My top favorite pastime is being a professional mentor of high school robotics team where I live, just a short ferry ride from downtown Seattle on Bainbridge Island. It’s a FIRST Robotics Team (4915 Spartronics) that I helped found six years ago. I’m the lead marketing mentor.
Here's a great Holiday gift and it's free: a new, four-part real estate Podcast series that's available today featuring the wisdom and a little wit from Ben Caballero. Ben is the world's #1 ranked real estate agent. He's also the first and only agent in U.S. history ever to exceed the $1 billion mark for residential sales transaction volume in a single year, a feat he has achieved in each of the last three years. At the WAV Group, we've been working with the legendary Ben Caballero and HomesUSA.com for a few years now. We've had the honor of working with him [...]
Like Mark Twain, the early reports on the death of Facebook clearly have been an exaggeration especially when it comes to real estate. It remains the social media channel that is still the best place to stay top of mind among the greatest number of home buyers and sellers. And it's still the best media channel for real estate agents to keep in front of their peers.
From the NAR Boston conference, one statistic keeps ringing in my head. As a confessed data junkie, I consume a lot of real estate research, so I'm pretty jaded. But when NAR's research guru Jessica Lautz showed a slide at a press conference entitled “Median Age of Home Buyers,” I almost fell off my chair.
For years, I have strenuously maintained that when I fly West, especially to Hawaii from the West Coast, I never have been jet lagged. But when I fly to Europe from Seattle, if I don’t follow all the jet lag management tactics I’ve learned over the years, I’ll pay the price. Many fellow business and active leisure travelers told me I was nuts.
My dad grew up, pre-Depression, on Beacon Hill in Boston. As a kid, we took a lot of road trips. Because my dad worked for Westin Hotels, we stayed at a lot of nice places in big towns for free. My favorite road trip when we lived in Chicago was visiting Boston and the New England area. I had been back a couple of times for business and always loved visiting this city. After this last week at NAR, I absolutely want to go back – but next time for a vacation.
Each year, I try to find some of the things you won't want to miss at the annual National Association of REALTORS Conference and Expo. This week, some 20,000 real estate pros are expected to take over Boston, one of America’s great historic cities packed with extraordinary tourist attractions.
When I sat down with Tim Dain and Quinn Nichols at CMLS to get a sneak peek at the new MARIS website they were getting close to finishing, they were pretty giddy about their site. They had been working on this for months, so I completely understood their euphoria. Anyone who has given ‘birth’ to a new website knows the pain you endure until it makes its public debut.
News reports yesterday disclosed that OJO Labs and WolfNet were becoming one company. The news traveled fast and furious, despite the fact that the "official" news release was issued this morning on the newswire. How cool is it that one of the hottest Artificial Intelligence startups just bought an established, 20+ year-old real estate data giant? Here are some classic quotes from yesterday news coverage of this historic event: RISMEDIA "The largest aggregator of MLS data has been acquired by one of the industry’s hottest artificial intelligence companies." “This is probably the most impressive fundamental move toward assisting the industry [...]
It’s been a remarkable past few weeks. In September I started my 5th year heading up WAV Group Communications. I can't remember a time in my PR career over the last three decades when I worked so hard but had so much fun. I've enjoyed an exhilarating streak of success for my clients that have made the long hours well-worth those moments of drudge.
WolfNet Technologies LLC has become the quiet data giant in real estate. Think about it. WolfNet provides Websites/IDX to Keller Williams (a client since 2002), the largest real estate brokerage in the world. WolfNet also is believed to be the leading company that normalizes MLS data. WolfNet’s digital footprint is massive: it’s a data goliath managing over 100 million property recordsthat covers 99% of all active MLS property listings in the U.S. and Canada. It hosts 89 million property photos for IDX solutions alone and provides more than 100,000 IDX and Websites to real estate agents and brokers – reaching [...]
NorthstarMLS and Southeast Minnesota REALTORS® (SEMR) have come together to announce that SERM will become part of NorthstarMLS. This merges the second largest MLS in Minnesota with the largest MLS as SEMR becomes a shareholder in NorthstarMLS. Congratulations go to all the leadership teams, headed by SEMR CEO Karen Becker and NorthstarMLS CEO John Mosey. Also kudos to CoreLogic's Matt Cohen (Consultant at Clareity), which the parties credit for helping its leadership fully evaluate this merger. Here is the full news release along with a couple of great photos taken at the signing: Second Largest MLS in Minnesota to Join NorthstarMLS [...]
