Will the Last PC User Please Turn Out the Lights?

Mobile has gone global and everyone from Wired Magazine, Gartner, Forrester Research, and Barron’s is writing about it. The headline is almost always the same – “THE DEATH OF THE PC HAS NOT BEEN GREATLY EXAGGERATED.” The real headline is that PC sales have been negative since 2011 and the 2015 numbers showed the largest drop in sales volume in history. Before you get overwhelmed with the fear of PCs going away, it will take a long time for that to happen. Shipments of new PCs globally is still running at a pace of around 65 million to 70 million [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:20-07:00March 25th, 2016|Broker Technology Research, MLS Insights|Comments Off on Will the Last PC User Please Turn Out the Lights?
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Northwood Realty Launches Training Website for Their Agents

About Northwood Northwood Realty is among the largest independent real estate companies in America. They cover multiple states and their 38 offices are focused mainly on the densely populated areas of Western Pennsylvania and Eastern Ohio. They are a full service firm with 974 agents, offering residential, finance, relocation, and insurance. Northwood is pioneering a program for agent training that introduces an effective model for other brokers to consider. It’s called Northwood Tech Trainers. About Northwood Trainers Northwood deploys five field trainers to support just under 1000 agents.  The ratio is effectively one trainer to every 200 agents. The field [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:20-07:00March 24th, 2016|Broker Technology Research, Broker-Agent Information, Technology Evaluation|Comments Off on Northwood Realty Launches Training Website for Their Agents
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The Vision of AMP™ Starting to Become a REALITY thanks to Rapattoni!

A couple of years ago, two of our most progressive clients came to RPR with a new vision about how MLS systems could work. They strongly believed that MLS systems should be offered in modules to make it easier and more practical for brokers and agents to be able to choose the MLS interface that works best for them. Tim Dain from the Austin Board of REALTORS® and Walt Baczkowski from the San Francisco Association of REALTORS® both saw the opportunity to de-couple the listing input, search and reporting functions from the database that houses all of the MLS information [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:20-07:00March 24th, 2016|Broker Technology Research, MLS Insights, Press Releases|Comments Off on The Vision of AMP™ Starting to Become a REALITY thanks to Rapattoni!
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Using Market Data to Drive Media Coverage

Are you getting published in your local media? Is your firm shaping the way opinion leaders and real estate consumers view critical issues in your housing market Associations, MLSs, and brokerages have access to the best local data ever available on trends in their local markets. Sales, prices, inventories, time on market—every day real estate professionals interpret these and other data to win the confidence of their customers and clients. You have a significant opportunity to turn market data into news that attracts business and establishes credibility. National data services like RealtyTrac and CoreLogic as well as sites like Realtor.com, [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:20-07:00March 22nd, 2016|Marketing, MLS Insights|Comments Off on Using Market Data to Drive Media Coverage
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Digital Dawn: Amazon is creating the smart house for the rest of us

Late Christmas morning, after the presents were opened, the wrapping discarded and breakfast consumed, my wife sent a text to her real best friend Paige that read, “I have a new best friend!” Paige promptly responded with “Huh?” “Her name is Alexa, as in the new Amazon Echo,” my wife texted back. How lucky am I, as a guy, to have a wife who put at the top of her gift list, a technology item? But more important was her reaction. She genuinely fell in love with Alexa within minutes after turning it on. It was wickedly cool and ridiculously [...]

By |2018-08-14T03:54:30-07:00March 16th, 2016|Broker Technology Research, Main category|Comments Off on Digital Dawn: Amazon is creating the smart house for the rest of us
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LeadingRE, Miami Beach and Marketing Automation

The Fontainebleau in Miami Beach recently hosted LeadingRE. It’s always happens during what I like to think of as the real estate brokerage convention season. Keller Williams, with its Family Reunion, preceded it in New Orleans and RE/MAX R4 followed it in Las Vegas. If you really want to get a feel for the real estate market in America, these conferences are a great place to gauge what is really happening on the ground because the preponderance of attendees are broker-owners. Conferences that target industry leaders or tech companies or the intelligentsia of real estate are great for forward thinking, [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:21-07:00March 16th, 2016|Broker Technology Research, Broker-Agent Information, Main category, Marketing|Comments Off on LeadingRE, Miami Beach and Marketing Automation
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Daniel Gale Sotheby’s International Turns Buyers Into An Asset

About the Firm When outlining broker excellence, it is always helpful to begin by painting a picture of the company that is executing an effective strategy. There are many dimensions to operating a successful brokerage. Daniel Gale Sotheby’s International real estate finds its success by serving consumers along the North Shore of Long Island from Manhasset to the North Fork where they operate 25 offices to support about 850 agents. Real Trends ranks the firm 59th in the Nation across all brokerage for volume, and fourth in America among Sotheby’s franchises. They are among the first brokerage firms in the [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:21-07:00March 16th, 2016|Broker Technology Research, Broker-Agent Information, Clients, Press Releases|Comments Off on Daniel Gale Sotheby’s International Turns Buyers Into An Asset
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Protect Your Content Now

My 13-year-old daughter provided me with a raw lesson in digital rights management yesterday. It is a pretty simple lesson really – do not let others build their business using your content, at your expense. Background Like every 13 year old, Social Media is a thing. 13 is the minimum age to open an account on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Kik, and SnapChat. You need to be 18 for YouTube, but a 13-year-old can sign up with a parent’s permission. For those of you who know me well, you know that my daughter already has a social media following [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:21-07:00March 16th, 2016|Main category, Our Services, Strategic Planning, Twitter for Real Estate|Comments Off on Protect Your Content Now
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Reducing Agent Attrition – Marketing to your Agents

Brokers across America do a great job of promoting their listings to potential home buyers and sellers with attractive flyers, online promotions, open houses, and effective website promotion, not to mention MLS promotion. Most brokers have a well-oiled system for building attractive marketing materials to sell their listings quickly. In my view, there’s a hole in the focus of marketing departments. Very few of the brokerages that we work focus on promoting their OWN brand and service offerings to their OWN agents. Brokers like to complain about the lack of adoption of tools and technologies. They wistfully talk about the [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:21-07:00March 16th, 2016|Broker-Agent Information, Marketing|Comments Off on Reducing Agent Attrition – Marketing to your Agents
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I Didn’t Hire FOUR Listing Agents!

There’s nothing like becoming an ACTUAL customer of a product to give you a different perspective. I have looked at Zillow and other third party sites a gazillion times in my career as a consultant, but it took actually selling a home to really open my eyes. We held onto our home in Buffalo, New York for a long time after moving to California. This year we finally decided to sell it. Once the home was live on third party sites, I became very interested in the agents who were featured on the property. I called each one to experience [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:21-07:00March 16th, 2016|Broker-Agent Information|Comments Off on I Didn’t Hire FOUR Listing Agents!
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IRES® MLS Passes Zillow® In Consumer Engagement

The Internet is the largest free market economy in the world. According to Siri™, 2.954 Billion people use the Internet every month. In the real estate industry, more consumers go to Zillow® than any other single real estate website. But that is changing. Some MLSs like IRES are actually drawing more consumer engagement in their local market and it is making a significant difference to MLS participants. MLSs measure listing engagement with their websites and syndication websites using services like ListHub™ and ListTrac™. These companies either get traffic statistics directly from publishers (like Zillow) or put tracking software on websites that [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:21-07:00March 7th, 2016|Broker Technology Research, MLS Insights, Press Releases|Comments Off on IRES® MLS Passes Zillow® In Consumer Engagement
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When Regional MLSs Go Bad

There are unfortunate consequences that face brokerages and agents when the relationships between Association shareholders in a regional MLS go bad. They get caught in the crosshairs as the Association shareholders wage war with each other. In many regional MLSs, the governance, vendor agreements, and data rights were not spelled out well enough to enable the regional break up. As a result, the regional MLS becomes a toxic battle of in fighting between Association shareholders that cripples the MLS from functioning. Governance Writing good governance agreements for the regional corporation is very difficult. The best approach is to craft governance [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:21-07:00March 4th, 2016|MLS Insights|Comments Off on When Regional MLSs Go Bad
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