Don’t Miss this Webinar on How to Make Your Business Explode with a Lead Generation Program!

Many consumers are looking to educate themselves on the housing market. They often end up on third party sites like Zillow and Trulia to see what listings in their area look like INSTEAD of your own site. WAV Group partner Marilyn Wilson is moderating this RE Technology webinar. This webinar is targeted to real estate brokers. Unfortunately, these sites can provide inaccurate data but time and again consumers head there because it’s the only location that provides them this information. Would you like to learn about an affordable program to attract potential new clients directly to your website, avoiding the [...]

ReTechnology.com Top 5 Articles of the Week

Webinar: Make Your Business Explode with a Powerful Lead Generation Program Many consumers are looking to educate themselves on the housing market. They often end up on third party sites like Zillow and Trulia to see what listings in their area look like INSTEAD of your own site. This webinar will help explain how to leverage your agent or broker site to become your local market's go-to listing information portal that provides accurate information for prospective buyers. Learn how to attain qualified leads that will help your business explode this fall! Date: Tuesday October 8th, 2013 Time: 1 pm Eastern / [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:24:26-07:00October 1st, 2013|Broker Technology Research, Broker-Agent Information, MLS Insights|Comments Off on ReTechnology.com Top 5 Articles of the Week

Listen When Smart People Speak

We all have our opinions about things like productivity and social media. Our own experiences with it along with what we hear and see around us make even the casual observer an expert. But there are actually people who study this stuff, and when they talk about their research, it is worth listening to. Heidi Ambles is the Director of Product Management and Social Software at IBM. She thinks highly of social media and is bullish on the benefits of social collaboration in the workplace. Here are a few statistics that Heidi recently shared during a talk that she gave. [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:24:26-07:00September 24th, 2013|Broker Technology Research, Broker-Agent Information, Main category|Comments Off on Listen When Smart People Speak

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