A week ago, the California Association of REALTORS held a very interesting panel discussion on the MLS, and live-streamed it. I hope I’m embedding this correctly below. Seriously, watch the whole thing if you haven’t already. It’s really good. I’m sure there are other things to talk about from this panel, but for now, I … Read more
I’m not wrong often (although Sunny might disagree) but when I am, I freely and eagerly admit it. The MLS of Choice change may be one of the times when I was wrong. I thought it wasn’t that big a deal: don’t charge people when they’re not using your MLS? Isn’t that a no-brainer? It … Read more
Last week the well-known real estate author/speaker/consultant Stefan Swanepoel wrote on Facebook that money is flowing into real estate technology. That observation sparked a heated discussion; many argued that real estate doesn’t scale, it’s too complicated, transactions are too difficult, too expensive, and too emotional for technology to disrupt, and so on. To paraphrase Darth Vader: … Read more
Just about every single MLS in the country has mandatory training for all new members that’s in the 3-5 hour range. Add in other courses ranging from how to use the tax data system to creating CMAs to whatever else the MLS offers and you’re looking at tens of hours of training in order to use … Read more
So Greg Robertson and I did a thing – a podcast, to be a little more specific – and I’m pretty excited about it. Industry Relations with Rob Hahn and Greg Robertson just went live this month. Each episode is about 30 minutes, and stuffed full of our particular brand of wit and insight and … Read more
I like being on panels. I like moderating them too. They’re fun, usually pretty short, and oftentimes the other participants are friends I can joke around with backstage. One downside though is that the panel format doesn’t give you a chance to dive into detailed explanations of complicated concepts. A panel is better for sound … Read more
I’m working on a couple of year-end monster posts, but wanted to throw this up as a quick sort of mental snack before the other stuff. Through a friend, I was introduced to Mark Manson, the self-help guru. Normally, I think of self-help gurus the same way I think of used car salesmen and religious … Read more
[You can consider this Part 2 of an ongoing series that started with my last post about comments on MLS and Upstream, but really this is more like Part 372 of an ongoing series about the future of organized real estate. You can blame my pie-in-the-sky high-level theorizing on my philosophy degree. But anyhow…] Organized … Read more
Yesterday, either Inman News or I broke the news that the California independent contractor case, Bararsani v. Coldwell Banker was settled. (I kinda think I broke it, because the settlement came down on the 13th, and since Inman has actual reporters and such, I’d have thought they’d have sniffed it out between then and the 18th, when my post … Read more