In this episode, I speak with my good friend and mentor, Phillip Cantrell. He is the CEO and founder of Benchmark Realty, the #1 brokerage by market share in the Nashville area. We discuss a sensitive and touchy topic — the NAR Speech Codes (10.5 and beyond) and how conservative REALTORS feel about the direction … Read more
At long last, Compass has reported on its first full quarter of operating as a public company. This is a moment I have been waiting for for quite some time, as there has not been a traditional brokerage to compare Realogy to since I started keeping track way back in the day when Realogy was … Read more
Here in Q1 of 2021, I’m beginning to detect a certain pattern when it comes to trying to analyze earnings calls to see where the industry is. There’s a lot of repetition, as if the things I’ve noted years ago haven’t changed at all. And yet, Q1 was a sizzling hot market, with unprecedented activity … Read more
[UPDATE: I heard from Dave Price, CEO of MARIS, about this. Please read the updates below.] Yesterday, I posted something small just to my friends on Facebook as an illustration of an issue that Sam DeBord and I discussed at length earlier in the week: how brokerages and agents were gaming Clear Cooperation Policy with … Read more
This is going to be a relatively short post. Frankly, because I’ve run out of ways to say the same thing quarter after quarter. If you’re new around here, please go back and re-read everything I’ve written about Zillow after every one of Zillow’s earnings calls. Then you can check out my June 2018 Red … Read more
I did a livestream on Facebook yesterday with Sam DeBord, a good friend and a fellow supernerd in MLS-related topics. Of course, he’s also the CEO of RESO and an active participant in NAR policy circles, so he’s among the most knowledgeable in the industry on the issues. We debated, discussed, and I’ve embedded the … Read more
In this episode, I chat with my good friend Keith Robinson, also the Chief Strategy Officer of NextHome. We discuss the housing market, why Keith doesn’t believe there’s a housing bubble, banter about what is actually going on with the insanity that is housing today, and where he sees things headed. Quite a topic for … Read more
I saw a Facebook post talking about a common problem with real estate agents — buyer disloyalty. That got me wondering, why aren’t we moving towards agents getting paid by the hour? It would solve so many problems. The way that real estate agents are getting paid leads to a lot of issues, one of … Read more
There must be something in the water. I got three separate emails recently regarding publicly-traded brokerages. Two were on EXPI because they hosted an analyst day, and one was on Compass. Plus, there’s a lot of noise out there debating whether Compass is a tech company or a brokerage or whatever. Since I’ve been covering … Read more