Brokers Need to Rethink Their Website Strategy

The three key objectives of delivering integrated tools to agents, highlighting company listings on the broker website, and marketing agents on the broker website are paramount to success...

Buyside Makes It Real

If you know anything about Hunt Real Estate Corporation, you know that they are a family owned and operated brokerage with high integrity and a fierce approach to competition. Since 1911 they have been a market leader in upstate New York, cities like Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Rochester, Syracuse, Albany, and the many Southern Tier communities that border Pennsylvania. They recently expanded into the Boston marketplace though a significant acquisition. We have known the Hunt family since Marlyn and I lived in Orchard Park, NY. We became friends though our interactions at The Buffalo Club and The Country Club of Buffalo. At the time, Marilyn ran marketing at Fisher-Price and I was spinning up my first start-up companies.

By |2018-02-20T07:30:27-08:00February 20th, 2018|Broker Technology Research, Main category, Technology|0 Comments

5 Steps to an Impactful and Effective Strategic Plan

by MARILYN WILSON on APRIL 28, 2017 We’ve all been involved in those strategic planning sessions where you get locked in a room, hold hands, sing Kumbaya, feel really excited for about 3 days and then everyone goes back to doing everything the same old way they did before the session. They are a total waste of time. I call those sessions “Forced Family Fun”. They give strategic planning a bad name. Let’s talk about a way to make the time and effort put into a strategic plan that will actually MAKE A DIFFERENCE for your organization. I’ve been facilitating [...]

Strategic Planning – More Critical Than Ever Now!

Never before has our industry been moving more quickly.  Industry initiatives like UpstreamRE, Broker Public Portal and AMP are coming are way.  Consumers are looking for more and more transparency. Agents must learn how to use technologies effectively if they are going to survive working with Millenials. What is YOUR organization doing to adapt and adjust to the fundamental changes that are upon us? WAV Group conducts strategic planning sessions regularly for MLSs, Associations, Brokerages and Technology companies. There are five fundamental questions that every organization needs to ask itself today. What’s our organization’s TRUE value?  If your organization was [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:01-07:00November 17th, 2016|Strategic Planning|0 Comments

Annual Strategy Planning and Management Retreat

There is a curious coincidence about the relationship between strategic planning and success. Large, successful companies always have strategic plans and management retreats to celebrate accomplishments and recognize opportunities for success. Interestingly enough, start ups do the same thing. Where is the middle ground? For whatever reason, companies that are in the middle of the pack typically do not have plans. Or, the plan they do have is stale – the product of a moment in time when the leadership or board of directors insisted to cobble something together which, in turn, was saved in a remote desktop folder or [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:03-07:00October 19th, 2016|Product Management, Strategic Planning|0 Comments

Is Real Estate Still in a Slump?

After the crash in the housing market, real estate was hit by the worst recession in our nation’s history. Frankly, brokers took a beating and operated at a loss for a number of years. Since the low point, things have been steadily been improving. There was a lot of speculation that the foreclosure volume in the hardest hit markets were clogging up the supply side. As we turned the corner, these distressed properties were slowly released into the marketplace and they are mostly absorbed. There was a two to three year heyday for brokers and agents who specialized in REO [...]

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 [...]

1000watt nails large broker IDX strategy

1000Watt Consulting wrote a post this week that is a must read. View it here - http://1000watt.net/2015/08/friday-flash-the-broken-down-lead-machine/# Brian Boero's point is clear: "If you are a large firm with more than 10% market share - ditch IDX." Reasons to Act This Way compromised presentation of properties raft of local competitors drafting on your listings paper brokers leverage your data with impunity relatively small number of leads that agents will probably drop the ball on. I am not going to recant the entire article. Please go and read it. But I do want to reinforce one point and add another. Reinforcement - [...]

Forward Looking Technology

2015 and 2016 will be years of incredible change in real estate technology. For too long, the real estate industry evolved in an eggshell whereby data, applications, and presentation layers were composite to one another behind most fragile and isolated shell walls. Today, we see systems that separate these three components of the technology to maximize the usefulness of this information to the industry and the consumers it serves. We Got You “We got you” is a statement that can have two meanings when a technology provider speaks it. It can take on the meaning of “we screwed you” or [...]

Do you love what you do?

It’s been a whirlwind past few weeks with Inman Connect and Leading RE and everything in between. And then came Valentine’s Day and I found myself writing and thinking about love: A news release on the love of our homes, a new Valentine’s video from 12-year old Sparkles Lund that captured her love of dancing, and I sat down and wrote a love letter to my wife of 22 years. So ask this question: Why do you love what you do? I asked this of a friend of mine when we both were hitting 40. He said he didn't. I [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:49-07:00February 25th, 2015|Main category, Marketing|1 Comment