Barbara Corcoran Holding Sales Webinar

Successful New York City REALTOR® with appearances on NBC's TODAY Show and ABC's reality hit Shark Tank Barbara Corcoran knows that innovation may be the single most important key to success in today's highly competitive marketplace. She is known for having built the most successful real estate business in New York City, as well as her current appearances on NBC's TODAY Show and as investor/shark on ABC's reality hit Shark Tank, from which she is now shepherding 11 new businesses to success! In this free live webinar Barbara reveals the unconventional strategies she used to achieve this, like: How to create an image bigger than reality. How to [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:25:13-07:00March 6th, 2012|Broker Technology Research, Broker-Agent Information, Main category|Comments Off on Barbara Corcoran Holding Sales Webinar

Century 21 CMO Bev Thorne Joins Zillow Advisory Board

Zillow is smart. They are building their Board of Advisors with key decision makers in the industry. Zillow is well aware that franchises are contractually required to submit listings to the franchisor, and in most cases, the franchisor can syndicate listings whereever they want. The data feed from franchisors like REALOGY Brands, Keller Williams, and RE/MAX are vital for long term assurance of listing count on Zillow. This also demonstrates Zillow’s disposition to surround itself with stakeholders in their mutual success. It also may deflect some of the local broker’s choice in syndicating listings to publishers. Century 21 has a [...]

MRED sends data directly to Trulia

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, [...]

A Discussion on Virtual Brokerage

We have the opportunity to work with many different software companies providing great products to the real estate industry.  Some of these companies are geared to serve both the traditional real estate model as well as a virtual brokerage.  It is clear to us, as well as these software providers, that the future of real estate companies will be different.  It will be leaner, lighter and in many cased “virtual” with a heavy emphasis on the broker providing great, integrated software products to agents that often work remotely.   I wrote at length about this shift in the white paper, “The [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:25:14-07:00February 23rd, 2012|Broker Technology Research, Broker-Agent Information, Main category, Marketing, Reports, Technology Evaluation, Virtual Office Website Series|Comments Off on A Discussion on Virtual Brokerage

Why Innovation Fails To Change Real Estate

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 [...]

Howard Hanna Syndication Announcement

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 [...]

Syndication as in insolent teen

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 [...]

LPS sells tax solutions to Lereta

LPS saw the spin off of their Agent-Broker products division in a management led buy out last September. The new company formed is called Real Estate Digital. Today, it was announced that the LPS Tax company was sold to Lereta. This company has nothing to do with the data that is licensed to RPR or MLSs.  This is a tax services company totally separate from the Applied Analytics Data Solutions company that licenses public records and serves MLS. These are interesting times. We will keep you posted on what we hear. […]

Balancing exchange rates in listing syndication

Online listing syndication presents complex strategic challenges to real estate brokerage in America today. The structure of economic trade between real estate brokers and publishers has many variables that are often misunderstood and often hard to measure. At the heart of the conversation is an unresolved understanding of the exchange rate in listing syndication. Even people with business analyst certification may be baffled. Do brokers subsidize the success of publishers by providing listings? Do publishers subsidize brokerages by providing willing homebuyers? Some of the policies by publishers to create revenue have been deemed to be very damaging by some real [...]

Earthcomber sues real estate mobile app developers

Mobile real estate applications are the largest growth area in real estate technology. This is why so many people are attending online school to learn app development. Like anything expanding rapidly, there is big opportunity at stake, and pioneers who filed patents for methods of delivering mobile solutions are working hard to protect their intellectual property. We saw a similar pattern in real estate when mapping was experiencing great growth in real estate. As you may recall, that ended with the National Association of REALTORS® negotiating an industry wide settlement widely known as CIVIX. In that settlement, a combination of Associations, MLSs, and [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:25:16-07:00January 20th, 2012|Broker Technology Research, Main category, MLS Insights|Comments Off on Earthcomber sues real estate mobile app developers

How Listhub’s Real Estate Network Works

It is not uncommon for detailed questions to arise whenever there is major change afoot in the real estate industry regarding data. Listhub’s announcement of the launch of the Real Estate Network precipitated many questions regarding a broker’s ability to manage and control websites that display their data. The Listhub Real Estate Network includes the opportunity for any broker to publish listings on Century 21, Coldwell Banker, RE/MAX, and the Realty Executives websites. WAV Group has researched this topic of the Real Estate Network with executives from Listhub and we have great news to report. They did it right the [...]

What real estate can learn from Zappos cyber attack

Zappos, a division of Amazon focused on online shoe sales announced that their customer database of 24 million customer records was hacked over the weekend. Fortunately, the credit card database was not accessed. This is a huge problem for Zappos. They will now need to go through a process of getting all 24 million customers to update their password, and notify each user that their username and password have been stolen. The implications of this hacker stealing this information is far reaching. Many consumers use a familiar username and password for accessing commonly used websites. If you have ever set [...]