WAV Group is among the ranks of consulting and research firms dedicated to the success of the Nation’s MLSs. Given the company’s involvement at the strategic planning level, there are several developing themes being nurtured. The top six trends are: Listing Syndication Premium Service Offerings MLS Consumer Websites Online Signatures Data Licensing Data Sharing […]
Midwest Real Estate Data LLC or MRED is the MLS of the Chicago region of Illinois. They are the MLS Provider to around 40,000 real estate professionals. In a press release today, Trulia announced that MRED will feed listings directly to Trulia, bypassing Listhub, Point2 and other listing syndicators. “Listing syndication has contributed to a mess on Trulia and all other sites who get their data second hand, on behalf of our brokers, MRED is going to fix it” says Russ Bergeron, MRED CEO. There has been a great deal of discussion in the real estate industry about syndication to publishers. Today, [...]
If you are a stock watcher of the leading companies supplying services to the real estate industry, you have been watching CoreLogic. Since the spin out from First American, the company has been tremendously successful in terms of overall revenue and cash position, but the stock has underperformed. At one point, the stock was as low as $7.64 per share over the past 52 weeks. The high was $19.20, and the target is around $16. The company currently trades at $14. For a company that has $250 Million in cash, a market cap of $1.53B is really low. Some of [...]
Every year, real estate sees the launch of beautiful products, offering awesome features, advantages, and benefits. Excellent marketing programs back them and the press creates a jubilee – Innovator of the Year! Then the product launches, and the industry shrugs its shoulder. It is the conundrum of new product development and innovation for real estate. Most of these companies are doing everything right. They are doing research, spotting trends, holding focus groups, testing usability, and modeling lovely financials. If they can only get 1% adoption of this, or 3% of that, revenues will be awesome. There are 1 Million real [...]
Recently, WAV Group has completed several customer satisfaction surveys from around the country in the Southwest, Mid-West, Southeast and Mid-Atlantic regions. In every case there has been a lot of discussion and requests for more MLS access via smartphones and especially for iPads and other tablet devices. While many MLSs think of their iPad application as a property search tool, agents want their MLS iPad apps to go much further than that. Even for those that have launched Tablet solutions, there are two major areas of dissatisfaction that MLSs need to address to make mobile MLS applications truly useful for [...]
LAS VEGAS – The Greater Las Vegas Association of REALTORS® (GLVAR) announced today that it has hired seasoned real estate association executive Nelson Janes as its new chief executive officer. Janes, who previously ran the Sacramento Association of REALTORS®, expects to start work at GLVAR on May 7. He was hired after GLVAR leaders conducted a national search to replace Irene Vogel, who is retiring after guiding the association for nearly 30 years. Devin Reiss, chairman of GLVAR’s CEO Search Committee, said Janes “brings extensive experience building successful associations and REALTOR® programs, considerable experience as a legislative advocate, expertise in [...]
Catchy headline. What the State of Illinois is doing is similar to what Colorado, New Mexico and possibly other States have already done. All real estate agents will need to become real estate brokers to retain their license. Brokers who manage agents will need to become Managing brokers. Oh, and did I mention that the state licensing fees go up 83%. Many view this move simply as a way to tax professionals. Illinois real estate agents have until March 15th to complete the training (15 hours) and take a competency test to meet new rules. By the way, the 83% [...]
Zillow announced today (full press release below) that Bob Bemis, former CEO of the Arizona Regional MLS, has joined Zillow as the Vice President of Partner relations. This is a major event in our industry on multiple levels. Having known Bob personally and professionally for many years I congratulate Zillow for an outstanding hire, well done! As a consultant in the industry watching the march of Zillow this hire tends to fuel some of my concerns about where this is actually leading. In almost every strategic planning session I lead we talk about threats to the industry as well [...]
Another shoe is going to drop today. Howard Hanna, one of America’s largest brokerages will announce their new listing syndication strategy. This is an important announcement because it brings forth a new chapter to the ongoing saga of finding an online advertising paradigm that balances the broker’s needs with the publisher’s needs, in the best possible way. Howard Hanna has spend the past 15 – 18 months studying. They study their website. They study the website of similar size brokerages. They have studied publisher websites. They became experts. Howard Hanna has been testing. Howard Hanna ran lots of experiments with [...]
Join us for this special webinar with some of America’s leading MLS system operators, John Heithaus from MRIS, Melissa Olson from Metrolist, and Jeremy Crawford from MLS listings. MLSs have abundant opportunities for delivering the best products to their subscribers for lower costs, but it is difficult. In this webinar, you will learn how MRIS, MLSListings, Metrolist and many other leading MLS are consistently amplifying the reach and effectiveness of their services to their subscribers with powerful new communications and eCommerce platforms. WAV Group partner Victor Lund will moderate the panel as each expert outlines their programs for success: Reason [...]
I received a call yesterday from a sage MLS executive. He saw the article in RE Technology about Sandicor adding a new syndication field into their MLS. We had discussed this a few years ago after some broker focus groups. At the time, the brokers did not seem to care too much about syndication, so the idea did not go anywhere. That changed. Adding the field is on the agenda at their next board meeting. He is probably not alone. Aside from that, he shared with me his vision for how syndication is going to play out in the long [...]
Until today, MLSs have been walled Internet gardens. The MLS is accessed through the browser, but is entirely separated from the rest of the open Internet. iMapp just released an innovation that may begin a trend to change all of that. With iMapp, real estate agents with accounts may install a search plugin into their browser. This plugin puts a layer of MLS tax data on top of any website. With the search plugin, agents can look up tax on any property address found on any website – this includes the MLS, Agent and Broker Property Search Websites, Consumer property [...]
