Brokers Need to Revisit VOW Websites

From 2009 to 2013, WAV Group spent a significant portion of our brokerage consulting on explaining what a Virtual Office Website (VOW) is and how it is different from an Internet Data Exchange (IDX) website. Now VOW websites are being discussed again in brokerage meetings and for good reason. Digital paper only brokers have been able to build spectacularly successful businesses that leverage IDX to develop referrals that take a 30% bite out of agent commissions. Brokers who care about the income of their agents should review this carefully.

Inside Real Estate Acquires Circlepix

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 [...]

InstaView 3.0 Introduces First Structured Data to Virtual Tours

Independence, Ohio— January 23, 2017. This week InstaView 3.0, the newest release of Property Panorama’s category-leading virtual tour platform, became the first virtual tour to publish Structured Data. Structured Data allows search engines like Google to render Agent Profiles, Office Profiles, Open Houses, and Property Detail summaries within search results, dramatically improving the search optimization of real estate listings. "Structured Data makes it easier to find and deliver information and is driving more consumer engagement with our new InstaView tours. InstaView tours are already receiving six times more unique visitors than any other listing marketing tool," said Property Panorama CEO [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:22:56-07:00January 24th, 2017|Marketing, Virtual Office Website Series|0 Comments

Looking At VR For Real Estate? AR Will Be Even Bigger

A lot of attention in real estate goes into looking at what the next big thing will be in technology that will impact our business. As a self-confessed closet Geek, I do my best to stay on top of future trends. All things related to data has garnered my greatest attention over the last few years – from Predictive Analytics, to Artificial Intelligence and the emergence of the “algorithm economy.” The future impact of these trends on real estate will be stunning, but there are two other trends closer to the vest for real estate brokerages that could have a [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:05-07:00September 14th, 2016|Marketing, Virtual Office Website Series|0 Comments

NNRMLS Shares Best Practice for Data Management

The Northern Nevada Regional MLS could be considered a middle tier MLS, ranking around the top 100 largest MLSs in the nation. There are approximately 728 MLSs today, down from 750 in the past 6 months. As consolidation runs rampant across America’s MLS, NNRMLS has become a shining light of MLS excellence. Shelley Specchio, CEO of NNRMLS credits a combination of strong broker relationships and the influence of the Council of MLS as keystones for keeping NNRMLS well positioned to serve their brokers, especially in areas of Data Management. Data Management for MLS has three themes. The first theme is [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:06-07:00August 30th, 2016|MLS Insights, Virtual Office Website Series|0 Comments

Brokers pulling out of IDX

Game changers happen when businesses test radical strategies. When a company breaks from the pack they learn things that none of their competitors learn. They understand a strategy that nobody else as any experience with. They grow their business wisdom and often find new ways to edge out the competition. By studying the impacts of strategies like withdrawing from listing syndication; launching single listing websites or virtual tours; and, withdrawing from IDX, marketers can learn volumes about how these strategies impact their online strategy. Listing Syndication Strategies that work WAV Group has been studying listing syndication strategies for more than [...]

A Discussion on Virtual Brokerage

We have the opportunity to work with many different software companies providing great products to the real estate industry.  Some of these companies are geared to serve both the traditional real estate model as well as a virtual brokerage.  It is clear to us, as well as these software providers, that the future of real estate companies will be different.  It will be leaner, lighter and in many cased “virtual” with a heavy emphasis on the broker providing great, integrated software products to agents that often work remotely.   I wrote at length about this shift in the white paper, “The [...]

Why MLS sold data is bad, and a note about the comma

Oversights are interesting. They are even more interesting when they are fixed.  Let me explain a little bit about “reporting Sales to the (MLS) Service” in the model MLS rules. Up until the recent meeting of the MLS Issues and Policies Committee meeting at the NAR Annual Convention, agents were required to change the listing status to Sold when a transaction closed. This is a case whereby the rule did not clearly indicate the behavior. As written, the agent was required to update the status of the listing, not enter the sale price from the contract. This is a significant [...]

Professional real estate websites are losing the battle for consumers online.

Professional real estate websites are losing the battle for consumers online. Todays real estate consumer has a dizzying array of websites that provide them with access to real estate listings.  There are numerous third party websites like Zillow and Trulia as well as national real estate Franchise sites and local real estate company websites.  Consumers likely assume that all of these sites offer the same quality of information. Unfortunately this isnt the case. This white paper from the WAV Group chronicles research findings on the consumer search experience.  WAV Group has calculated the differences between third party websites, franchise websites, and broker websites [...]

Who will tie the data together in the MLS world?

If you have worked in the MLS world as long as I have you know how many moving parts there are in terms of technology to run the organization effectively.  With the creation of RETS, the so called “standard", the use of multiple modules to provide services has increased even more.  What has been obvious to me for many years looking at the industry’s technology, however, is that no one has done a good job of pulling all of the important data points together for the MLSs so they can run their organizations more effectively. Today, MLS systems do a [...]

Real Estate CRM Company seeks venture partner

For the past four years, Technology Concepts, a veteran MLS provider, has been developing a Customer Relationship Management product for the real estate industry.  The company has leveraged their experience serving MLSs, brokers and agents to architect and build one of the industry’s most advanced enterprise level CRM solutions. The product, named Eventus, is operational, installed and has realized outstanding results for the first tier users.  Now that the product is ready for full deployment into the market place, the company is seeking a business partner to fuel marketing and fulfillment.  The company will consider options from company or product [...]