Late last week, Rob and I connected and, once again, he gave me some feedback on my work. His latest recommendation is that I familiarize myself more with the current broker landscape. His June 2018 Red Dot on Zillow, Redfin and Realogy is where I have begun taking a deep dive. While I don’t expect … Read more
The other day Rob wrote a post on how Competition in Real Estate is Changing. I don’t think anyone would disagree. And it reminded me of a comment that I can’t find on another post which simply asked “What can brokers even do about it?”. That’s a sincere question worth talking about, from this Recovering … Read more
Regular readers know that I have said that Opendoor could be the most important company in real estate. My reasoning was that Opendoor looked to be trying to revolutionize the single biggest painful aspect of buying a home: the mortgage. Here’s what I wrote: So yeah, I think Opendoor is about revolutionizing the entire culture around how homes … Read more
Was it just yesterday when I was speculating on Zillow’s recent hiring of Bob Bemis? Why, yes, yes it was. How things change in 24 hours when you live in interesting times. [Editor’s Note: Obviously, you started writing this on the 15th and didn’t finish? Nice managing the deadline, Rob.] Today, Zillow released their Q4/2011 … Read more
I’ve been traveling more or less nonstop for a couple of weeks, and busy as hell in any event, so I kind of missed the controversy around Redfin’s Scouting Report. I’d suggest heading over to Jay Thompson’s blog to get his thoughts on the product, and the various responses from the real estate industry to … Read more
I’m giving a presentation tomorrow at the Nextgen Realtor Group of the Houston Association of REALTORS. I do believe the actual title of my presentation, as in the program itself, is called Welcome to Dystopia. Somehow, it seems, I’ve become the Cassandra of the real estate industry. But in researching for the presentation, I ran … Read more
I forgot an angle on this post about agent ratings and consumers that’s more in line with the light and snappy flow of this blog. As the NAR survey, flawed as it might be, shows, consumers overwhelmingly want these skills/qualities in a REALTOR: Honesty and Integrity – 98% Knowledge of purchase process – 96% Responsiveness … Read more
As I’m sure you all have heard by now, Google has decided to beat a hasty retreat from real estate: In part due to low usage, the proliferation of excellent property-search tools on real estate websites, and the infrastructure challenge posed by the impending retirement of the Google Base API (used by listing providers to submit … 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