By now, you have probably heard the news that Zillow launched a “residential brokerage”, will join the MLS, and use the MLS IDX feed to power its dominant website. Just at random, here’s one news story from The Real Deal covering the announcement: For years, Zillow denied it had plans to become a brokerage. But … Read more
Over at Inman, there’s a great writeup of a truly inside baseball topic: the confusion and controversy around Days On Market. Andrea Brambila wrote the report on a panel discussion between Sam Debord of RESO, Rene Galicia of NAR, and Katie Smithson of W+R Studios. All three are people I count as friends, and they … Read more
There is a persistent narrative in the real estate industry. It is persistent because at its core, there is a lot of truth to it. Yet, it’s a narrative that has overextended that truth and is now threatening to become a blinder. Therefore, it somehow falls on me, the voice in the wilderness, to warn … Read more
Unless you’re in the MLS space of the residential real estate industry, you probably did not know that the MLS Standards Workgroup of the NAR MLS Technology and Emerging Issues Advisory Board released an Interim Report. In fact, you probably didn’t know that there was such a thing as a MLS Standards Workgroup. Well, there … Read more
It’s Friday afternoon, and my brother is landing in Las Vegas soon, so I’m outta here! But first, wanted to briefly discuss a new T3 Insight from T3 Sixty: “Expanding the American Dream.” It’s a new monthly article from the good folks over at T3 Sixty and this first one is on a topic on … Read more
This morning, I woke up to not one but two emails about Rental Beast, a new startup that proposes to become the MLS for rentals and integrate it with existing MLSs. One was from WAV Group, doing their PR thing, so I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention. But the second one was from … Read more
This is the followup to the first post, in which I asked whether the real estate industry was serious about race and racial issues. I am choosing to believe that we are, and that the various leaders speaking out about the need to do something are serious about that. If so, we should see more … Read more
Every American of good conscience is hurting now, both from the evil of police brutality and the evil of looting and rioting. I have been silently seething because I felt I had nothing useful to add that literally everyone with a conscience agrees on. What happened to George Floyd was a shocking and horrifying murder … Read more
In Part 1, we looked at what a Platform in real estate might look like, having been inspired by Ben Thompson at Stratechery who talked about platforms in an aggregator world. We then decided that such a platform does not exist in real estate today because of all of the disparate parts that have to … Read more