A few weeks ago, I put up a post about a working paper study from the National Bureau of Economic Research that researched the question of real estate commissions. The authors basically concluded that the reason why real estate commissions are so high is because buyer agents steer clients to properties that are paying higher cooperating … Read more
A relatively brief post today, as I’m still trying to catch up from being on the road so much. Plus, I realized that I’ve been writing about Big Heavy Topics lately, and thought it’d be fun to talk a bit about marketing. Believe it or not, when I started this blog in 2009, my focus … Read more
I’ve been on the road driving all around Florida since Labor Day, so obviously, blogging has been light. But I was sent some news by a reader — again, the best informed audience in real estate — and I was really struck by the forceful language. CALBRE (California Bureau of Real Estate) has released a Licensee … Read more
In part 1 and part 2 of this series, I laid out my concerns with Project Upstream as it is currently structured, and a path forward in which Upstream becomes part and parcel of the MLS system. As I mentioned in those posts, the technology to do this is not science fiction. It exists today, … Read more
Yesterday, I gave a presentation at the Pacific West Association of REALTORS Broker Summit which I named “Bring the Pain”. To be fair, I ask all my speaking clients whether they want the Light, Medium, or Heavy and PWR picked heaviest of the heavy. One of the things I mentioned was a recent Working Study … Read more
I recently found this post on GeekEstate, which was from a while ago, that asked a provocative question: There are some proponents for the entire industry ceasing syndication entirely (specifically to Zillow). The thinking is generally “with no listings, Zillow would become irrelevant and lose all their traffic, all that traffic would frequent agent/broker websites, and the result would be … Read more
In Part 1, we discussed why Project Upstream as currently setup is problematic, despite the goals of Upstream being absolutely worth pursuing. In this part, I go more into offering solutions. Had I been involved with Upstream earlier on, this would have been my advice, but then, nobody asked me. 🙂 Basically, my take is that … Read more
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about Zillow’s acquisition of Dotloop, and offered the following under “The Long Game”: Over the long haul then, those who are working with Zillow, leveraging that end-to-end data, and managing the lead-to-contract-to-close lifecycle most efficiently will do more business, make more money, and drive competitors out of … Read more
At the Inman Connect conference that just wrapped up, there was a “town hall” on a variety of topics featuring industry thought leaders like Marilyn Wilson of the WAV Group, Mark McLaughlin of Pacific Union, Joseph Rand of BHG Rand Realty, and Katie Maxwell of Intero. One question I asked was about Project Upstream, the recently … Read more