Yesterday, an item on Facebook caught my eye. It was someone sharing a Medium post by Frances Flynn Thorsen, the “Blogmother” of real estate. Before you continue, I strongly suggest reading the whole thing. (You’ll need a Medium account, I believe.) There’s quite a lot of history here, including some sordid drama involving criminal extortion, … Read more
One of the things I missed while finishing up the July Red Dot was this well-done interview of Redfin’s Glenn Kelman in Inman. Andrea Brambila doing her rockstar thing again. I’m thinking through what Redfin wants to see happen, but one passage in particular caught my attention. At one point, talking about incentives for agents … Read more
It hasn’t even been 24 hours since the joint DOJ-FTC workshop on competition in real estate ended. I’ve heard quite a bit, and although one would think listening to panelists in a controlled environment talk about what ought to be truly mind-numbing topics to regular humans, I wasn’t bored at all. Not sure what that … Read more
Joe Rand is one of the smartest guys in the industry, not to mention one of the nicest. He’s an author, who wrote the book on how real estate can deal with disruption. He’s also a terrific singer, in case you didn’t know. In a recent Inman Op/Ed, Joe says that it isn’t NAR’s job … Read more
Chances are, if you read this blog on a regular basis, you’re already aware of the op/ed by Jim Harrison in Inman News titled “It’s time to stop ignoring the crisis at NAR“. That comes on the heels of a back-and-forth between HAR (still the Houston Association of REALTORS, even if their website stands for … Read more
I seriously thought about not writing this post. For one thing, this is complicated stuff, and I thought maybe it deserves to be a Red Dot Report in the near future. That might still happen, depending on how things play out over the next few months. This is also one of my Black Swans coming … Read more
Look, the past 24 hour or so has been a lot of fun. I know I had a few laughs. But things are getting a little out of hand, y’all. Plus, it’s far too late, and I have real work to do and too little time to do it all. Nonetheless, this whole NAR #Logogate … Read more
As many of you know, I was privileged to be at Inman Disconnect this year. This was a different kind of event than ever before — one aimed at getting something done, rather than hearing about what others have done. At the very start of the event, Brad Inman told the gathered leaders that the … Read more
The latest word out of National Association of REALTORS is that the Budget Committee, together with Leadership, has approved a new set of initiatives (not sure what that means, as we’ll discuss below) called S.M.A.R.T. Initiatives and passed a budget to support it to the tune of $35 million per year: We cannot afford – … Read more