At WAV Group, we like to look under the hood at what the top property search sites in America are doing to engage consumers and boost performance. In some cases, we work with the site owner and have access to their analytics (ie Google Analytics or other). In other cases, we use benchmarking tools like Hitwise and ComScore to get a glimpse into what these top performers may be doing. The results are interesting.
Imagine a world where every real estate agent, broker and franchise in the nation promoted their real estate mobile app to consumers. The app is white-label branded to the agent, broker, and franchise offering direct access to every MLS listing without any competitive ads. That is the way it would need to work. Guess what, we have it. You have it. Our industry has it. Today.
Since its early days, Zillow Group has maintained a position that the consumer interest is best served by allowing listings from all sources, including For Sale By Owner, to be posted to their site. This may be, in part, why Zillow sites had up to 187 Million unique users visit their sites last year. Recently, WAV Group has noticed a new type of broker support that is in line with this policy.
It seems like every week we’re hearing about a new announcement from a large brokerage or franchise telling us they are spending millions on technology and re-positioning their brand story around their technology suite.
If you know anything about Hunt Real Estate Corporation, you know that they are a family owned and operated brokerage with high integrity and a fierce approach to competition. Since 1911 they have been a market leader in upstate New York, cities like Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Rochester, Syracuse, Albany, and the many Southern Tier communities that border Pennsylvania. They recently expanded into the Boston marketplace though a significant acquisition. We have known the Hunt family since Marlyn and I lived in Orchard Park, NY. We became friends though our interactions at The Buffalo Club and The Country Club of Buffalo. At the time, Marilyn ran marketing at Fisher-Price and I was spinning up my first start-up companies.
The smartest technology companies and most progressive MLSs are leading our industry to a new era of efficiency and profitability. They are making it easy for start-ups to expand quickly from market to market and serve the innovation needs of brokers. These leaders are supporting well-established companies to evolve their data platforms and opening the door for standardization in EVERY market in the country.
In talking with various people inside brokerages, I hear the same challenge time and time again. "My data is all over the place and I have no way to figure out what it means." Driving information out of your data is Business Intelligence (BI). There are free or low-cost solutions to help analyze data in your control and derive the answers needed to make better business decisions.
This Flashback Features series unearths profiles from the past of real estate and technology leaders. A version of this story was first published in California Real Estate magazine. This profile of Craigslist founder Craig Newmark is from 2006. By Kevin Hawkins Craig Newmark, the Internet’s reluctant mogul, makes his daily visit to Café Reverie in the Cole Valley neighborhood of San Francisco. He has dog biscuits in his pockets and a ready smile for the next little child that he encounters.
WAV GROUP has gotten acquainted with myPlanit and it's CEO Adrienne Meisels. Adrienne is a fantastic person who is super smart and developing a very creative application that lets agents look at a map to see the places they have gone (like listing appointments, open houses, etc) and visualize their journey on a timeline. It's a lot more than that, but you can appreciate how this example would benefit an agent. Adrienne uses the term The Internet of You. myPlanit does the work for you by privately and securely tracking the things that you do, for you. Inman News gave [...]
In an announcement made to their membership, Leading Real Estate Companies of the World® (LeadingRE) have entered into a definitive agreement with MoxiWorks® to provide LeadingRE Cloud™ to their 565+ brokerage members. The solution is called LeadingRE Cloud. Franchises and networks like LeadingRE have been providing data services for their brokers over decades. No doubt, the most notorious version is the legacy CREST system at Realogy Holdings Corporation®. Keller Williams® CEO, Gary Keller has kicked off a Billion dollar investment in technology. RE/MAX® is in a process to buy a company or outsource to a vendor. Berkshire Hathaway Home Services® has [...]
We’re starting to see the impact of a new leadership team at the National Association of REALTORS® led by Bob Goldberg, a strategic, yet practical leader that is SERIOUS about making the industry function more effectively. He also seems to be critically evaluating every investment in technology and making some bold moves to re-focus efforts. NAR announced yesterday that is shutting down development on its Advanced Multilist Platform, or AMP. AMP was under development for a few years at a burn rate of $6 Million per year. The concept behind AMP was solid – consolidate MLS data into a single [...]
Circlepix has sold everything. They operated an extensive network of photographers that they sold to VHT Studios in January. Now they have sold the rest of their company to Inside Real Estate. If you have not followed Inside Real Estate lately – pay attention. Inside Real Estate is the incredible company that recently landed Keyes – one of the largest firms in South East Florida among others. They are taking a piecemeal approach to purchasing world class software providers to complete their suite of an end-to-end solution for brokers, teams, and agents. At the heart of Inside Real Estate is [...]
