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
A current discussion within the MLS and tech vendor industry is around the issue of listing syndication. This post by Brian Larson, and the discussions therein, is a pretty good summation of the thinking on the part of MLS executives, vendors, and consultants. As Victor Lund of the WAV Group, a leader in the world … Read more
While at Inman NYC in January, I met a great guy, Ernie Graham, a co-founder of an outfit called SocialBios.com. He’s smart, he’s personable, he’s driven, he’s focused, and he sure can carry a tune at the karaoke. [Ed: We won’t be talking more about that now, y’hear?] I spoke with him yesterday about his … Read more
Something must be in the air. Within a fairly short period of time, I’ve had emails, phone calls, and direct messages about the perils of listing syndication. In the last couple of days, two extremely smart, extremely influential people have written on topics that revolve around the issue of syndication. The first is John Heithaus, … Read more
Now that I am a consumer in the real estate market, having moved from New Jersey to Texas (like so many others) and therefore having placed my house in the hands of a Realtor, I get to have some cool experiences. I wanted to share one of them with you all, especially the real estate … Read more
There are a few things that we all put up with, which puzzle me. Why do we tolerate computer crashes from our mobile phones? Why do we put up with rude government workers? And finally, why do we accept as normal that service providers of all kinds would not show up on time? Consider my … 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
Sami Inkinen, co-founder of Trulia, has written a blogpost about the future of syndication where he raises some important questions about where the real estate industry is headed with distribution of listings: Now that listing syndication has become a mainstream practice and “syndication sites” like Trulia have grown to serve millions of users, an old … Read more
Coming off of an awesome, Hall-of-Fame type of year in which I batted .600 in predictions (or, alternatively, a year in which I only got 6 out of 10 predictions even remotely close to right, and hence am a big #FAIL), I thought I would don the Nostradamus hat once again and make foolish predictions … Read more