Are Real Estate Agents Dishonest?

A few months ago I spoke to the owner of a start-up company who was completely convinced that consumers do NOT trust their real estate agents to help them find service providers. He believed that agents were not the best group to help a home buyer secure all of the services they need to complete a transaction. He passionately believed that consumers believe that real estate agents are dishonest and do not have the best interest of their clients in mind. For those of you that read the WAV Group blog, you know we are not shy about talking about [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:13-07:00June 14th, 2016|Broker-Agent Information|Comments Off on Are Real Estate Agents Dishonest?
Read More

Is Old School Print Set to Rebound?

Print advertising and marketing has seen a striking decline. I love using the phrase that newspapers are like nursing homes. But that might be changing. Here are some thoughts. Years ago, I spent a few years working with a real estate magazine. We helped them expand into digital marketing – online portal, online advertising, agent and broker websites, etc. It was a good thing. We married their loyal customers to new services that escalated in revenue as print dropped off. The relationship remained the same, the revenue by product choice changed. One of the great boosts to the online marketing [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:24-07:00February 4th, 2016|Main category|1 Comment
Read More

Does Your Brand Have a Strategic Plan?

If you are reading this, you are somewhere in the real estate ecosystem – either part of an MLS, a REALTORS® Association, a large brokerage, or a technology firm that serves one of those personas. We work with some of these personas on strategy, we work with some on story, we all of them on state.   Strategy, Story, and State are business terms that are bantered around a lot. Saying the words has no meaning unless you are able to contextualize them within your own business. That process of contextualization is work that needs to be done by businesses [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:24-07:00January 31st, 2016|Main category|Comments Off on Does Your Brand Have a Strategic Plan?
Read More

Tech Helpline Now Available to Orange County Association of REALTORS®

Some 13,600+ Agents Get Unlimited Tech Support from “Friendly” U.S.-Based Staff  Orlando, FL., (October 28, 2015) – California’s Orange County real estate agents are more dependent on technology to help them buy and sell homes than ever before, and now when a computer crashes or a smartphone glitches out, they can get immediate assistance. Tech Helpline, the real estate industry’s #1 tech support service, is a new, included member benefit available to more than 13,600 members of the Orange County Association of REALTORS®. These Southern California agents and brokers join nearly 400,000 REALTORS® throughout the U.S. and Canada that have [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:31-07:00October 28th, 2015|Main category|Comments Off on Tech Helpline Now Available to Orange County Association of REALTORS®
Read More

Form Simplicity adds new paperless management tools for real estate brokers

Features allow broker compliance workflow to be digitally managed Orlando, FL – September 30, 2015 – One of the real estate industry’s most popular and advanced paperless transaction solutions, Form Simplicity, has added Broker Transaction Management into its cloud-based platform. Broker Transaction Management creates a single place inside Form Simplicity for real estate brokers to manage, review, approve, track and store every agent’s transaction activity from beginning to end. Form Simplicity’s new Broker Transaction Management tools allow real estate brokers to reduce their risk through a customizable, automated, paperless review process that helps safeguard brokerage transactions to remain compliant. Brokers [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:35-07:00September 30th, 2015|Main category|Comments Off on Form Simplicity adds new paperless management tools for real estate brokers
Read More

Beverly Faul

November 20,2014 Dear Friends and Partners, Our team is heartbroken to share the news that our colleague and dear friend, Beverly Faull passed away earlier this week after a brave battle with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. An accomplished real estate industry veteran, Beverly became a member of the Down Payment Resource team in 2009 and recently celebrated her fifth anniversary with the company. We have all admired her professional spirit and tenacity over the years. Beverly believed wholeheartedly in the company’s mission of helping homebuyers access down payment programs. She worked tirelessly to grow DPR to 21 MLSs and Realtor Associations. Prior [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:54-07:00November 20th, 2014|Main category|Comments Off on Beverly Faul
Read More

Howard Hanna and William E Wood Join Together

In a press release today, Howard Hanna and William E Wood have reached an agreement whereby Howard Hanna has purchased William E Wood. The Hanna family of companies now reaches from Michigan through Ohio, down through Pennsylvania extending into Virginia and the Carolinas. Following their successful acquisitions of the past with Smythe Cramer, Realty One, Edward Surovell Realtors and others. They do not have any plans to make changes at William E. Wood. The executive team will remain in place along with the brand. William E Wood is a great company and the Hanna's intended to work hard to keep [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:24:19-07:00January 9th, 2014|Broker Technology Research, Main category, Press Releases, Strategic Planning|Comments Off on Howard Hanna and William E Wood Join Together
Read More

FBI Overstates Mortgage Fraud

President Obama's administration released a report from a year long mortgage fraud initiative conducted by the FBI. This probably hits home with many MLS who have been cooperating with FBI investigators who are using MLS data to detect potential fraud. Sadly, the report was found to be way, way out of line, overstating the scope of the problem by significant margin. According to the initial report, the FBI indicated that they had criminally charged 530 people. The restated report indicated that they only charged 107 people. According to he initial report, the FBI indicated that total losses from the fraud [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:24:30-07:00August 12th, 2013|Main category, MLS Insights|Comments Off on FBI Overstates Mortgage Fraud
Read More

Roost to share real estate lessons with other professionals

Real Estate agents are mighty in numbers and skilled in communicating thier services to consumers. Eventhough many are critical of REALTORS, they are leaders in many ways - social media being one of them. Today Roost announced that they are planning to extend the same services they provide to real estate agents to other professional ranks. Here is the letter announcing their expansion. I’m very excited today to announce the next generation of Roost.com.  We’ve taken everything we’ve learned in the last year of building Social Marketing products for Real Estate brokers and agents and put it into this product.  And [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:25:46-07:00March 29th, 2011|Broker-Agent Information, Main category|Comments Off on Roost to share real estate lessons with other professionals
Read More

The entire real estate industry is retiring!

I was reviewing the 2010 National Association of REALTORS Member Profile today and noticed a very alarming fact!  The real estate industry is retiring! Not only has the average age of REALTORS moved from 51 to 54 year old.  While the number of REALTORS that are 60 or older has risen 32% in the past four years, the number of REALTORS that are 39 years old and younger has actually DECREASED 21%!   Not only is the industry concentrated on those that are nearly retirement age, we are LOSING those that are in their prime producing years!   Most MLSs and Associations [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:25:50-07:00March 5th, 2011|Main category|Comments Off on The entire real estate industry is retiring!
Read More

Google is not out of the real estate listings business

The last few days have been full of Google noise in the real estate blogs and media. From our perspective, it has been a bit comedic. Google made a post on their blog about shutting down Google Base and everyone went into shock. Google Base was never a great idea. It was a project to aggregate real estate listing data because they could not get the listings by their standard methods - indexing. At the time that Google Base was created, Google Robots and Spiders were blocked from indexing real estate listings on nearly all property search websites. Realtor.com blocked [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:25:54-07:00January 29th, 2011|Broker-Agent Information, Main category|Comments Off on Google is not out of the real estate listings business
Read More

Divided we get conquered!

Can’t we all just get along? Last week at Inman Connect in New York City, I was invited to share the Top 5 questions MLSs should address in the next year.  I reserved one of my five points to one of the key dysfunctions I have observed in our industry - Internal Squabbling.   As the market gets tighter and budgets gets strained, we see more and more examples of discord between real estate organizations supposedly all designed to serve the needs of real estate professionals.  In some regions we see local real estate associations engaging in predatory practices, trying [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:25:54-07:00January 22nd, 2011|Broker-Agent Information, Main category, MLS Insights|Comments Off on Divided we get conquered!
Read More
WAV Group | Copyright © 2025 All Rights Reserved.