I’ve had a chance to somewhat recover from a whole week in Las Vegas. Frankly coming home on Friday (after a 4 hour delay, hell I could have drove back in less time) I was exhausted. While I didn’t “go big” on the first night I did on a few of the others. So here’s my take on Inman Connect’s first conference in Las Vegas. The good, the bad and the ugly.

The Good

Brad started off a little different this year, he turned the tables on himself. So instead of giving a inspirational speech or throw out a wild goal, he was interviewed and shared with everyone some of the origin stories of Inman News and his best and worst interviews. Interesting to hear that Barbara Cochran had him on his heels. As for the rest of the show I can’t remember when we had such great speakers. Both mornings (Wednesday and Thursday) were just great. Unlike other interviewers Brad isn’t afraid to ask difficult questions. At one point he asked Rich Barton, CEO of Zillow, since Zillow now seems to have broker licenses in all 50 states, “How can anyone trust you anymore? Yikes.

A big shout out to Clelia Peters who did a lot of interviewing on stage, she did an outstanding job. Hope she comes back again. I think the line of the show when she was interviewing Ryan Gorman, CEO of NRT, Inc. who is suing Compass over alleged illegal recruiting practices. Peters opined that such practices might be aggresive, but maybe not illegal. Ryan, shot back, “It’s a fine line between shopping and shoplifting”, which the crowd just loved.

I really enjoyed Cheih Huang, CEO of Boxed. His talk on “how I built my company” was great. He told a personal story of starting his business with a lot of emotion and humor. Good stuff.

While San Francisco is my favorite city of all time, I did enjoy having the conference in Las Vegas. You had so many options. The best restaurants, shows, etc.

So overall, as for the conference itself, the exhibit booths, startup alley, and General Sessions Inman Connect scored a 9 out of 10.

The Bad

The “bad” weren’t necessarily in control of anyone or a failing of the conference organizers, just compromises.

Having to huff back and forth between the conference area and your hotel room or bars was a pain in the ass. Not having everything in a central location was missed. But not every hotel is set up like the Marriott Marquis.

Your hotel room key only got you to the floor you had your room on. I’m told this was a security precaution since the concert shooting in Las Vegas. This made it very difficult to attend any parties or get customers up to your suite for private meetings.

Not having one central location (aka a single lobby bar) was also a bummer. With everything being so spread out there were people I didn’t see until Friday.

The Ugly

The General Sessions started at 8:30AM. And it doesn’t get anymore uglier than that when you were up till wee hours of the morning. How about 9:30am? 10? Pretty please, with sugar on top!

Other Highlights

While I didn’t win the Inman Innovator award ( you can see a list of award winners here) for either of my podcasts (Listing Bits and Industry Relations) I was very pleased to see Sam DeBord win the Nate Ellis Award. As Inman News put it….

“Sam DeBord…Embracing the role of the agent and the brokerage, he has pushed the industry forward with his credible voice, his relentless advocacy and his unmatched smarts about the real estate business.”

I knew Nate, and the spirt of this award was exactly right. Congrats Sam.

My thanks to Brad, and the rest of the Inman News team for a fun week.

Patrick Hearns for Inman News: Amazon makes splash with game-changing Realogy partnership

““Customers can be overwhelmed when moving, and we’re excited to be working with Realogy to offer homebuyers a simplified way to settle into a new home,” Pat Bigatel, director of Amazon Home Services, said on Monday leading up to the roll out. “The Amazon Move-In Benefit will enable homebuyers to adapt the offering to their needs – from help assembling furniture, to assisting with smart home device set up, to a deep clean, and more.”

I might be missing something but for years the industry has been holding their collective breath with “wait till Amazon gets in to real estate, then everything is going to change…” This announcement just sounds like Amazon wants to sell you more shit. “Game-changing”? Meh.

A couple things about design and location. The first is in an observation from me on the upswing in drone photography and best practices.

With more and more agents using drone photography and easier photo editing software I’m starting to see a trend of using color (or lack of) to highlight location. Which I think works better than adding inclusions on the photo itself. #designthinking pic.twitter.com/uMgo28J9PR

— Greg Robertson (@gregrobertson) July 17, 2019

You can see a larger image of both by clicking here.

The second is from Leonard Kiefer, Deputy Chief Economist at Freddie Mac. He’s a great follow. I love his data viz stuff. He marries the context of his data viz with the story he is telling. For instance in this example he is talking about growth in housing prices on coastal states. I love how he matches each of the charts placement to mirror their location on a map of the U.S.

In most of the middle part of the country over the past 44 years there has been little growth in real (inflation-adjusted) house prices.
In coastal states, a very different story. pic.twitter.com/PLbiNftha3

— Leonard Kiefer (@lenkiefer) July 10, 2019

Both are highlighting location but it different ways.

Buyside: BHGRE Metro Brokers Integrates Buyside™ Into Realogy’s® Zap Platform

Buyside™ announced that Atlanta, GA based BHGRE Metro Brokers will be the first firm in the Realogy Franchise Group to integrate data from Zap into Buyside. Metro Brokers is among the largest Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate franchises in the world with over 2,400 agents and 27 offices. Using Buyside’s proprietary algorithms, buyer data from all Metro Brokers’ Zap websites will be combined with search activity from the major search portals to form a more complete picture of the demand for any property.

This sounds very intriguing. I wonder how many and what the traffic is to these “Zap websites” that Metro Brokers have deployed.

“According to Charles Williams, IV, CEO of Buyside, “The software we supply to Metro Brokers unlocks the power of their buyer data for agents so they can win more listings, become more profitable and command greater control over their inventory.” Buyside’s core products include Home Valuation landing pages, which combines multiple automated home valuations with visualizations of real-time buyer intent; Buyer Match™ dashboard, which intelligently pairs home buyers and sellers within a brokerage; and Real-time Buyside Market Analysis (BMA), which arms a brokerage’s agents with insights on buyer demand to help them close more listing presentations..”

We are about to launch Buyside integration (to a broker to be named later) in Cloud CMA. I’ve seen it on staging and can confirm it is a super cool use case for listing presentations.