As a result of the ongoing discussion about Broker Public Portal (most recent thread here), I did a little bit of digging to figure out whether there have been other “agent/broker led” portal initiatives that have successfully competed against market leaders in other countries. I found this article…

Any young founders out there, pre seed funding and pre accelerator? Apply for a YC Fellowship: YC Fellows will receive a $12,000 grant and advice from the YC community for 8 weeks (from mid-September to mid-November) to go from an idea to a startup. Fellows need…

I would bet every founder reading this blog knows about AirBnB. If you don’t, you’ve been living under a rock. Some of you have raised funds. Others haven’t. Fundraising is not easy. Don’t let anyone tell you differently, despite what you hear in the tech…

Zillow is acquiring DotLoop. Fires are burning in real estate social media. Let’s get this out of the way. There are tons of brokers and agents who dislike Zillow. Call them what you want. They’re here. I’m a regular critic of the company when they (regularly) make…

It’s no secret I’m not the biggest fan of the Broker Public Portal. I really don’t see how it makes strategic financial sense, and have long thought the project will be a colossal waste of money rebuilding the exact offering that has taken Zillow 10 years – and millions and…

Durham N. Carolina’s Adwerx is a digital advertising platform for residential real estate that was created using a concept and code for a completely different vertical, musicians. Jed Carlson and his team of now 37 employees used their experience to build a system that allows…

Zillow Group is making another acquisition: Dotloop (read press release). +   Zillow seems to buy up every innovative technology player in the entire industry. I can’t fault them for buying up the talent, and mindshare. I have to wonder if any technology companies are going to be left as independents…

Early on at Zillow, I used Yahoo! Pipes as a way to aggregate and filter web results with zero actual programming knowledge (Pipes was mentioned by Justin in this article from 2010). It was a cool tool back in the day. Fast forward several years,…

Project Upstream, as far as I can tell, is all about consolidating the MLS data. Zillow currently has to take data from hundreds of MLS organizations, in a variety of formats, and consolidate it to put it on Zillow. Once Upstream is completed, they will…

I’ve long thought (known) there is opportunity for brokerages to be the local market expert with the media (I wrote that post over 4 years ago in 2011). I agree with Brian — Pacific Union’s Market Pulse video is a smart approach to delivering local real estate…