More startup news… congrats on those selected for REach’s 2016 class (press release): Flipt enables brokers and agents to win more listings by connecting with millions of home sellers at the earliest stages of their selling decision. Homeselfe by Energy Datametrics helps brokers and agents…

Anyone reading using the Local Market Explorer WordPress plugin that I blogged about several months ago? I’m looking for an example integration or two to highlight (and yes, that would mean you’d get a link or two from this blog).

A couple pieces of news related to real estate startups… Placester acquired Realsatisfied. The Placester move makes sense given they grew their reach by 150,000 agents in one day. The combined team is a more formidable foe to Zillow than they were as separate companies. Congrats…

Given that Virgent is a technology-driven brokerage (and the fact that we’re all huge data nerds), it should be no surprise that we collect a lot of data about our transactions, on everything from basics about a listing to excruciating details on showing scheduling and…

There’s a recent article (& 300+ comments) in the Washington Post about commissions, the topic everyone always loves to debate. You may also find my analysis from 2014 interesting. Do you think anything has changed in terms of consumer behavior/adoption for discount services in the last…

Finding trusted developers is a challenge I hear fairly frequently from real estate entrepreneurs I speak to. I know a trusted senior Rails/backend engineer (here in Seattle if location matters to you) looking for contract work at the moment. Shoot me an email at drew at…

I posted an update to my employment profile on LinkedIn recently. Shortly thereafter, I received a nice message from a past work associate: “Congrats on the new role! Hope you’re doing well!” I quickly thanked the sender. Seconds later, another message came through: “Congrats on the new role!…

An interview with Rich Barton on Zillow launch day in 2006 on NPR can be found here. “We’re live” post on Zillow’s Blog is here. (inspired by recently watching Zuckerberg’s 2004 interview)

Mark Zuckerberg being interviewed in 2004… Yes, I’d say Facebook turned out quite a bit bigger than originally imagined.

I wrote about the teams opportunity a week ago. Zillow announced another investment in that area today with the addition of team profiles. I’d say this is a pretty good indicator we’ll see more and more investment into software for helping teams in the coming year.