Posts Tagged ‘Technology’
Who’s Going to Be at This Year’s FWD Innovation Summit? One Former Judge’s Thoughts on this Year’s Contestant Line Up
Last year, when I was one of the judges on the FWD Innovation Summit, I wrote up a fairly rigorous analysis of the participants so that I could be prepared for their presentations. This year, I won’t be judging, but I will be live-blogging the event on Tuesday here on this blog, so I did the…
Read MoreIs the Real Problem With the Real Estate Industry the Clients? Maybe
I was asked again last week to contribute a response at Inman News to a provocative article from Brad Inman. Last time, he wrote about the potential disruption of the broker-agent relationship from online portals, in the way that Uber has disrupted the traditional limousine industry’s relationship with drivers. And in my response, I challenged…
Read MoreRules for CORE Agents #34: Only Embrace New Technologies That Replace Old Tools With Better Tools
Consider the plight of the poor “Realtogeek” – real estate agents who embrace new technology so tightly that they leap into every new trend and buy every shiny new gizmo that hits the market. While the Realtosaurus reacts to the intimidation of new technologies by shutting down and ignoring them, Realtogeeks respond by elevating them…
Read MoreRules for CORE Agents #33: You Wouldn't Trust a Doctor Who Still Used Leaches
Consider the plight of the poor “Realtosaurus” – real estate agents who are increasingly falling behind because they stubbornly resist learning how to use modern technology. They’re so afraid of these new technologies that they’ve overcompensated by making it an “old school” point of pride that they don’t know how to use a computer or…
Read MoreReviewing the iPad Apps from Realtor.com, Trulia, and Zillow: The New Home Search Paradigm
I love my iPad. Seriously. I find myself curling up in bed with it, with no particular idea of what I’m going to do with it other than that I want to play with it. I read my books on it, surf the web, read blogs, and I’ve even started reading comic books again because…
Read More"THIS IS THE JOB": Seven Things That Real Estate Agents and Brokers Do that Are Not Good Enough
In a post last week, I argued that the enemy of the good is not the great, but the crappy. That is, the classic cliche that the “enemy of the good is the great” has some truth for perfectionist types that have difficulty finishing projects because they’re never quite “good enough,” but the bigger problems…
Read MoreThe Guide to the Best Smartphone Apps
A good smartphone is really a mini-computer in your pocket, capable of doings things that computers even five years ago could not do. But you’re not getting the most out of your smartphone if you’re just using it for making calls, checking email, and surfing the web. Those are all good things to do, but…
Read MoreAre Real Estate Agents Worth It? Yes!
NOTE: This is a reprint of a post I made in early February on the Market Intelligence blog that I write for my company in New York. Since it has some universal application to the industry, I thought I would share it here. The bottom line: good real estate agents are, and always have been,…
Read MoreBook Review: Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right — Achieving Operational Excellence in the Real Estate Industry
Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto is a powerful book, one of the best and simplest articulations of how to achieve operational excellence that I have ever read. Gawande’s message is simple: the world has become increasingly complex, and we need to actively create systems and processes that will simplify the tasks that we have to…
Read MoreThe Real Estate Broker of the Future?
I was at a conference this week and one of the issues we discussed was the “Real Estate Brokerage of the Future,” a topic that has come up a lot in discussions at industry conferences in the past year. Unfortunately, much of the discussion drifted, as it tends to do, to a simple application of…
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