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Let’s face it…many of the most well-respected companies in real estate have not spent a lot of time on their logo in a LONG TIME! The industry is besieged with new players with huge marketing budgets and very contemporary branding. While a logo is not everything, it can certainly set the tone and tell others you’re evolving and that your brand is still relevant today.
I have been reading articles about Zillow Group’s positioning on Upstream and the forms licensing policy of the California Association of REALTORS® with great interest. My take away is that Zillow Group is doing and saying exactly what they should be doing and saying to positively impact Zillow’s market opportunities in real estate. Remember, Zillow has industry relations people and government relations people that want to fight tooth and nail for every advantage they can get. It’s business.
When Daniel Castro from the Internet Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) took the stage at Inman in New York on January, we all thought he was going to provide an academic view of our industry and provide us with some food for thought. What we didn’t know was that he was going to tell us how the consumer needs Open Data because we have somehow been holding back on them. We also didn’t know at the time that the ITIF had been promoting Zillow for many years. Castro published an articles on the Federal Government’s Economic and Statistics Administration website featuring a promotional video from Zillow in 2015 entitled “Open Data Impact: How Zillow Uses Open Data to Level the Playing Field for Consumers.”
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “Early in the morning, at the break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one’s strength, to read a book – I call that vicious!” There is a liberating freedom about the early hours of Saturday or Sunday. Unlike the other days of the week, my mind has more freedom. I wake up unfocused on the routine of my workday and embrace any number of ideas or influences that come my way. I like to read – not books like I did as a teenager so much as digital media. One of my favorite inspirations [...]
WAV Group has been working with many companies on listing presentations. They are the Barnum & Bailey Circus of selling real estate. You know the drill, in this ring we have the home tour, in this ring we have comps, and in this ring we have why you should pick me. iPads deliver listing presentations with much higher impact than paper. It’s a great listing tool. There are a few tools that make the iPad sing that I really like. I think that Paperless Agent has put together a great series of education and applications that make the iPad a [...]
Today, 85% of homebuyers are white, but that is changing rapidly in America. The new and growing homebuyer population is Hispanic or Latino, and most do not speak English well enough to have confidence in a real estate transaction written in a foreign language, with an agent who is not bilingual. Yikes or Opportunity? We think opportunity. From 2010 to 2012, the number of Hispanic homebuyers increased 38%! Today, only 20,000 of the nations’ 1.2 Million members of the National Association of REALTORS is Hispanic. By the way – all of the stats quoted here look at data collected in [...]
A broker friend of mine downloaded the WAV Group 2004 Broker Transaction Management study recently and gave me a call. Like every real estate broker in America, she has long adapted her business to online forms. Like most brokerages, she also confesses that they have a forms box of printed forms in every office. A few years ago, she made a decision to purchase digital signatures for all of her agents. Today, she is considering transaction management. Again. This is not her first visit to this consideration, but rather an annual trek that is part of her end-to-end customer experience [...]
I attended Luxury Connect last week in Beverly Hills. If you are not familiar with the event, it was expertly delivered by the team from Inman News that is host to the Real Estate Connect conferences held annually in New York City and San Francisco. I don’t think that anyone really appreciates how difficult it is to put on a great event. This group does it with ease and grace even when pitted against seemingly insurmountable challenges. There was so much fanfare about this event, it is speculated that the original property selected for the event was sold! A week [...]
Today's real estate firms, franchise or otherwise, need to provide a robust marketing solution for agents that especially support them with digital marketing tools: Video, virtual tours, eMail marketing, and social media marketing. In an announcement today, Coldwell Banker announced a partnership with Imprev to power their digital marketing suite for all of their franchise companies. There are a number of firms that offer marketing solutions, but the two firms that have dominated the selection among franchise organizations in the past years include Marketleader and Imprev. Strangely enough, until a few years ago, Imprev was Marketleader's partner for their marketing [...]
WAV Group partners, Mike Audet, Marilyn Wilson, and Victor Lund are founders of RE Technology and RETechnology.com. Today that site reaches 750,000 real estate agents and brokers though partnerships with more than 90 MLSs who deliver subscriptions to RE Technology as a member benefit. Each week, RE Technology publishes a notification to MLSs that lists the top 5 most heavily viewed articles of the week. This list goes out to our MLS partners who may, in turn, republish the articles in their own newsletter, blog, or develop content ideas for their training or communications programs. Below is the RE Technology [...]
The results are in from the annual WAV Group MLS Technology Survey. We will be working on the report in the coming weeks. Last year’s report showed that there were not any MLS software solutions with super high ratings. This year’s survey showed that the ratings have dropped down for every vendor. What can be done about that? As you may know, WAV Group provides RFP services to MLSs who are facing a contract termination date. It is smart to shop around to see if there are solutions that are better shaped to meet the evolving needs of agents and [...]
Many software solutions used in real estate today are offered as Software as a Service (SaaS), meaning that they are accessed through a browser or, in some cases, a mobile app. For most companies today, being cross-browser compliant is about as far as they have gone. Advanced companies, mostly those who have the luxury of products released in the past couple of years, have made their browser-based application “responsive” so as to fit naturally into any screen resolution on any browser. Cloud CMA just came out with a browser Bookmarklet that reminded me how many powerful browser features are not [...]
