial brew-ha-ha that seems to occur around these types of events. Over the last month – especially last week – I had the pleasure of talking to many real estate technology companies who provide products and services to brokers and agents. When the discussion would lead to back office architecture, the discussion was segmented into two groups.
Imagine a world where every real estate agent, broker and franchise in the nation promoted their real estate mobile app to consumers. The app is white-label branded to the agent, broker, and franchise offering direct access to every MLS listing without any competitive ads. That is the way it would need to work. Guess what, we have it. You have it. Our industry has it. Today.
