Important Lesson for Brokerages from Opendoor’s Eric Wu

Over the weekend, I saw a video from a session at Startup Grind Global Conference in which Eric Wu, the CEO and Co-Founder of Opendoor.com, was interviewed by Elad Gil a “serial entrepreneur, executive (Twitter, Google, Color) and investor at leading companies like Airbnb, Coinbase, Instacart, Pinterest, Stripe, Square, Wish and others.” Inman ran a story … Read more

Gotterdammerung: A Very Serious Legal Threat

I realize I just posted on the future of the MLS, and normally, I’d let posts sit for a few days to “mature” but this is far too big an event and far too big a deal to wait. In case you missed it, a class action lawsuit was filed with the United States District … Read more

Homeowners Net More Selling to Zillow Than With a REALTOR

(Pardon me a moment while I go put on my asbestos suit for the inevitable flames coming my way.) The Zillow Group Q4/2018 earnings call yesterday was a shocker in many ways. What most people immediately focused on was the change at CEO from Spencer Rascoff to Rich Barton. I gather from social media this … Read more

What Everybody is Missing On Vaynerchukgate

Unless you have been living under a rock, you’ve seen the recent brouhaha over the video of a podcast Gary Vaynerchuk’s video where he completely shits on homeownership. In case you missed it, the first part is all about homeownership: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmUyYzrcmEA The real estate commentariat more or less exploded, partly because Gary Vee has long … Read more

Negative Space: Reffkin and Schneider on the Future of Brokerages

It’s been over a week since I thawed out from the polar vortex that was Inman Connect NYC. I realize that people in Chicago and elsewhere in the Midwest would have loved mere 10 below zero temperatures, but for this now-southern boy, that week came with a religious awakening: hell won’t be hot, it’ll be … Read more

A Mission for YPN, If You Choose to Accept It…

It’s been a good long while, I know, and I apologize. But life has become a bit insane, with travel, client work, and of course, writing a 90-page report on the truth about Millennials as real estate consumers. The February Red Dot just went live today, so I can finally write this post I’ve been … Read more

The Machine and the Real Estate Agent

I’m taking a break from writing my February report, and thought I’d think through something with you all. It’s not directly relevant to my Red Dot topic, but it’s so interesting that I couldn’t help but want to do some “read what I wrote to see what I think” type of a thing. We all … Read more

Seven Predictions for 2019: K-Pop Edition

[Posted earlier at Inman News; now that it’s actually 2019, figured it was safe to post to my site for posterity.] So it turns out that I started doing musical themes in 2011 with the Techno Edition for 2012. I’ve done great music (like Alison Krauss and Union Station) to hair-curlingly cringey music (like the … Read more

The Seven Most Interesting People in Real Estate, 2018 Edition

Welcome back to another edition of The Seven Most Interesting People in Real Estate. I know, I know, as a friend of mine said on Facebook, “Great, yet another list.” It does seem like there are a lot of lists in our industry. But what the hell, I do this mostly for fun anyhow, and this … Read more