This is great news! Multiple Listing Issues and Policy Committee voted to send the Broker Attribution policy change recommendation back for another look. An impressive move based on a recommendation by the NAR Leadership during the Committee meeting.
In the advent of Inman Connect this week, these were three stories I found which piqued my interest this last week. Will Amazon Uber-ize the Real Estate Industry? Cisco and Juniper Networks stocks slipped last Friday on news from The Information that Amazon was entering the $14 billion data center equipment business. While searching for more news I stumbled upon investment firm, TwinRock Partners, article about Amazon and real estate.
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.
If you remember the rage about FourSquare years ago, its coming back again. But this time, Google is leading the way to create local experts and Google Maps is the platform. So set up your account on Google Local Guides and get going! If you participate a lot, (hit 50 reviews), you will be highlighted as a top reviewer on Google Maps for Apple’s iOS and Android. Why? Well, that is only something that you can answer. Like so many other social media strategies, it needs to be something that you enjoy doing. Also, consider this – Google Maps is [...]
Real Estate is not just an online thing. It’s a global thing. People buy houses all around the globe, and in many nations – the notion of online real estate is hot. In the small nation of England, companies valued at £312m, or £40m Housesimple along with easyProperty and eMoov are all trying to make a go of it with significant venture backing. Online real estate is ripe for the taking. Zillow Group will not need to go out for additional funding to pivot to online real estate. The company is valued at over $5B and is operating at a run [...]
When some of our readers heard that my daughter Alexandra AKA Sparkles Lund was invited to attend Google Creator Day, they were genuinely interested in hearing about what she learned at this exciting event. She has written a blog post for her own blog, SparklesLund.com and I thought I would share it with you because there is some very interesting information about ways to build the size and engagement of a YouTube channel. Please follow her on Facebook, instagram, Twitter and subscribe to her YouTube channel, Enjoy! As you may know, I have been really publishing a lot of videos on YouTube [...]
Doing research like our 2013 Broker Website Effectiveness Study (BWES) helps WAV Group identify and measure a multitude of strategies that brokers may deploy to improve their online performance. One key trend today that is working very well is video. I am not sure how long video will help brokers gain an edge, but today it works. Some of the facts we gathered in the BWES included that Google is the #1 search engine by a significant margin, capturing 75% of all search traffic (see image) If you combine the predominance Google with an understanding of how search results [...]
Google Real Estate Last July, search and technology giant, Google announced an agreement to acquire ITA Software for around $700 Million. ITA software is a company that cut its teeth in the travel industry powering websites like Orbitz and Kayak. Google has been struggling with supporting consumers in real estate search for many years. They have had many fits and starts, including Google Base. With Google Base, the company tried to aggregate listing data and sort it out. Google Base was a failure and they shut it down. Now with ITA Software, Google may be [...]
The last few days have been full of Google noise in the real estate blogs and media. From our perspective, it has been a bit comedic. Google made a post on their blog about shutting down Google Base and everyone went into shock. Google Base was never a great idea. It was a project to aggregate real estate listing data because they could not get the listings by their standard methods - indexing. At the time that Google Base was created, Google Robots and Spiders were blocked from indexing real estate listings on nearly all property search websites. Realtor.com blocked [...]
