Magical Thinking vs. Boring Reality

  Facebook can sometimes be a gold mine for content. Consider these two seemingly unrelated events: Marie is a friend who used to work in the real estate industry, as the Director of Marketing for MRIS. She relocated to Florida, and asked me months ago for some agents I knew in the area. I didn’t, … Read more

Real Estate Hope and Change for the Hope and Change Generation

My friend Eric Stegemann, a Millennial himself, tweeted out the following article from BusinessWeek talking about the “Lost Generation” of Homeowners: For some analysts, the scariest outcome of the collapsed home-price bubble is that it could turn an entire generation of would-be homeowners into perma-renters. Yale economist Robert Shiller floated the idea of a “lost … Read more

On Pinnacle: Interview W/ Stefan Swanepoel and Jeremy Conaway

Recently, I found out that the Pinnacle Group Project — something I had heard rumors about for a few months — had officially launched. What the hell is Pinnacle? From the website (the URL is “thechangechampions.com” by the way): A two year intensive course of study for Association Leadership and Management. This program includes: Eight … Read more

Episode 5 of Trialogues Podcast is Up

In case you didn’t know, I’ve been having some fun with Matthew Shadbolt of Corcoran and Gahlord Dewald of Thoughtfaucet on a podcast thing of late. Episode 5 is now up: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/trialogues-conversations-on/id524756328 Take a listen if you enjoy the kind of impractical, highly theoretical ramblings that we happen to like. 🙂 -rsh

NAR the PAC: Three Questions

I’ve been having a twitter conversation (remember those?) with my good friend Mike Pennington, who is not only one of the guys behind RETSO, but is an active member of his local and state Association of REALTORS, about NAR and political power. I assume it’s because of either the Trialogues podcast in which we discussed … Read more

Information and the Firm, Real Estate: What Does Big Data Even Mean?

  In part 1, we just looked at one person’s view of what Big Data means for corporations, then tried to apply it to real estate. I’ve had a couple of conversations about it with some very smart industry people since posting that, and am trying to wrap my head around the whole concept. The … Read more

Information and the Firm – Real Estate Style

I’m pretty certain this is going to be an obsession for me for the next few weeks. So as I’m wont to do, I’ll think out loud on these pages what these incredible insights might mean for real estate. The “this” is both the video above and this blogpost on The Economist’s Schumpeter blog. The … Read more

NPR Notices Millennials Aren’t Buying Houses

[Continuing my experiment on short posts… 600 words or less, guaranteed.] I’ve been sounding the alarm on the Millennials for… oh… over two years now, I guess, starting with this post in March of 2010. I noticed that even the mainstream media (like the LA Times) is starting to catch on to the fact that … Read more