This week, there was breaking news about an iBuyer receiving $325m in series “E” funding as well as lots of talk about their business model and game plan. Given all the buzz, I thought it would be a good time to spend time under the hood, to understand how this motor is put together!
WAV Group will be hosting a free informational webinar Monday, July 9th at 10am Pacific. The most rapid growth in real estate brokerage has happened with 100% commission firms, otherwise known as Transaction Fee Brokerages.
WAV Group attended the NAREE conference for the fifth consecutive year. For more than a few of team members like Kevin Hawkins, they have attended nearly every year of their career. Here is the inside word. If you want to be heard, you need to be a newsmaker. The key to getting access to be heard is establishing a relationship with journalists – otherwise, you are a whisper.
WAV Group has known the founders of W+R Studios long before they broke away from eNeighborhoods and founded the company. The partners have invested their lives and careers in developing real estate software that makes a difference. Cloud CMA was their first product, mobile friendly, easy to use, beautiful CMA reports. They launched at a time when building a CMA on your phone or tablet was impossible. They took a mobile first approach and were able to drive market adoption with impressive speed.
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.
