In Search Of A Perfect Broker VOW

WAV Group is conducting research to discover if there is any broker in the United States who has pulled out of IDX and only offers a Virtual Office Website to consumers. Presumably, it would be a large enough broker who would display their listings publicly without the need to register to the site. If consumers wanted to see other broker listings, they would need to register. No other broker would be able to display that brokers listings to the public. If you know of such a site here in America, please direct me to it and you will be handsomely rewarded. My loving relationship [...]

It is all about schools

The most active group of home buyers in sellers in America have one thing in common - school age children.  Traditionally, real estate has ducked the consumer by avoiding the laborious and somewhat liability producing task of informing consumers about schools. Our industry has largely taken the stance that if a consumer wants to know about schools, they will provide the phone number to the school district. Good luck with that. This is not true of all brokers or MLSs. Some have invested heavily in procuring the most accurate school data available. You will often find the information somewhere down below the [...]

Are my listings going everywhere – Zillow Front Door

Whenever an announcement like the Zillow-Front Door announcement is made, brokers have questions about their data and where it is going. We call this the issue of re-syndication, and whenever an announcement is made made about one party sending data to another party - brokers should know. Zillow is not re-syndicating to HGTV's Frontdoor.com website. The first thing that I would suggest to any broker providing data to any publisher is to have a contract with the publisher that defines what they can or cannot do with your data. Most of the franchisors like REALOGY, Keller Williams, RE/MAX, and others have such [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:24:41-07:00February 13th, 2013|Broker Technology Research, Main category, Marketing|2 Comments

Zillow expands rental offering with Hotpads acquisition

Market leading real estate publisher Zillow expanded their footprint by entering into an agreement to purchase Hot Pads today. The strategy behind the acquisition seems squarely aimed at conquering a larger audience of real estate consumers, namely consumers interested in rental properties. In October, Hotpads had nearly 2.8 Million Unique Visitors. Depending on how you add up traffic to Zillow and their other sites like realestate.yahoo.com, it adds up to less than a 5% increase in traffic. Moreover, Zillow picks up highly skilled staff that understand the real estate portal business, and how to manage data. Although Zillow already has [...]

Point2 encourages publishers to play nice

Yardi subsidiary, Point2 is changing its data distribution policies to align with what it believes to be the interests of MLSs, Associations, Brokers and agents in the US, similar to what it has introduced in Canada with the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA). Since Yardi purchased Point2, they have renewed determination to protect the data rights of agents, brokers, and their partner Associations of REALTORS(r) and MLS. In the past, the default distribution setting for Point2 has been broker-opt out rather than broker opt-in.  WAV Group has never been in favor of Broker Opt-out programs. Broker opt-out means that unless notified [...]

How MLSs and MLS vendors are failing brokers

Let me begin by saying that the remarks that follow do not apply to all MLSs. There are many that do an excellent job at servicing the data needs of brokers. The focus of this article is to talk about some of the common failures seen by WAV Group consultants trying to help brokers fix complex data problems. There is a fundamental understanding of the MLS which has been lost. Although MLS systems provide excellent services through the MLS software, many are failing at providing data services to the brokers and agents to power the many applications that live outside [...]

Black Sand Labs Launches MLS License Compliance Tool

Like all MLSes, Hawaii Information Service takes data licenses seriously. Aside from the natural investigation of reported violations, they wanted to find a way to crawl the Internet to find additional abuses of their data license agreements. After an unproductive effort to find a commercial solution to meet their needs, Hawaii Information Systems partnered with Falcon Technologies to build one. Now, the two cooperating companies formed a new startup called Black Sand Labs to deliver the service to other MLSs fighting the compliance battle. The new product is called APHIS – which may sound like a crawling insect, but was [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:24:49-07:00October 25th, 2012|Main category, MLS Insights|0 Comments

WAV Group Publishes Study Showing that Local Real Estate Brokerage Websites Offer the Most Complete, Accurate and Timely Information About Homes for Sale

October 3, 2012—The WAV Group today published the results of an independent study of 11 major markets that found local real estate brokerage websites give consumers the most complete, accurate and timely information about homes for sale. The study evaluated sites from three local brokerages with real estate agents who help consumers buy and sell homes, comparing listing search results to those found on two national portals, Trulia and Zillow, which operate almost exclusively online. In the markets analyzed, the study concluded: Local real estate brokerage sites display 100% of the agent-listed homes for sale compared to about 80% for [...]

Mitch Skinner Now Partner at Larson Sobodka

WAV Group is please to extend congratulations to Attorney Mitchell Skinner who has become a member of the legal firm Larson Sobodka. Mitch as been working with the firm's founder Brian Larson and first member, Elizabeth Sobodka for about two years. Clients of Larson Sobodka have undoubtedly had a solid experience working with Mr. Skinner. Skinner has been helping the firm with their core speciality: data licensing and vendor contracts. It is an area of expertise that has made the firm renowned throughout the industry. Vendor contracts has long been a speciality of the firm - and they have foraged new paths over the past [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:24:51-07:00September 20th, 2012|Main category, Press Releases|0 Comments

Homes.com partners with newspapers

Following in the path of Homefinder, Trulia, and Zillow, the Nation's 4th largest portal - Homes.com has announced that they are seeking to partner with Newspapers to offer online property search. Moreover, they are offering this service to Newspapers for free, in line with others. The new twist is that Homes.com seeks to leverage the relationship that Newspapers have with advertisers to develop a sales channel for their other products. The announcement of the new strategy is coupled with the launch of their first newspaper partner. In this case, it is actually an announcement of a partnership with 50 newspapers [...]

Are App Stores the Next Zillow or Trulia?

I have been giving a lot of thought lately to the idea of App Stores in the real estate technology industry and it has raised a number of questions that I want to put out there to inspire a conversation with the industry. Let me say right up front that I am not neutral in this discussion, as I am one of the founders of RE Technology which has, as an option, the ability to create an eCommerce store which is different, but related to, an App store. My partner Victor did a great job of discussing the differences in his [...]

Two Brokers Go YouTube on Syndicaiton

Listing Syndication has become one of the more polarizing business topics in the real estate industry. Everyone seems to have a view, and many groups are trying to figure out how to fix it. There is no doubt that some companies are benefiting from syndication, but most find only little or moderate success. We seem to be hitting an inflection point with syndication where a lot of change is about to happen - slowly I suspect - like all real estate trends. The Council of MLS published two surveys this week - one for consumers and another for professionals. They are [...]