Spending Over $60K Per Month on Zillow

It is not very hard to find out who Zillow's top customers are. Just visit the website and look at the Agent Reviews section. One of those top customers is Samer Kuraishi Group from the Washington, D.C. area. Samer is a second generation real estate agent. The brokerage, A-K Real Estate, Inc. ("A-K") is a boutique 40 agent firm, located about two blocks from the White House, that was founded by his father. Together, they have grown the company significantly, supporting consumers in Maryland, DC, and Virginia. Much of the company's growth has happened over the past few years and was [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:51-07:00December 23rd, 2014|Broker Technology Research, Main category|1 Comment

New eSignature Integration Streamlines the Transaction Process for Real Estate Brokerages

  CAMBRIDGE, ONTARIO (NOVEMBER 7, 2014) – Lone Wolf Real Estate Technologies, the industry leader in real estate solutions and services, announces a new integration with Instanet Solutions Authentisign Signit eSignature module. The Authentisign integration allows Lone Wolf clients to electronically sign the Transaction Record Sheet for each real estate transaction. It is a complementary service that streamlines the transaction management process and enhances the efficiency of brokerage operations. “This partnership showcases the true value of integrated solutions for a real estate brokerage and is an integral component in reducing manual processes for our clients,” says Chris Avery, Vice President [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:55-07:00November 12th, 2014|Press Releases|0 Comments

Revaluate Property Reports

When real estate tech entrepreneur Chris Drayer (see LinkedIn) gets started on something, WAV Group is always willing to take a look. Today we connected with Chris to get an inside look at Revaluate, a big data resource that pulls property attributes from 2000 data sources to tell a property story. Today, Revaluate is in Beta and only available to New York City properties. There is great news and not so great news about this. The great news is that they tackled one of the most challenging cities in America to collect property data. The other great news is that [...]

MLSListings in the Lead Pack of MLS Adopting Homesnap

Homesnap is approaching the Nation’s leading MLSs with one heck of a value proposition. The company optimizes all of the MLS data for mobile devices and delivers it through an app to agents…..for free. Well, its free for the first year. Homesnap is among a small handful of mobile solution providers that offer agent-only data.  The agents can access the full listing data along with showing instructions, commission splits, agent roster, and other confidential fields. The MLS data is organized and combined with census data, tax data, and geographic boundaries that are important to agents in the field. The solution [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:57-07:00October 16th, 2014|Main category, MLS Insights|2 Comments

Tedesco Moves From Tucson to RI State Association

Phil Tedesco is one of those senior level MLS and Association Executives that everyone wants to lead their organization. He has a depth of experience across many large Associations and Mid-sized MLSs that have led him to his new role as the CEO of the Rhode Island State Association of REALTORS® and Statewide MLS. He will be departing his current position at the Tucson Association of REALTORS® at the end of this year. Interestingly enough, the Tucson Association and the Rhode Island State Association (4000 members) have nearly identical membership numbers with Tucson having a slight lead (4700 members) as [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:57-07:00October 14th, 2014|Broker-Agent Information, Main category|4 Comments

The NAR and Top Level Domains

WAV Group has been participating in the MLS Domains Association as an advocate for the strategy for organized real estate to gain control of top level domains. These domains that represent organized real estate like .MLS, .REALTOR, and .realestate were available on the open market for anyone to grab. You can read our articles on the topic here https://www.wavgroup.com/?s=mls+domains There is a group called ICANN that organizes the top level domains on the internet. The most used top level domains are .com, .gov, .biz, .org. The top level domains have meaning like commerce, government, business, non-profit organization. Countries have top [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:57-07:00October 8th, 2014|Main category, Technology Evaluation|0 Comments

Today’s News Summary

News represents change in real estate. It also represents staying the course. There were lots of both today. Not knowing what to expect, the industry unloaded today. Bullets were flying everywhere. The MOVE acquisition by News Corp was the headline - If you look at our post on it, we have added the letter that NAR sent to the membership, the letter that MOVE sent to the industry, and the press release. Taking the temperature on this, it is probably a good thing. The only big concern is that REA group from Australia has investments in the top 3 portals [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:58-07:00September 30th, 2014|Main category, MLS Insights|0 Comments

Midyear Broker Website Benchmarks

WAV Group just completed providing our broker clients with a review of their Google Analytics for September. Something rather remarkable happened this month that has confirmed a strategy that we have long suspected, but have not had enough data to confirm. Virtual Tour Videos Drive More Traffic Than Listing Syndication on Broker Websites. Quite a number of WAV Group broker clients have been publishing automated virtual tours to YouTube for a few years now. They are using vendors like Property Panorama, RealBiz, Virtual Tour Café, Imprev, VHT or some other solution. We do not endorse any product over another but [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:23:59-07:00September 11th, 2014|Main category, Marketing, Technology Evaluation|1 Comment

Agents Love MLS Newsletters

When RE Technology was founded by WAV Group partners in 2010, the goal was to provide an information resource inside the MLS system that would sharpen agent understanding of technology in real estate. We will forever appreciate MRED, MRIS, MLSListings, and MFRMLS for introducing the first 100,000 users to the service. Today, 91 MLSs and over 700,000 users have access to RE Technology as a member benefit. Because technology companies sponsor the service, there is never charge to the MLS or the broker or agent. The concept behind RE Technology is to support MLSs at delivering insightful information about technology [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:24:00-07:00September 3rd, 2014|Main category, Marketing, MLS Insights|1 Comment

MyOnlineYardSign Attacks MLS IDX Policy

Generally speaking, real estate business media companies write a pretty respectful commentary regarding the well-developed MLS IDX policy. Sure, the policy is a living document and the MLS Policy Committee is an open forum for clarifying the policy and amending it from time to time. But generally, it is a well adopted program that publically exemplifies cooperation among brokerage firms. Today, Travis Saxton of Real Trends promoted a product called MyOnlineYardSign. The product allows real estate agents and brokers to put contact information and the company logo on their photos for free. Watermarking of this type has been around for [...]

Who Syndicated My Listings?

We have learned over the last half-decade of doing listing syndication that it is complicated, especially for firms that have multiple offices, multiple associations, multiple MLSs, and possibly a franchise or network. We call this overlapping syndication disorder and the existence of this disorder can lead to syndication fraud. Last month, Amy Gallagher of Century 21® Hometown Realty in California encountered a fraud attempt that was blocked by ListHub. This is an important component of our service that you may not be aware of. Gallagher’s firm participates in three primary MLSs along the central coast of California and is also [...]

The End Of War Between Zillow and Trulia

There is a major war going on in the taxi industry today. Uber and Lyft are duking it out. Both companies have deep cash pockets and they are deploying it in marketing and undercutting each other. It is pretty hard to know which service is better as they work hard to drive market share. As Zillow marches toward the stock swap to join forces with Trulia, perhaps a new wisdom of that transaction will reveal itself. They just avoided a very expensive war where the two of them may have killed each other off to reign supreme. It is pretty [...]