Home Flipping Report Paints iBuyer Story with a Different Brush
OpenDoor, Zillow, and others have created a stir in the real estate industry by putting a new name on home flipping called iBuyer.
Catalysts Creating WAVes of Fast Change in a Slow-Moving Industry
There are many pillars of change happening in the industry today, some more significant than others, driven by very different catalysts. Teamwork drives higher productivity and greater income.
I Rented a U-Haul — Word of Mouth
How much of your business development strategy is focused on human contact with your friends and past customers? What are you doing to raise your human interaction?
Preach to the Converted
Strategically, the very first dollar invested in supporting your business should be spent fixing the leak of lost, repeat, and referral customers. Somehow, that focus on customers is not happening in our industry today.
Three Stories for You to Read: Amazon, Cybersecurity, App Dev
In the advent of Inman Connect this week, these were three stories I found which piqued my interest this last week. Will Amazon Uber-ize the Real Estate Industry? Cisco and Juniper Networks stocks slipped last Friday on news from The Information that Amazon was entering the $14 billion data center equipment business. While searching for more news I stumbled upon investment firm, TwinRock Partners, article about Amazon and real estate.
A Tech View on Consolidation
Consolidation of Associations and/or Multiple Listing Systems (MLS) at any level has its pros and cons. Consolidation can tip the scale in the way that it improves the business, the industry and most importantly, how it impacts all the stakeholders. This of course includes the consumer who is at the top of pyramid!
Study Says Longer Tweets are Better
Twitter for real estate is a curious strategy. There was quite a bit of discussion about Twitter in some of the Facebook groups that I am in. #thatsfunny. In all seriousness, when WAV Group evaluates the effectiveness of social media marketing and advertising (those are two different things), the numbers prove out that Facebook is far more effective in every matrix of reporting. The data suggests that Facebook is core, Twitter is niche. If you do market on Twitter as part of your surround sound system, you likely already know that Twitter extended the number of characters from the old [...]
It’s the Biggest Marketing and PR Mistake
Stay on message. Those three little words sound so simple. But it amazes me how difficult it seems for companies – and their messengers – to do this. It should be the core of their marketing and PR compass. Consistency and repetition: That’s what every well-crafted marketing and PR program adheres to over the long haul. Unfortunately, most companies forget these crucial tenets and they stray. Or worse, they veer so far from their original course, they completely undermine what they have already have accomplished. Building brand awareness takes time, often a very long time. Building brand loyalty (a.k.a. understanding [...]
Are You Guilty Of “Business As Usual Budgeting?”
Financial and budget planning concept with calculator notebook and financial chart report on work desk How many of have been informed that need to spend the rest of your budget or its going to be reduced next year? How many times have you blindly hit copy and paste and then added a bit for inflation and an unexpected project and then called it a day on your budgeting process? If you’re walking somewhat blindly through your budgeting process then you’re practicing what we call “business-as-usual budgeting”. What’s that? Well, if your typical budgeting practice is to look at last year’s [...]
Big Data Can Drive Bigger Broker Margins
WAV Group spends a lot of time consulting with brokers on how to re-margin their business. We published a paper in 2013 called Harvesting Business From Broker Data. That paper characterized the methods that we developed with a number of brokers to harvest business from across the enterprise of title, mortgage, residential, relocation, insurance, commercial, and property management businesses. It has worked very well for many brokers to recapture repeat transactions and new business though cross sell. In many ways, the rethinking that went into the thesis around harvesting business across the enterprise was the first intellectual break from the [...]
The Problem With Real Estate Is That Nobody Cares About Quality
As a Founding Partner at WAV Group consulting, I have the opportunity to talk to fund managers about their investments in real estate. Some investors are focused on supporting public companies such as Realogy, RE/MAX and others are betting against them with short positions. The truth is that we do not ever know the position of the investors when they ask questions. We just answer them as best we can. On a call this morning, I was asked a profound question about customer experience in two parts. Part 1. What brand has the highest customer satisfaction rating? Part 2. What [...]
Top 5 Ways to Transform Your Office Managers Into Sales Success Coaches
None of the brokers we’ve worked with believe that their office managers are doing what they are supposed to be doing — sales training. Instead, they act more like den mothers. When they could be working on sales coaching or recruiting, office managers are consoling agents who lost big deals, troubleshooting broken printers, or retrieving lost MLS passwords. It’s too easy for office managers to spend the day putting out a series of small fires. Its easy to use all of those daily tasks as excuses for not focusing on the most important roles that managers are responsible for. The [...]