Since a few people have asked for these, I’ve uploaded them to scribd… but I must warn you that they’re not likely to make a whole lot of sense without the audio. I tend to make slides as supplements/visual aids to my presentations. But, at least you’ll get an idea. 🙂 Part 1: Time For … Read more
Agent Ratings is in the news again. MLSListings, based on Sunnyvale, California, has announced that it will launch a pilot REALTOR ratings program with the California Association of REALTORS. But it appears that the MLSListings program isn’t what HAR attempted to do a while back, where consumers directly rate agents: Designed by independent consumer review … Read more
This is simply mindblowing: The use of blogs has steadily increased as a marketing tool for real estate agents. One in ten members reported having a real estate blog. In 2009, 7 percent of members reported having a blog. Among REALTORS®, blogs are most common among those aged 29, and nearly one in five members … Read more
Or so says NAR: More interestingly, however, the Member Profile shows that REALTORS® with a college education earn higher income. It indicates that across all levels of experience, NAR members with at least a bachelor’s degree earn higher gross personal income than those without formal college education. For those REALTORS® with 10 years of experience … Read more
Following up on my post on NAR 800K, I found this article on Inman News about a survey it conducted of its readers (subscription required). Apparently, most of the respondents agree with yours truly in thinking that at least another 20% of agents need to exit the industry before we can have recovery. But here’s … Read more
A while back, over on Notorious, I speculated that the number of real estate agents would drop further. Since the best measure of the number of real estate agents is the membership of NAR, I thought we’re headed to about 800,000 members of NAR from the around 1.2 million number we’ve heard recently. As of … Read more
A current discussion within the MLS and tech vendor industry is around the issue of listing syndication. This post by Brian Larson, and the discussions therein, is a pretty good summation of the thinking on the part of MLS executives, vendors, and consultants. As Victor Lund of the WAV Group, a leader in the world … Read more
Something must be in the air. Within a fairly short period of time, I’ve had emails, phone calls, and direct messages about the perils of listing syndication. In the last couple of days, two extremely smart, extremely influential people have written on topics that revolve around the issue of syndication. The first is John Heithaus, … Read more
Sami Inkinen, co-founder of Trulia, has written a blogpost about the future of syndication where he raises some important questions about where the real estate industry is headed with distribution of listings: Now that listing syndication has become a mainstream practice and “syndication sites” like Trulia have grown to serve millions of users, an old … Read more