Study Says Longer Tweets are Better

Twitter for real estate is a curious strategy. There was quite a bit of discussion about Twitter in some of the Facebook groups that I am in. #thatsfunny. In all seriousness, when WAV Group evaluates the effectiveness of social media marketing and advertising (those are two different things), the numbers prove out that Facebook is far more effective in every matrix of reporting. The data suggests that Facebook is core, Twitter is niche. If you do market on Twitter as part of your surround sound system, you likely already know that Twitter extended the number of characters from the old [...]

By |2017-12-13T09:00:10-08:00December 13th, 2017|Broker Technology Research, Main category, Marketing, Strategic Planning, Suveys and Research, Twitter for Real Estate|Comments Off on Study Says Longer Tweets are Better

It’s the Biggest Marketing and PR Mistake

Stay on message. Those three little words sound so simple. But it amazes me how difficult it seems for companies – and their messengers – to do this. It should be the core of their marketing and PR compass. Consistency and repetition: That’s what every well-crafted marketing and PR program adheres to over the long haul. Unfortunately, most companies forget these crucial tenets and they stray. Or worse, they veer so far from their original course, they completely undermine what they have already have accomplished. Building brand awareness takes time, often a very long time. Building brand loyalty (a.k.a. understanding [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:22:39-07:00September 18th, 2017|Main category, Sales Advisory, Strategic Planning|Comments Off on It’s the Biggest Marketing and PR Mistake

Are You Guilty Of “Business As Usual Budgeting?”

Financial and budget planning concept with calculator notebook and financial chart report on work desk How many of have been informed that need to spend the rest of your budget or its going to be reduced next year?   How many times have you blindly hit copy and paste and then added a bit for inflation and an unexpected project and then called it a day on your budgeting process?   If you’re walking somewhat blindly through your budgeting process then you’re practicing what we call “business-as-usual budgeting”. What’s that? Well, if your typical budgeting practice is to look at last year’s [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:22:41-07:00August 23rd, 2017|Broker Technology Research, Strategic Planning|Comments Off on Are You Guilty Of “Business As Usual Budgeting?”

Big Data Can Drive Bigger Broker Margins

WAV Group spends a lot of time consulting with brokers on how to re-margin their business. We published a paper in 2013 called Harvesting Business From Broker Data.  That paper characterized the methods that we developed with a number of brokers to harvest business from across the enterprise of title, mortgage, residential, relocation, insurance, commercial, and property management businesses. It has worked very well for many brokers to recapture repeat transactions and new business though cross sell. In many ways, the rethinking that went into the thesis around harvesting business across the enterprise was the first intellectual break from the [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:22:46-07:00June 9th, 2017|Broker Technology Research, Broker-Agent Information, Strategic Planning|Comments Off on Big Data Can Drive Bigger Broker Margins

The Problem With Real Estate Is That Nobody Cares About Quality

As a Founding Partner at WAV Group consulting, I have the opportunity to talk to fund managers about their investments in real estate. Some investors are focused on supporting public companies such as Realogy, RE/MAX and others are betting against them with short positions. The truth is that we do not ever know the position of the investors when they ask questions. We just answer them as best we can. On a call this morning, I was asked a profound question about customer experience in two parts. Part 1. What brand has the highest customer satisfaction rating? Part 2. What [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:22:47-07:00May 31st, 2017|Broker-Agent Information, Strategic Planning|Comments Off on The Problem With Real Estate Is That Nobody Cares About Quality

Top 5 Ways to Transform Your Office Managers Into Sales Success Coaches

None of the brokers we’ve worked with believe that their office managers are doing what they are supposed to be doing — sales training. Instead, they act more like den mothers. When they could be working on sales coaching or recruiting, office managers are consoling agents who lost big deals, troubleshooting broken printers, or retrieving lost MLS passwords. It’s too easy for office managers to spend the day putting out a series of small fires. Its easy to use all of those daily tasks as excuses for not focusing on the most important roles that managers are responsible for. The [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:22:49-07:00May 25th, 2017|Broker-Agent Information, Product Management, Strategic Planning, Wav of Change|Comments Off on Top 5 Ways to Transform Your Office Managers Into Sales Success Coaches

ELM STREET TECHNOLOGY ANNOUNCES STRATEGIC ACQUISITION OF CONSOLIDATED KNOWLEDGE

May 23, 2017 – Greensboro, NC – Today, Elm Street Technology (EST) announced the acquisition of Consolidated Knowledge, a technology platform provider to the residential real estate and multi-family industries. This acquisition is the next step in EST’s ongoing efforts to consolidate the real estate industry’s leading technology and marketing service providers. Today’s announcement is the latest in a series of strategic moves EST has made in recent months to create a portfolio of marketing and technology products and services that, when integrated, offer a single technology solution providing lead generation to client retention services for agents, teams, brokers and [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:22:49-07:00May 23rd, 2017|Broker Technology Research, Broker-Agent Information, Press Releases, Strategic Planning|Comments Off on ELM STREET TECHNOLOGY ANNOUNCES STRATEGIC ACQUISITION OF CONSOLIDATED KNOWLEDGE

CoreLogic Hires John Chipman

WAV Group are pleased to announced that John Chipman has joined the CoreLogic Team. Read the full press release from CoreLogic below. It is my pleasure to announce that John Chipman has joined CoreLogic® as a strategic account executive with a focus on real estate brokerage. John has been working with real estate brokerages dating back to his start with Homestore in 1999. Over the years he has become an expert at understanding the operational need of brokers in areas of online marketing, digital marketing, websites, CRM, and big data. John will be responsible for CoreLogic large broker and franchise [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:22:51-07:00May 2nd, 2017|Broker Technology Research, Press Releases, Strategic Planning|Comments Off on CoreLogic Hires John Chipman

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 [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:22:51-07:00April 28th, 2017|Broker Technology Research, Strategic Planning|Comments Off on 5 Steps to an Impactful and Effective Strategic Plan

SEO Or Search Marketing For Brokers

We just escorted a client though a double audit of their search engine optimization on their broker website.  We reviewed Domain Authority and ranked it against their competition and saw a range of authority from 44 to 48 for leading broker websites. We reviewed Moz Report, CheckPageRank.net, and others. We carefully analyzed all area search keyword traffic using a combination of searches that include Neilson, ComScore, Google Analytics, and Hitwise. You can ignore any site data from a third party that is free (i.e. Quantcast and other free services are way off). Too often, firms look too closely at their [...]

By |2024-01-05T21:01:50-08:00March 28th, 2017|Broker Technology Research, Marketing, SEO, Strategic Planning|Comments Off on SEO Or Search Marketing For Brokers

Effective Ways to Generate Seller Leads

WAV Group recently did an audit of a broker’s lead strategy, and it caused a bit of a eureka moment for the broker. We found they needed to stop focusing on buyer lead generation immediately and focus on seller lead generation. As a consulting firm, WAV Group has a full bag of executional tricks for firms to consider when they are setting strategy. The way that these activities are implemented and driven though the culture of an organization is the secret to success. We considered a few of these strategies in our latest study entitled Generate Seller Leads: Don’t Worry About [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:22:54-07:00March 24th, 2017|Our Company, Sales Advisory, Strategic Planning|1 Comment

The Power of Sharing

Today, many leading news sites and blogs welcome by-lined posts and articles from respected professionals willing to share valuable knowledge and insights with their readers.  Good, free content helps boost their SEO, readership, and prestige. For companies who sell to brokers, agents, lenders, and consumers, the explosion of real estate blogs locally as well as nationally creates unprecedented opportunities to build brands, advance careers and position products and services.  The only cost involved might be the time of a professional writer experienced in the residential real estate to turn concepts into great copy. The publishers who operate these sites make [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:01-07:00November 17th, 2016|Marketing, Strategic Planning|Comments Off on The Power of Sharing