Who are the best website providers in 2016? Who do you use? What do you like? Not like? Do you go full custom, semi-custom, or template? Do you pay for IDX separately? What do you spend monthly? What are you looking for in your next…

You may have read the recent post on Inman (subscription wall) about bot vs broker when sourcing homes for a buyer to tour. It says, in an unscientific test, the bot can more accurately recommend the properties buyers will like viewing in person. I wrote a…

It’s been quite awhile since the topic of conversion rates on real estate websites was talked about. What conversion rates is your website seeing? (Keep in mind, without context, conversion numbers mean nothing.)

I think the connected (aka digital) home is a massively, massively big space that we’re going to see a ton of innovation in over the next few years. My sense is connected home will end up merging with the history of the home opportunity I’ve been…

I think a lot about long term strategic defensibility when evaluating any business (& building my own). The best companies, focus on what they do better than anyone else, that is extremely hard to duplicate — and stay focused on executing on increasing that defensibility. You’ve…

Those in Canada, and certainly those in Toronto, are likely following the story of the upcoming expected ruling by the federal Competition Tribunal against the Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB) that would open MLS data to external parties. Further details can be found at Global and…

Note to all startup founders, MetaProp NYC is accepting applications for their 2016 accelerator. Flip, a company profiled here already, is the anchor member of the 2016 cohort. Apply now (closes July 31st): http://www.metaprop.org/apply/

Though I still have many friends who work at Zillow, I’m not (financially) biased when I say I’m still constantly impressed with Zillow’s marketing… I’m a fan. (I should note that I just watched it on Youtube and a Realtor.com paid ad came on immediately…

Props to Ari Summer for releasing an open source CLI (command line interface) for querying RETS servers and searching metadata. The gem is built on top of the rets gem, which handles the actual querying and parsing of the RETS server requests. You can download and clone the repo on GitHub: https://github.com/summera/retscli…

Congrats to Rick Ward for launching the redesigned 360Modern. Disclosure: I’ve previously done consulting work for 360Modern.