Many of you know today is #givingtuesday. I recommend you giveback by becoming a member of Giveback Homes. Or Kiva. Or The AdventureProject (which is what I donated to earlier today). Or any other cause you care about. And yes, Black Friday is a con. [Graphic via Mary]

Building marketplaces is a tough, tough game. It’s virtually always a massive chicken and egg problem. I know from experience — Horizon is a marketplace for hospitality exchange (though we aren’t technically involved in a transaction element yet). VersionOne, a VC firm, recently produced a fairly advanced…

I just watched the following video, a short presentation by Brett at New Story (which I’ve written about before): Given I’m a sucker for community, one thing I picked up on was that Brett mentioned that building homes leads to lasting community. Money can’t build…

While most of the industry conversation centers around Zillow’s focus on high performing agent teams, Zillow keeps plugging away with business development efforts to gain more distribution for their mortgage offering. This week’s news was that Zillow Group partnered with Google Compare for mortgage data (press…

When you post something on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest, do you close your eyes and hope that it looks the way you want it to? If so, you should be using Open Graph, the social media protocol designed by Facebook back in 2010. Open Graph…

There are many, many people in the real estate industry who have WordPress powered websites. Most of those know there are two arms of WordPress. WordPress.org (self hosted, open source) and WordPress.com (hosted, not open source). The big news today is that WordPress.com is now open…

Those of you who have had self hosted WordPress real estate websites for a number of years may remember the local market explorer WordPress plugin (released back in 2009, see launch post here & here). The plugin makes it simple to create city, neighborhood, and zip code pages filled…

I meant to write this immediately following my return from the Zip.Code Retsly Hackathon but I think I literally needed this much time to catch up on the sleep I deprived myself of, over the course of the 34 straight hours I was at the event……

Surefield launched their Pricepoint this week (see GeekWire coverage), which you can test out here (coverage for properties in Western Washington only). The concept of personalizing an automated valuation model with custom comps is not new, of course. During my time at Zillow, I spoke with consumers…

This has nothing to do with real estate technology, so if you can handle that, read on… From a comment on AVC from Yasmine Mustafa: Something broke down in the immigration system because despite being brought here, we discovered we were illegal aliens when I…