As you can imagine, there’s been a ton of chatter about Project Upstream and its “divorce” with Daddy NARbucks. I think I’ve gotten no fewer than three emails from consultants and thought leaders in the industry on the topic. Inman has written not just a news article announcing the split, but an in-depth investigation into […]
The December Red Dot, Darkness Comes: Q3 and the Rise of Redfin, is now published and live. I’m pretty proud of it, but I thought I would write this post because I think this report might actually be important. If you are in real estate, or interested in the industry, if you read nothing else […]
I’ve been busy researching and writing the November Red Dot, which has now been published. But as often happens, when I’m deep in that project, blogging gets light. I apologize. It appears there are a few things to talk about, but none are more important or more interesting than two recent announcements by NAR and […]
There is a great interview with Robert Reffkin, CEO of Compass, up on Inman today. Read the whole thing. But I saw something that really made me sit back and think, so figured I’d share it with everybody. Here’s what Reffkin said: And the third is that agents are starting to operate their business on […]
Yesterday, an item on Facebook caught my eye. It was someone sharing a Medium post by Frances Flynn Thorsen, the “Blogmother” of real estate. Before you continue, I strongly suggest reading the whole thing. (You’ll need a Medium account, I believe.) There’s quite a lot of history here, including some sordid drama involving criminal extortion, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Joe Rand is one of the smartest guys in the industry, not to mention one of the nicest. He’s an author, who wrote the book on how real estate can deal with disruption. He’s also a terrific singer, in case you didn’t know. In a recent Inman Op/Ed, Joe says that it isn’t NAR’s job […]
Chances are, if you read this blog on a regular basis, you’re already aware of the op/ed by Jim Harrison in Inman News titled “It’s time to stop ignoring the crisis at NAR“. That comes on the heels of a back-and-forth between HAR (still the Houston Association of REALTORS, even if their website stands for […]
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 […]
