I’m honored to be asked to give the closing remarks at the Council of MLS conference in Chicago this year at the end of September/early October. Since I’m supposed to be wrapping up the discussions of those few days, I can’t actually prepare anything ahead of time. But I can sort of cheat by putting … Read more
So earlier today, I get an email of some interesting real-estate related links from my friends at AOL Housingwatch (where I pen an occasional column or two). In it, I find this gem of a story: Mortgage loan originators will have to be fingerprinted and sign up to a central registry to do business in … Read more
I’m going to try to do a bit of a stream-of-consciousness “live-blog” here at Houston Association of REALTORS Real Estate Investment Symposium. I put that in quotes because (a) I’m distracted often, and (b) the bandwidth isn’t the best off my little MiFi device. I’ve already missed a couple of the early presentations from Zillow, … Read more
Once again, I find myself in the curious position of praising the good folks at RPR while at the same time ending up on a negative note. On the one hand, RPR’s posting their Content License Agreement (complete with redlined corrections) is by far the most transparent thing that I’ve seen a company do in … Read more
In my latest Inman column (link is for subscribers only, unless you made it in before the paywall dropped), I took issue with mobile for real estate, and called it the “eternal next big thing” for real estate. I didn’t have the space really to address what I do think is the future of mobile … Read more
Original posted on The Notorious R.O.B by Rob Hahn. Agent ratings are back in the conversation, thanks to this scintillating op/ed by Kris Berg (link is for Inman premium subscribers only) who is one of the best writers in real estate today. I have written about this topic before (here and here) and it continues to fascinate and puzzle me … Read more
From the Search Engine Land site comes news (h/t: Duke Long, @dukelong) that Google has built out what amounts to the start of a national real estate search website: The real estate listing place pages include property information, photos, map placement, Street View imagery and functionality, nearby public transit details, and even AdWords ads. Google … Read more
[UPDATED 11/20/09: More facts added.] Earlier this week, Reggie Nicolay (@ReggieRPR), the Director of Social Media for the REALTORS Property Resource, LLC, wrote: I happen to agree 100%. Also, a commenter on one of my earlier posts by the name of Kris Goodfellow wrote: Rob, I’ve got to say, that there is much in the … Read more
Without a doubt, the topic of conversation at this year’s NAR National Convention has been the REALTOR Property Resource (Link: PDF) or RPR, the ambitious $20mm program rolled out with much fanfare by NAR. You couldn’t avoid talking about RPR even if you tried. And I wasn’t really trying that hard, because RPR is a … Read more