Congratulations to Annie Ives for being featured as a Power Player in Angeleno Magazine. For those of us not from Los Angeles, Angeleno Magazine is a highly respected local journal. She was touted for her leadership of TheMLS/Claw since 2002. Congratulations Annie! Read the entire article here! https://themlsblog.com/2016/05/25/news-ceo-annie-ives-profiled-in-angeleno-magazine/
We are so excited to see how MLSs are starting to cross-pollinate talent across markets. Congrats to MRED in Chicago for electing Art Carter, CEO of the California Regional Multiple Listing Service, the nation’s largest MLS to their Board of Directors. We, at WAV Group often promote the idea of inviting diverse talent and perspectives to sit on MLS Boards. Boards in most industries elect participants with diverse backgrounds in finance, marketing, product development and management. MLSs generally only invite agents and brokers from their local region to participate. A move to elect a strategic manager from outside of the [...]
When I was growing up in Chicago in the 1960s, professional boxing was a big sport that my dad followed and heck, like a lot of kids, I enjoyed many of the things my parents did. My dad exposed me at a very young age to a gold-medal Olympic boxer named Cassius Clay, who would later changed his name to Muhammad Ali. Ali was the classic showman who pontificated by using the most quotable quotes. That talent, mixed with a boxing acumen we had not seen before, made him a PR person’s dream, but his activities also made him an [...]
Companies across the real estate spectrum who are selling to their competitors are having fantastic results. The process of expanding your communication strategy to include competitors is found to drive more new business than ever imagined. In the old days, companies locked down their communications plans to hide from sharing information with their competitors. Today, the overwhelming trend is to occupy more share of voice to position your company as a market leader. WAV Group consulting works with Associations of REALTORS®, Multiple Listing Service Providers (MLS), and technology firms to implement these programs through WAV Group Communications. Below are some [...]
Doesn’t it seem like life just keeps getting faster and faster? It forces us to put our head down and just DO all the time. We’re not always thinking about where our organization is focused or why they are even focused on it. We’re so busy surviving the day to day that sometimes we can’t see the forest for the trees! So how do you get yourself back to a place where you’re focused on continual improvement in your business? Who has time to do strategic planning anyway, right? While every business suffers from these thoughts on occasion, it IS [...]
Real Estate is not just an online thing. It’s a global thing. People buy houses all around the globe, and in many nations – the notion of online real estate is hot. In the small nation of England, companies valued at £312m, or £40m Housesimple along with easyProperty and eMoov are all trying to make a go of it with significant venture backing. Online real estate is ripe for the taking. Zillow Group will not need to go out for additional funding to pivot to online real estate. The company is valued at over $5B and is operating at a run [...]
A few months ago I spoke to the owner of a start-up company who was completely convinced that consumers do NOT trust their real estate agents to help them find service providers. He believed that agents were not the best group to help a home buyer secure all of the services they need to complete a transaction. He passionately believed that consumers believe that real estate agents are dishonest and do not have the best interest of their clients in mind. For those of you that read the WAV Group blog, you know we are not shy about talking about [...]
The pessimist MLSs among you will look upon the title of this article with raised hairs. The lens that we have adopted here is for a single focus. Namely, to search for specific context within the databases of Upstream that may be of value to MLSs. Remember, Upstream does more than manage listings, but it does start with the MLS destination in mind. The MLS does not need to change their business rules, or modify their data schema. They need only disclose to their brokers what their rules and schema are and accept a broker load as is common among nearly [...]
One of my favorite research rituals is the annual release by Mary Meeker of her Internet Trends Report, the latest of which was issued on June 1. Meeker was catapulted into the financing world spotlight as the lead manager at Morgan Stanley for Netscape’s IPO in 1995. Later that year, she and Chris DePuy at Morgan published The Internet Trends, and it quickly became the definitive digest of the current state of the Internet, as well as discerning big-picture trends. Meeker would go on to serve as a research analyst for another notable Morgan Stanley IPO in 2004: Google. Today, [...]
WAV Group provides brokers with consulting on online marketing. One of our services includes benchmarking the effectiveness of listing syndication strategies. We have been tracking the performance of a real estate broker’s listings dating back to 2006 by publishing channel. As these reports show, Trulia effectiveness has decreased to a remarkable volume of no leads per week on 367 listings. The same report in 2013 showed between 12 and 25 leads per month. It begs the question “If a third party consumer website is not delivering value, should a broker continue to syndicate?” One thing is for sure, we can [...]
COMPLETE THE SURVEY NOW The Real Estate Standards Organization, RESO, has been hard at work creating consistent data across MLS regions and across the country by creating the RESO Data Dictionary. To date 1.1 mm agents across the country now have access to RESO Data Dictionary thanks to the hard work of Leading Real Estate Companies of the World, The Realty Alliance, NAR, MLS system providers and MLSs across the country. This normalized data built from years of work with technology leaders from around the industry is being used to fuel Upstream, Broker Public Portal (Homesnap) and the AMP program. [...]
Bob Rosecrans and Michael Koval at Pixces Consulting Group are a little more subtle in addressing this subject in their new White Paper “Real Estate Brokers: Is your CIO future proofing your business?” But the title of the paper’s first chapter really says it all: “I love my CIO but…” What follows in an exceptionally candid and insightful examination of the conversations that Chief Executive Officers or broker-owners must have with their Chief Information Officers – or 0whoever is the Technology leader or point person at their brokerage. As Senior Partners at Pixces – and industry power hitters – Koval [...]
