When Rich Barton took (back) over as CEO of Zillow earlier this year, I wrote a Red Dot and titled it, “The Return of the King.” I didn’t realize then that the king was not just a fighter, but a gambler. With giant brass ones. After the Q2 earnings results, I know that now. Zillow’s … Read more
Happy Friday everybody. I realize most of you won’t get to this until tomorrow or perhaps Monday, but since I’ve been working on the Zillow Q2 earnings analysis (likely publishing on Monday), I wanted to end the week on a… well… interesting note. Most of you have seen the headlines on Inman about Zillow’s massive … Read more
In a couple of recent VIP posts, I looked through limited number of iBuyer transactions of both Opendoor and Zillow. I then took the most interesting conclusion one can draw from those numbers and put it on Facebook, in the Inman Coast to Coast group, comprised of thousands of professional REALTORS. While some responses were … Read more
In a previous post, I looked at some of Opendoor’s transactions in Florida and drew some conclusions on very limited data. Well, I got my hands on some more data, this time from Phoenix and for Zillow Offers. Because I don’t have a data analyst on my team, and I’ve got a lot of things … Read more
Zillow reported its Q1/2019 earnings yesterday, and it was the first “real” earnings call with Rich Barton at the helm. As much as I missed hearing Spencer Rascoff on the call, I have to tip my hat to Barton and team (his style appears to be having the senior operators on the earnings call) for … Read more
Recently, there was an excellent post about iBuyers from Homebloq, a company that appears to sell some sort of a mobile app “connecting Chicago brokers and buyers” according to the website. The blog is not signed, but I think it’s written by Austin James, the co-founder of Homebloq, and is titled, “How iBuyers Die.” I’ve … 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
Okay, so just had an exchange on the Book of Faces with my good friend, James Dwiggins, the CEO of NextHome. He’s really one of the smartest and nicest guys in the business, and it’s always fun to talk industry issues. And I started to write a response and thought, why not, a short blogpost. … Read more
(Pardon me a moment while I go put on my asbestos suit for the inevitable flames coming my way.) The Zillow Group Q4/2018 earnings call yesterday was a shocker in many ways. What most people immediately focused on was the change at CEO from Spencer Rascoff to Rich Barton. I gather from social media this … Read more