Don’t believe the hype. First off its currently a tropical depression, not a hurricane. Secondly, this thing is moving east. My prediction is this time tomorrow it will be heading to Greenland.
Button up Buttercup and bring a raincoat.
#BestNAREver
In an interview with Brad Inman, Andy Florance, CEO of CoStar said Zillow was “hijacking” listings and also compared them to the Mafia. His analogy was as follows:
“An agent puts up a yard sign, and then another company pulls up, spray paints over the sign, and puts a new agent’s name on the sign. Florance said no one would tolerate such behavior in the real world.”
Here’s what I’m picturing from Andy’s description.
In a recent post about the divorce of Homesnap and BPP Homesnap’s co-founder Steve Barnes stated…
“Homes.com and Homesnap.com will also offer paid preferred placement for listings in search results.”
Would this be tolerated in the “real world”?
The off-market/public records game is heating up!
Homesnap’s new platform guesses when people will move
“The platform uses an algorithm that crunches millions of records, including MLS data, to come up with a “Likelihood to List” score. The service, available only to licensed agents, shows a “heat map” of neighborhoods color-coded to zero in on the homes most likely to go on the market.
“Instead of sending a postcard to 5,000 homes, real estate agents can just focus in on the people the algorithm has determined are the most likely to list their homes,” Lou Mintzer, Homesnap’s chief product officer.”
Things could get awkward for both these D.C. area-based companies if they frequent the same restaurants.
Remine has been on a bit of a hiring spree lately. Joe Kazzoun and Bill Andrews were hired back in October of last year. Recently they also hired Quinn Nichols, formerly of MARIS, Troy Feeken, formerly of FBS, and Chelsea Goyer, formerly of Redfin. That’s going add a lot to their burn-rate.
Meanwhile, the O.G. in the game, CoreLogic, is not sitting still. CoreLogic has been recently touting a brand-new Realist “re-imagined from the ground up “. This space is heating up quickly, it will be interesting to see what they come up with.
In an article posted on Inman News today, Homesnap CEO John Mazur calls this new Off-Market Marketplace their “crown-jewel” and promises more enhancements coming.
All this can only be good for agents and MLS customers. Competition is a good thing.
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The Constellation Real Estate Group Acquires Assets of SmartZip
The Constellation Real Estate Group (“CREG”), has announced today that it has acquired certain assets of SmartZip Analytics Inc. (“SmartZip”), a pioneer in predictive analytics and award-winning provider of data-driven marketing automation and lead generation products for the real estate industry.
The acquisition includes SmartZip’s SmartTargeting platform, patent-pending predictive analytics, data solutions, and automated referral-building content system, Reach150.
If you are an avid Vendor Alley reader, you already knew this was coming.
I’m sure every industry has bottom feeders like Constellation Software. It just feels like every time Constellation Software buys a company, a puppy dies.
HUNTINGTON BEACH, CA (January 14, 2019) – Real estate software company W+R Studios announced management restructuring to help with boosting growth at the company.
Co-founder Dan Woolley will now take over responsibilities for choosing where to go to lunch on 2nd Friday’s of each month. Previously W+R Studios co-founder Greg Robertson held these responsibilities, which will now be switched to choosing company snacks and soft drinks. “Greg has done a great job choosing places to eat for lunch, and the company has done well under his stewardship, but we must change to move forward, and I welcome the challenge” stated Dan Woolley.
The company has a long time tradition of “Free Lunch Fridays” where team members located at W+R Studios’ Huntington Beach headquarters are treated to lunch every Friday of the month at local restaurants. Deciding where to go to lunch every Friday has been deemed to be a crucial part of the company’s success.
“I’m more of a meat and potatoes kind of guy.” Stated Greg Robertson. “I’m looking forward to Dan opening up the company’s palette of lunch choices.”
These changes will be put in to place on February 8th, 2019.
About W+R Studios
Founded in 2008, W+R Studios is a privately held web software company located in Huntington Beach, California. The company focuses on creating the next generation of web-based software solutions for the real estate industry. By providing a “less is more” approach to software design, elegant user interfaces, and using the latest in agile programming, W+R Studios’ software applications are at the same time powerful, yet accessible to everyone. Co-founders Dan Woolley and Greg Robertson have over 26 years of experience each developing and marketing real estate software solutions.
My thanks to John Reilly for shooting this video at CMLS 2018 last week. It was just a static shot of me on stage so I took his raw footage and edited it to include the slides I used. Hope you enjoy.
