On August 26, Rob Hahn, Founder of the blog, Notorious R.O.B, asked for some answers to his post “Some Questions About KWRI’s Virtual Brokerage.” I’m happy to oblige. As a Market Center owner (Operating Principal) and one of the many architects of Keller Williams (KW) Expansion, I am committed to ensuring KWRI’s virtual brokerages are … Read more
Just thought I’d drop a brief (well, for me) note here about Opendoor’s acquisition of Open Listings, in between preparing for hurricane Florence…. Inman News has the story: Flush with hundreds of millions in venture funding, the fast-growing home-buying and selling startup Opendoor is making its first acquisition: Open Listings, a discount brokerage with a team of salaried in-house … Read more
Reader Ben Thompson asked me in a recent comment if I would opine on the topic of the impact of (and to, I would think) various companies in a buyer’s market: Sorry to trend off topic, but Rob kindly please consider writing a blog post on the impact of companies like Redfin in a buyers … Read more
I’m neck-deep in getting the September Red Dot on the Real Estate Platform out the door, but had to pause and poke my nose in to give an award for a minute. Inman reported on the 16 startups at the new Innovation, Opportunity & Investment Summit conference that NAR is putting on as I write … Read more
In the August Red Dot, The Truth About iBuyers, I made the point that the real estate industry fundamentally misunderstands what the iBuyer movement is all about: Perhaps because the pioneer of iBuyer was Opendoor, which focused on the selling experience at launch, the real estate industry has perceived iBuyers to be something like technology-powered … Read more
I’m still in recovery mode from thyroid surgery on Friday (it went great, thank you to all who have messaged me) but wanted to throw out a quick reaction to the news coming out of Zillow in its Q2 earnings report. Rest assured, I’ll be covering this in some depth at some point, probably. For … Read more
A couple of months ago, I took a taxi for the first time in years. I was at an airport where the Uber pickup was a long walk away, while the taxi stand was right there at the curb where one exits the terminal. I figured, what the hell – the cab is right here. … Read more
One of the things I missed while finishing up the July Red Dot was this well-done interview of Redfin’s Glenn Kelman in Inman. Andrea Brambila doing her rockstar thing again. I’m thinking through what Redfin wants to see happen, but one passage in particular caught my attention. At one point, talking about incentives for agents … Read more
It hasn’t even been 24 hours since the joint DOJ-FTC workshop on competition in real estate ended. I’ve heard quite a bit, and although one would think listening to panelists in a controlled environment talk about what ought to be truly mind-numbing topics to regular humans, I wasn’t bored at all. Not sure what that … Read more