RE Technology’s Top 5 Articles of the Week

Does Your Website Capture Leads or Let Them Get Away? Getting visitors to your site is only half the battle of online advertising. If your website does not convert even the highest quality visitors to leads, your online lead generation efforts are doomed to failure. Your website needs to both engage your visitors with the information they are looking for and ask for their contact information so you can reach out and turn them into clients.  5 Reasons to Use a Virtual Tour In conversation with Tim Denbo of VirtualTourCafe, we asked a simple question: "Why should agents create a [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:24:26-07:00September 23rd, 2013|Broker-Agent Information, Main category, Technology Evaluation|Comments Off on RE Technology’s Top 5 Articles of the Week

Pilgrims vs. Portals

History tells many stories of long ago that reflect on the conditions of today. I came across a story about the Pilgrims that made me think that in some way, it is similar to the real estate industry and portals. In 1630, a Pilgrim court dealt a nasty blow to one of its settlers. They ordered him to be incarcerated, burned his house, confiscated all of his goods, then ultimately exiled him from America. The Pilgrim’s name was Thomas Morton, and they said that he was a danger to society. Morton went to England and pleaded with the English court, [...]

FIND Offers Unique Reciprocal Data Sharing.

Before REALTORS® Property Resource (RPR) was conceived, the National Association of REALTORS® was working with their realtor.com partner, Move, Inc. to develop a library of information on every property in America. NAR selected another vendor and developed what we know as RPR today. MOVE took their prototype and developed a free product called FINDSM. FIND is proprietary software for MLSs that provides property centric data on more than 100 million real estate parcels in the United States, and offers agents and brokers access to timely, accurate and reliable listing information across MLS boundaries. Available as a link or a toolbar [...]

How SourceMLS Benefits Brokers

The Council of MLS, an industry trade group that allows MLSs to collaborate on common initiatives and share best practices, released a new initiative today called SourceMLS. The goal of SourceMLS is to develop an industry-wide method that supports brokers with listing source validation. Listing validation allows brokers to take credit for having the best data quality of any consumer-facing website. Listing data is widely distributed on the Internet today. Unfortunately, consumers do not have a way to know if the listing they are looking at is valid: really for sale, or if the listing information is accurate, or even if [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:24:28-07:00September 3rd, 2013|Broker-Agent Information, Main category|1 Comment

Product Overview of BombBomb for Real Estate VMail

BombBomb is a video mail program. You can record yourself talking on your computer or mobile device and send that recording as an email. It is a streaming email, so you are not sending a large file. Beyond vMail, BombBomb allows you to vLog or video blog. You can publish the recordings you make in newsletters, on your blog, website, or social media page. Suffice it to say, once the video is created, you can ship it anywhere. Using BombBomb for the first time was quick and easy. I entered a little bit of profile information and was off creating [...]

More Brokers Offering More Services

WAV Group consults primarily with enterprise brokerages who offer full services. We frequently refer to full services as home services, not to be confused with the Berkshire Hathaway company of the same name. Home services refer to the variety of needs that a customer has during a real estate transaction and beyond. In the residential real estate, this may take the form of Mortgage Services, Homeowners Insurance, Title Insurance, Home Warranty. Some residential companies even offer contractor services, maintenance services, landscaping services. Resort areas have brokers who offer concierge services where they will clean your home before and after your [...]

RE Technology Top 5 Articles of The Week

Each week, RE Technology publishes the top 5 most read articles. These articles may be republished by MLSs and Associations in newsletters or blogs for free. If you are not offering RE Technology as a member benefit, join more than 82 MLSs currently offering the service. There is never any charge. The top article of the week was submitted to RE Technology from listing syndication service provider Listhub, a product of MOVE, Inc. Agents Need To Leverage Marketing Remarks In The MLS More Effectively Since the information you enter in the MLS is the source of the marketing content that is [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:24:29-07:00August 24th, 2013|Broker Technology Research, Broker-Agent Information, Main category, Technology Evaluation|Comments Off on RE Technology Top 5 Articles of The Week

Top 5 Ways to Become More Relevant with Consumer Research

The real estate industry suffers from what I call the “lowest common denominator” phenomenon. Every one of the business models in the industry – associations, MLSs and brokerages are built on attracting and retaining as many agents as possible.   Many real estate entities collect monies every month from every participant – regardless of their productivity.  While these models each have their own reasons to exist, they have created a major problem in my view.  Real estate organizations are so busy attracting sales professionals that many ignore the needs of the most important group – the customer. It’s no wonder that [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:24:29-07:00August 16th, 2013|Broker-Agent Information, Main category, MLS Insights, Suveys and Research|Comments Off on Top 5 Ways to Become More Relevant with Consumer Research

Improving Second Tier Help Desk Performance

The Help Desk experience has been a cornerstone of innovation in business over the past decade. An enormous amount of investment has been placed on every corner of allowing consumers to help themselves. WAV Group routinely consults with enterprise brokers, MLSs, and large real estate technology companies on streamlining help desk to improve customer service and reduce costs. We have developed a new paradigm around encouraging self-help that you may want to consider. The customer who uses automated self-help tools like product FAQs and video before calling for support is normally the most dissatisfied customer. About the self-helper The self-helper [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:24:30-07:00August 13th, 2013|Broker-Agent Information, Main category, Technology Evaluation|Comments Off on Improving Second Tier Help Desk Performance

Leads are for Losers!

If America’s real estate agents and brokers had to build their business on online leads, they would be out of business. On all accounts, online marketing and lead generation tactics over the past decade have left brokerages with lighter wallets and little to show for it. Recently, the world’s largest real estate organization, REALOGY posted that they had generated 1.56 Million leads over the past 6 months for 239,000 agents. It is not really fair to double that number and annualize it to 3 million per year because November through January is a pathetic lead generation period. Regardless, even at [...]

Trulia To Collect More Agent Data

To optimize your online effectiveness in the real estate business, you need to think strategically. This is the kind of strategic thinking that WAV Group works with brokers and franchises on every day. When a company that does a great job at online marketing and search engine optimization focuses on a strategy like enhancing agent information, we pay attention. Typically, when Trulia, Zillow, Realtor.com, or homes.com makes a change, it is with intent to find improvement. It's the way everyone should think. Why Agent Profiles Are Important When consumers search, they use keywords. In our broker website effectiveness study, we learned [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:24:31-07:00August 5th, 2013|Broker Technology Research, Broker-Agent Information, Main category, Our Services|Comments Off on Trulia To Collect More Agent Data

Not All eSignature Platforms are Created Equal Webinar

Are your electronically signed documents compliant with the laws governing electronic signatures? If you’re not sure, you MUST attend this webinar. While using eSignatures comes with many benefits such as saving the time, money and hassle of driving around town to obtain a signature it also requires that agents, brokers and MLSs be thoughtful about their choice of providers. In this webinar, you will hear from eSignature providers DocuSign and Authentisign, along with Russ Bergeron of MRED, on best practices, what you need to know and how important it is to do your homework. Not all eSignature solutions are the [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:24:31-07:00August 5th, 2013|Broker-Agent Information, Main category, Our Company, Our Services, Technology Evaluation|Comments Off on Not All eSignature Platforms are Created Equal Webinar