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
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
I seriously thought about not writing this post. For one thing, this is complicated stuff, and I thought maybe it deserves to be a Red Dot Report in the near future. That might still happen, depending on how things play out over the next few months. This is also one of my Black Swans coming … Read more
[Note: I advised Zillow on its communication plan for rolling out the program I discuss herein. I do not have an ongoing relationship with Zillow.] I assume that by now anybody who is reading Notorious is aware of the big announcement from Zillow: Zillow Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:Z) (NASDAQ:ZG), which houses a portfolio of the largest … Read more
One of my recurring dreams is that some kind of IPO fever sweeps real estate, and dozens of brokerages go public. I want to see KW’s numbers, hear Hoddy Hanna on an earnings call, gain transparency into what Kuba over at RealtyOne is thinking, etc. I can’t wait for Compass to go public, so we … Read more
One of the biggest changes in the industry as we entered 2018 was a changing of the guard atop the largest real estate company in the U.S. as Richard Smith, CEO of Realogy stepped down, and Ryan Schneider, formerly of Capital One, stepped up. I thought it was all kinds of interesting that Realogy, which … Read more
Yesterday’s post on the keynote Vision speech by Josh Team and Gary Keller at this year’s Family Reunion generated… ah… let’s call it “a bit of passion.” The early batch of commenters took issue — and not in a civil fashion — about what I wrote based on the Inman story. Except for the tone, … Read more
I’ve been asked by the good folks at Inman to give some thought to the question of leadership as part of their efforts to revolutionize leadership in real estate. Seeing as how yours truly does not lack for opinions on a variety of topics, and this one in particular, I thought I would happily oblige … Read more