I’m still in recovery mode from thyroid surgery on Friday (it went great, thank you to all who have messaged me) but wanted to throw out a quick reaction to the news coming out of Zillow in its Q2 earnings report. Rest assured, I’ll be covering this in some depth at some point, probably. For … Read more
Mike Delprete, the man behind Adventures in Real Estate Tech, recently sent out an email newsletter (I can’t find the article on his website) about OfferDepot: A Keller Williams team in Phoenix recently launched OfferDepot, an instant offer play, to “help with all the confusion with cash offers vs bringing your home to market.” Why … Read more
[Note: I advised Zillow on its communication plan for rolling out the program I discuss herein. I do not have an ongoing relationship with Zillow.] I assume that by now anybody who is reading Notorious is aware of the big announcement from Zillow: Zillow Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:Z) (NASDAQ:ZG), which houses a portfolio of the largest … Read more
It’s New Year’s Eve, 2017. The champagne is chilling, dinner reservation has been made, and it’s quiet around here. Rare thing, this quiet. In any event, on this last day of 2017 — a year filled with changes, both good and bad and in-between — I thought it’d be fun to take a look back … Read more
So I’ve decided to add to my end-of-the-year workload by starting something new this year. I call it the Interesting List, and there are seven people — a number that is sacred to me as well as many of the world’s oldest religions — on it. Hence, The Seven Most Interesting People in Real Estate. … Read more
I’ve been extraordinarily busy due to a bunch of deadlines for a couple of projects. That isn’t an excuse, or an apology, but a setup since it was research for one of those projects that leads to this post. Let’s not bury the lede: On current trends, Redfin will overtake Realtor.com as the second most … Read more
One of the recurring problems of the real estate industry is that it is almost entirely reactive when it comes to problems. We continually look backwards, rather than forwards, then wonder why things don’t improve. A good example is the latest recommendation from Victor Lund of the WAV Group, who promotes Redfin’s idea that IDX … Read more
Okay, it turns out that Part 2 was the difficult one to write, because of how complicated organized real estate is. Part 1, the impact on brokerage, is here in case you missed it. The final question is the impact on technology vendors in real estate. They are actually a pretty important part of the … Read more
I have to be honest here. I thought this post would be easy to write after Part 1, where I talked about impact on brokerages. Turns out not to be the case. There are several reasons why, but the biggest is that there are a lot of “if-then” branching scenarios that made me get into … Read more