Where Real Estate Gets Its Dirt

NAR announces partnership with Clareity Security.

I heard through the grapevine (do they have grapevines in Arizona?) that last week at the 2015 Leadership Summit Dale Stinton announced a new partnership with Clareity Security, dubbed the “NAR Portlet Project“. Despite the unfortunate name it seems like another big win for Clareity. Clareity will begin implementing NAR Resource Portlets in about 18 to 200 local and state associations in August and September. Which should reach about 100,000 members. The new “Portlets” fit into’s Clareity’s SSO Dashboards.

A lot of members get to their MLS system through their local association’s website but its not clear whether 3rd party vendors participating with Clariety’s App Store will be displayed on this new association dashboards.

Overall I think this is great for NAR. They have a lot of resources that not a lot of members know about (REALTOR University, .Realtor domain name site, MVP member benefits, and of course RPAC). Clareity strategy seems pretty clear, they want their Dashboards to be in front of as many agents as possible. Makes a helluva a lot sense to me.

Regarding the rumor of Zillow acquiring Trulia

A few thoughts on this.

“Blue horseshoe loves….”
This could all be just Wall Street trickery. Remember how much MOVE stock bounced when it was rumored they were going to be bought by Trulia? It was significant. So maybe someone got the idea to make a bigger play by spreading a Zillow buying Trulia rumor.

Seattle vs. San Francisco
Executive leadership at both companies couldn’t be more different. Think Frank Underwood and Mr. Chips (you make a guess of which CEO fits the part) It’s really hard for me to imagine both teams being on the same page of anything, besides all money they will be making.

A deal could be a good for MOVE.
A Zillow and Trulia merger could be a good thing for MOVE, Inc. Such a large acquisition would be a huge distraction for Zillow, something MOVE could act upon. Plus they immediately bump from the #3 listing site to the #2 listing site. : )

LinkedIn ripple
If you start getting LinkedIn requests from anyone at Trulia then you know the deal is real.

Is it a good or bad thing?
Personally I think it would be bad for the industry. Competition is a good, and with less of it the industry will suffer.

The biggest loser.
Another thought occurred to me. Dominion Enterprises (a privately held company) owns Homes.com. Zillow and Trulia’s market cap is about 8 Billion. Hindsight is 20/20 but you gotta wonder if back in the day Dominion spun off Homes.com and did an IPO what that asset would be worth. Is it too late? Or is the Batten Family too fat and happy? There is big money in this space, without proper investment it will be harder and harder to take them seriously.

28 Billion Dollars?
In an article yesterday the CFO of Trulia was quoted:

““Long-term, we see this as a two-player market and evolving much like e-commerce” with EBay Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., Sean Aggarwal, chief financial officer at Trulia, said at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Technology Conference in June.

He also described online real estate as a “very large category,” with real estate professionals spending about $28 billion a year on marketing. Trulia and Zillow collectively are doing about $500 million to $600 million a year in revenue, he said, leaving $27 billion plus of “potential money” that could come into that realm over the next several years.

Does anyone else think that number is crazy?

Will a deal happen?
No comment from either side. Typically where there’s smoke there’s fire, but I say no.

UPDATE: 7/28/2014 Looks like I got this wrong. Zillow is acquiring Trulia for 3.5 Billion in an all stock deal.

Former Trulian, Eric Wu, hopes to simply the home buying process to a “few clicks”.

Kim-Mai Cutler via TechCrunch

Keith Rabois’ Homebuying Startup OpenDoor Raises $9.95M From Everyone

“Before you start worrying about real estate speculators, OpenDoor is launching in three markets outside of California and is only for owner-occupied homes. Co-founder Eric Wu did not specify which markets, but he said the company is more concerned with markets where there isn’t a lot of liquidity or demand.”

“In contrast, Wu said the rest of the $20 trillion U.S. residential real estate market is one of the least liquid kinds of markets even though it represents such a vital kind of asset to Americans across the country. He argues this lack of liquidity ties people to debt and jobs or locations that may not benefit them anymore. Real estate transactions often take more than 90 days and homeowners often don’t have enough capital for a down payment or a mortgage, which makes home buying stressful.

Wu didn’t go into how the product will work, because it has yet to launch.”

I’m must be missing something. Just because you make it easier to buy a turd, doesn’t mean people will start buying lots and lots of turds.

UPDATE: 2/10/24 – Drew Meyers of GeekEstate Blog has a few ideas of how this might work. – And I still don’t get it.

Is the Market Leader deal with NRT a good one?

Inman News has a story of Market Leader (now owned by Trulia) having entered in to a multi-year deal with NRT, which as over 41,000 agents, to provide a white-labled version of their product at a “modest” fee.

Not sure what they mean by “modest”. When Market Leader did a deal with Keller Williams back in 2011 they announced that 80,000 of KW agents would pay $15/ month for “eEdge”. Not sure how much of that was going back to Market Leader either. But somehow I think this NRT deal is even more leveraged to the back-side. Meaning the up-front fee is minimal, and conversion to a “premium version” is where they make money.

Market Leader has similar deals with other Realogy brands, Century 21 and Better Homes & Gardens. NRT, as you may know, is operated by Realogy.

These freemium (or close to freemium) deals are tough. Agents are fiercely independent. It’s up to the vendor to do the leg work of first getting adoption and then converting them to a a premium version. Based on my experience the franchisors are going to little or next to nothing to help out.

It would be interesting to see what type of conversion percentages they have with each brand. The article mentions Trulia having 25K “premium subscribers”, which based on my math, and agent count, is 27% of their existing deals. Based on my experience even half of a 27% conversion rate is pretty amazing (and a good deal). My guess it would be Keller Williams first and C21 and BH&G a distant second and third (as a percentage of premium upgrades). But I do think the NRT deal with be closer in conversion percentage with KW than C21 or BH&G.

Wilmington Regional AOR switching to ShowingTime

About time…

_______________________________________________________________

WILMINGTON REGIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® PARTNERS WITH SHOWINGTIME TO PROVIDE APPOINTMENT CENTER SERVICES TO MEMBERS

NEW SERVICE TO LAUNCH BY JANUARY 7TH, 2014

Chicago, IL – January 6, 2014—The Multiple Listing Service of the Wilmington Regional Association of Realtors® announced today that it selected ShowingTime, the real estate industry’s leading showing management technology provider, to provide appointment center services for its 1,650+ Realtor® members beginning Tuesday, January 7.

“The ShowingTime Appointment Center’s extended hours, two-way text messaging capabilities, branded calls and emails, and overall use of technology to automate the scheduling process is exciting,” said MLS President Sandy Beals. “I am looking forward to a long relationship with ShowingTime. I am so confident they will exceed members’ expectations.”

ShowingTime’s technology-rich Appointment Center, along with its online scheduling system available 24/7 in the MLS, will enable WRAR members to call to schedule showings from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. Eastern time, seven days a week, or login to the MLS anytime to schedule showings. Members can also use smart phones, tablets and the ShowingTime Mobile App to request and manage showings and feedback.

ShowingTime products – currently used to schedule more than 2 million showings per month in more than 190 markets representing 400,000+ real estate professionals – use technology to improve efficiency and streamline the appointment scheduling process, resulting in quicker showing confirmations and less phone tag. The Multiple Listing Service of the Wilmington Regional Association of Realtors® is ShowingTime’s 70th market-wide subscribing customer.

“We are thrilled to partner with the Wilmington Regional Association of Realtors®,” said ShowingTime President Michael Lane. “WRAR members will have access to many unique features that will help them be effective, including our patented two-way text messaging system for homeowner approval of showings. Our services will equip the members of WRAR to provide great service to buyers and sellers.” he added. “We’re also pleased to be able to offer job opportunities to many of the appointment specialists from the prior showing service that lost their jobs prior to the holidays.”

About ShowingTime
ShowingTime equips MLSs, Associations, offices, brokers and agents with tools to schedule showings, generate feedback and report on activity. Its products are used by more than 6,000 offices nationwide and integrated with 190+ MLSs to manage two million showings every month. Visit http://www.showingtime.com for more information.
_________________________________

FOR MORE INFORMATION, contact Tom Denk, ShowingTime, 312-568-8001 x130 tdenk@showingtime.com

TREND selects CoreLogic’s Matrix as primary MLS platform in multiyear deal.

Brian de Schepper
Brian de Schepper
Early this year CoreLogic promoted Brian de Schepper to head all of MLS sales for CoreLogic. Brian as many of you know was part of the Tarasoft team that CoreLogic bought a few years back. I spoke to Ben Graboske, VP of CoreLogic, at a recent event and he told me that he has full confidence in Brian. Looks like the confidence is justified in regards to this recent deal with TREND MLS.

25,000 members (per month) is a huge win. Switching from TREND MLS’ home grown system was a big decision. As everyone knows Tom Phillips and his team at TREND MLS are a careful bunch and I can imagine the process that Corelogic went through to get this business was, to say the least, involved. Congrats to Brian and CoreLogic.

Here’s the full press release.

Nextdoor, a social network for neighborhoods, raises 60 million.

I’ve written about Nextdoor before. No revenue yet, but these guys now have 90 million in the bank and Zillow’s co-founder Rich Barton on their board. I like the idea here, connecting online with your neighbors. Seems a little counter intuitive (why not just say hello instead?). But with everyone as busy as they are it seems that making a connection online is great way to start a relationship (online neighboring?). Here’s a quote from their CEO Nirav Tolia.

“And Mr. Tolia says Nextdoor is adding members at a healthy clip and believes it can fill the information void left by the erosion of local newspaper readership and local television viewing. The company is also attracting classified ads, robust discussions on its message boards about everything from crime to local businesses and services, and becoming a forum for neighbors to meet one another.”

Clareity Store partnerships will reach 900,000 agents

LPS to offer Clareity app store to 250,000-plus subscribers.

Via Inman News

““The momentum is building every day with MLS operators and the vendor/merchant community. In addition to deploying dozens of regional stores in 2013, we are also adding three to four new merchants and numerous products to the Store’s master catalog each week. My team is looking forward to the Inman Connect conference as the place for us to build new relationships with the vendor community,” Larson added.”

900,000 is huge number!

CoreLogic buys DataQuick

SumoCoreLogic set to beef up data capabilities with $661M acquisition.

Via Inman News:

“Marking what is probably the biggest deal in the real estate tech space so far this year, data aggregator CoreLogic announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to purchase a pair of technology companies for a whopping $661 million, a move that will strengthen its footprint in the insurance industry and beef up its property data and analytics capabilities”

This is a HUGE deal. CoreLogic is prepping itself for a battle. When I read this I kept thinking about Bill Foley’s recent acquisition of LPS. Like two Sumo wrestlers preparing to enter the ring.

Move, Inc. renews contract with Microsoft.

Spencer Rascoff, CEO of Zillow
Spencer Rascoff, CEO of Zillow

Nice win for Move, Inc.

Was anyone else surprised that Microsoft sold the name HomeAdvisor to ServiceMagic? I guess I missed/forgot the news last year.

Also I looooooove this little tidbit from Move, Inc.’s press release….

““We know that Microsoft had a number of choices in online realtor partners and are pleased to announce our continued long-standing relationship with MSN to deliver the most accurate and trusted real estate information to the MSN community,” said Barbara O’Connor, executive vice president of marketing for Move, Inc.”

In a nutshell, what Barb is saying, is Move, Inc. won the business from Zillow.

And there’s nothing sweeter than kicking your competitors ass on their home turf (Seattle).

Congrats to everyone at Move, Inc.

Sponsored By Paragon Connect