Real Estate

The Firm As Model Actually Happening?

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In a time lost in memory, in a world far far away, I openly hypothesized that the future of real estate brokerage might look more like a law firm than brokers of today: Everyone else is an employee. They get a salary, they get benefits, and if business is good, and they’re good, then they … Read more

Agent Value in the Age of Ebay

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So two events conspired to make my evening interesting. First, there was a brief Twitter exchange between Marc Davison, he of the Kilo-class wattage, and Joe Ferrara of Sellsius: Joe: @1000wattmarc Riddle me this: When looking at a specific home zstimate, what value is knowing the median error rate for a city? Marc: @jfsellsius Totally. … Read more

Client Service? Or Lip Service?

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Lawyers — probably the most risk-averse group of human beings on the planet by training, vocation, and personality — are starting to embrace social media and web marketing principles.  There are some rather interesting lessons from that world for realestistas. For example, this article from Lawyers USA (h/t What About Clients?) titled, “Are you overlooking … Read more

Dealing With Negative Comments That Are True

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One of the “risks” of having a company blog or company social media operation of any kind is that someone will come on your blog, your Facebook page, or whatever, and just trash you. Most of the advice on dealing with negativity is to “address it”. For example, here’s a post from MarketingProfsDaily on handling … Read more

On Business Darwinism

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First of all, let me give a shout-out to Hey Amaretto, aka, Diane Guercio, whose blog I just read for the first time.  She’s got an amazing voice for the web: personable, yet relevant, with useful information mixed in with humor and an overall fun voice.  Really, check her out for one example of how … Read more

From Cowboys to Consultants

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Something to consider from the world of commercial real estate, Brokerages Retool Rainmakers: With office leasing and investment sales volume reaching new lows across the country, big brokerages are retraining idled dealmakers to become service providers rather than cowboys intent on roping the next mega deal. Brokerages have enormous fixed costs and in this challenging … Read more

Lessons from Barbershops

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Marc Davison’s newest post is, as is normal for him, a wonderful read filled with cool and interesting insights.  Go read it in full. The key passage, I think, is this: But over the decades, the love waned. As new competitors grew into the marketplace, these establishments remained still in their own murky waters of … Read more

Seth Godin Has An Idea for You

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He thinks real estate brokers should start local newspapers: What should not-so-busy real estate brokers do? Why not start a local newspaper? Here’s how I would do it. Assume you’ve got six people in your office. Each person is responsible to do two things each day: Interview a local business, a local student or a … Read more