Where Real Estate Gets Its Dirt

Susan Young joins Real Safe Agents(r)

DC 2011

RSA Hires Susan Young

“Susan Young has been a fixture in the industry for more than 16 years, most recently serving as Director of Industry Relations at Realtor.com® for 10 years. Prior to that Susan served the industry as a Realtor®, Sales Manager, and CEO of a regional MLS in Ohio.
Susan stated, “I’m very excited to join the team at Real Safe Agent©. I have so many dear friends in this industry, and have seen the impact crime has on our community. Knowing that Real Safe Agent can prevent crime and the industry finally has an answer, joining the team feels more like a mission than a career move.”

Congrats to Susan and Lee!

Nice suit!

Cloud Suit

#RIPPrince

A brand new day

I’m very excited to announce something we have been working on for a long time. Back in October of last year we asked Damien Huze to join our leadership team at W&R Studios as our Chief Design Officer. Design has always been an important focus with our company and Damien, who had helped us launch W&R Studios back in 2008 with our corporate identity, product logos, and the original Cloud CMA UI/UX, seemed to be at a time in his life he wanted to make a change. We, and I think the industry, will be glad he was ready for that change.

Old Cloud CMA Logo
Old Cloud CMA Logo

Damien quickly hired another designer Jesus “Jay” Cardenas whom he had collaborated in the past. First up was to bring a brand new look and feel to our logos. We told them that nothing was sacred, the look, feel, naming conventions, everything was up for grabs.

Branding surveys were sent, pencil was put to paper, stylus pressed to glass, mouse was clicked to desk. Since Damien was the very person that designed the original Cloud CMA logo I was curious what he and his team were going to come up with.

I was not disappointed. But let me let Damien tell the story….

The New Face of Our Brand

“Can you make it rain harder?”

Anyone who knows me, or follows me on Twitter knows I’m a huge Prince fan.

So here’s a story.

Considered by everyone as the best Super Bowl performance of all time, I remember living in South Florida at the time and watching this, the rain was just pouring. The story goes (and they tell it in the link to the video below) is that when they told Prince that it began to rain he asked, “Can you make it rain harder?”

I never not get chills every time I hear that song. But by the time he came to finale, singing Purple Rain, at the Super Bowl, like today, nothing but tears.

Prince Performs “Purple Rain” During Downpour | Super Bowl XLI Halftime Show | NFL

RIP Prince.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Cloud MLX launch party – You’re invited!

We are having a launch party next week at our W&R Studios offices in Huntington Beach next Tuesday (4/26), at 6PM.

If you have ever come to any of our parties you know that Frances and her team does it right! We are going to have a Live Jazz Band, a Bourbon Bar, good food and a lot of swag.

We are celebrating the launch of Cloud MLX and our new rebranding. I know a lot of you might be heading to the C.A.R. Meetings, or maybe you could fly in a day early for the T3 Summit, but Dan and I would love you to figure out a way to join us for this special event!

You can RVSP here: Cloud MLX Launch Party RSVP

MLX Invitation

Hope to see you there!

EBRD restructures, hires new CEO Davina Lara

East Bay Regional Data, Subscriber-Based MLS for Alameda and Contra Costa Counties, Signs Buyout Agreement and Announces New Management

East Bay Regional Data Inc.(EBRD), a regional real estate subscriber-based Multiple Listing Service (MLS) for brokers and agents in Alameda and Contra Costa counties, announces that a buyout agreement has been signed making the Oakland Berkeley Association of REALTORS® (OBAR) the sole owner of EBRD, effective September 2016.

OBAR assumed management responsibilities for EBRD on April 1, 2016. The restructuring introduces new management to the organization. DaVina Lara becomes Managing CEO of EBRD and maintains her role as CEO of OBAR.

This will open a new can of worms in an already complicated MLS world in northern California. I remember DaVina as an office manager at SoCalMLS back in the day. She had severals gigs since then (AE at Hemet AOR, and CEO of Palm Springs AOR). But I will always remember DaVina for singing the national anthem at the Anaheim Pond (now the Honda Center) when Russ Bergeron rented out the place to train tens of thousands of REALTORS on Tempo all in one day! To this day that is the highest number of product sales I’ve ever done at an event.

Placester acquires RealSatisfied

From Inman News this morning.
Placester acquires RealSatisfiedReal estate website provider will use RealSatisfied to broaden data it offers agents

Placester sees bringing RealSatisfied under its roof as a way to further expand the range of data it can offer to agents.

The real estate website provider powers the listing search tools of a vast network of online news websites through partnerships with a range of publishers — a level of coverage that was boosted when Placester acquired HomeFinder in March.

Placester is fast becoming a juggernaut in the industry. NAR partnerships, acquisitions, franchisor deals, they are making all the right moves. Having raised 50 million dollars doesn’t hurt either.

And RealSatisfied is legit. These guys are great to work with and their product is rock solid simple to use, with an easy to understand value proposition. It was super easy to integrate in to our Cloud CMA.

Congrats to Jeff, Phil and the rest of the RealSatisfied team.

RIP Nate Ellis

Nate Ellis

He had been fighting an illness for several months. I remember Nate so well. He was such a generous person. So sad.

Cloud CMA Webinar – How To Use CMAs to Generate Seller Leads

retech_email_header
Looks like RETechnology is putting a “Techinar” about Cloud CMA. For all you MLS Providers out there the webinar is free and would be good to promote to your members and learn more about Cloud CMA and its lead generation capabilites.

“Join W&R Studios’ National Trainer and real estate speaker Ricardo Bueno and listing rockstar April Kass in a FREE webinar on Thursday, April 14th at 10:00am PST as they dive deep into everything you need to know to start generating and closing more seller leads today!

Join us as we discuss:
– How you can generate seller leads instantly straight from your Social Media, website, or blog
– How to structure the perfect CMA to win the listing (every single time)
– The tools top performers are using to close more listings

Seats are limited so make sure you register early!”

The registration link is here: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/3823269484388922882?utm_source=newsletter_30444&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=cloud-cma-promo-2

Hanlon’s razor

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

Seems appropriate this week.

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