Rob Hahn

Managing Partner of 7DS Associates, and the grand poobah of this here blog. Once called "a revolutionary in a really nice suit", people often wonder what I do for a living because I have the temerity to not talk about my clients and my work for clients. Suffice to say that I do strategy work for some of the largest organizations and companies in real estate, as well as some of the smallest startups and agent teams, but usually only on projects that interest me with big implications for reforming this wonderful, crazy, lovable yet frustrating real estate industry of ours.

In Which I Point Out the Obvious, With Numbers

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James Dwiggins, CEO of Nexthome, has become one of my favorite commentators on the state of the industry. He’s extremely smart, has years and years of experience as a broker and now as a franchise operator, and is without question one of the tallest men in the real estate industry. (Maybe Walt Baczkowski, CEO of … Read more

Don't Brokerages Compete With Each Other?

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Over on Facebook, an interesting and intelligent discussion broke out — which is news in and of itself, I realize. We weren’t discussing The Dress or llamas. Amazing. What we were discussing is MLS taking over syndication, something that Kipp Cooper at North Alabama pioneered. Here’s how it began: The responses were really interesting, and … Read more

Don't Brokerages Compete With Each Other?

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Over on Facebook, an interesting and intelligent discussion broke out — which is news in and of itself, I realize. We weren’t discussing The Dress or llamas. Amazing. What we were discussing is MLS taking over syndication, something that Kipp Cooper at North Alabama pioneered. Here’s how it began: The responses were really interesting, and … Read more

Don’t Brokerages Compete With Each Other?

by

Over on Facebook, an interesting and intelligent discussion broke out — which is news in and of itself, I realize. We weren’t discussing The Dress or llamas. Amazing. What we were discussing is MLS taking over syndication, something that Kipp Cooper at North Alabama pioneered. Here’s how it began: The responses were really interesting, and … Read more

On NRT's New HomesForSale.com (Which Most Folks Are Misunderstanding)

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 I know some folks think I’m a Realogy homer. Well, given that’s where I got my start in the industry, maybe I’m a little bit guilty of that whole “cut me and I bleed blue” thing. But I think I’m actually calling things as I see them; I’ve been plenty critical of Realogy when they’ve … Read more

On NRT’s New HomesForSale.com (Which Most Folks Are Misunderstanding)

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 I know some folks think I’m a Realogy homer. Well, given that’s where I got my start in the industry, maybe I’m a little bit guilty of that whole “cut me and I bleed blue” thing. But I think I’m actually calling things as I see them; I’ve been plenty critical of Realogy when they’ve … Read more

Tell Me Again How the MLS is the "Gold Standard" of Data Accuracy?

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I’ll have some thoughts on Realogy/NRT’s new HomesForSale.com later, but I couldn’t resist this brief observation. I kinda knew the problem existed, but until this splashy website came along, we did not have the visual impact/evidence. If HomesForSale.com accomplishes nothing else, it really ought to wake up the industry (particularly the MLS) about the problem with … Read more

Tell Me Again How the MLS is the “Gold Standard” of Data Accuracy?

by

I’ll have some thoughts on Realogy/NRT’s new HomesForSale.com later, but I couldn’t resist this brief observation. I kinda knew the problem existed, but until this splashy website came along, we did not have the visual impact/evidence. If HomesForSale.com accomplishes nothing else, it really ought to wake up the industry (particularly the MLS) about the problem with … Read more

We Need To Talk About Fannie Mae A Bit

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A couple of weeks ago, I learned about a new Fannie Mae program that was rolled out to lenders called Collateral Underwriter, or CU. From the press release: Fannie Mae created the online tool in 2013 to analyze appraisal data it had been receiving from lenders electronically since 2012. With the rollout in early 2015, … Read more