Recently, I ran across a hilarious little parody website called ReallyRottenRealty.com. The site exposes some of the more compellingly awful business practices of some brokers and agents out there. Check it out, and be prepared to laugh while grimacing. Turns out, the website is a marketing vehicle for a company called AgentHarvest, based in Dallas, … Read more
The incredibly smart, sometimes bearded, Gahlord Dewald has a post up on Inman (will go behind paywall in 24 hours) in which he counsels brokers and agents to “break free from cookie-cutter real estate” by paying more attention to categories of information and data: Think your brand is different from your competition? Go look at … Read more
In 2007, Ralph Roberts, then the “official spokesman” of Guthy-Renker Home, published a brief essay on RISMedia called “How to Soar High with Power Agent Teams“. In it, he recommended an approach to teaming that is much more based on division of labor and functions: I was recently flying home from the National Association of … Read more
In the comments to this post, I’m getting some rather interesting thoughts from a variety of real estate agents and brokers. The question I asked was, “Why should I, as a consumer, care if you’re tech-savvy or not?” The most popular answer was along the lines of, “Because tech-savvy agents have speed and ease of … Read more
As a longtime watcher of real estate and technology, but still just a consumer in every respect, I have a question for the technology-savvy realtors. What does it matter to me, as a consumer, if you’re a tech-savvy agent? It’s a real question, actually, because at this point, I’m not sure what the answer is. … Read more
We worship creativity. In describing a business, a leader, a product, or a service, I can think of no higher praise than to say it is creative, or visionary, or innovative. Whether in marketing, or technology, or business process, or a blogpost, all of us admire creativity, strive for creativity, and think about creativity. The … Read more
A couple of days ago, I read this post on the Four Hour Workweek blog about a guy’s attempt to find out the limits of free credit card concierge services. He had the free concierge do things like help him with a crossword puzzle and book space travel. It’s a hilarious post and I learned … Read more
One of the best things about conferences is having great conversations with really smart innovative people. Garron Seliken of M Realty is one such smart, innovative person, and he and I (along with a bunch of other folks like Marie Still, Jay Thompson, Chris Drayer, and Daniel Rothamel) had lunch today at NAR Mid Year. … Read more
In Part 1, I explored how large law firms and big brokerages are similar, based on the forthcoming paper by Glenn Reynolds, a law professor and blogging pioneer. Then in Part 2, we looked at how they’re different in some fundamental ways, particularly compensation models, that makes the size of Big Brokerage appear to be … Read more