Last week, I imagined a world where Zillow Offers is the greatest strategic mistake in the company’s history. Flipping houses directly adds significant operational complexity utilizing on the ground employees and contractors, with low margins. Was their original entry to the market, a marketplace enabling third party investors, not the right approach? I left the article with this question:

So, am I crazy? Is Zillow’s iBuyer strategy sound? Can brokerages, with the help of a tech vendor such as Cloud CMA, compete?

Greg wonders what the smartest people in the room could build now since we know how the next decade plays out. Over romanticizing the status quo is indeed a reality. He finishes by asking a question every entrepreneur or entrepreneur to be should be thinking about:

What would you work on if you had the permission to?

Weekly Radar Sample

WHY CRIMINALS LOVE REAL ESTATE
We do our best to spare this audience from too much divisiveness. However, it’s hard to ignore the mechanics of Paul Manafort’s money laundering scheme with a pro-Russian regime in Ukraine and funneling it into development projects in New York City to avoid detection and pretend it has nothing to do with the real estate industry. This piece from Curbed breaks down the ins and outs of how and why criminals love real estate. I don’t know about you, but it’s kind of embarrassing to read this passage as someone on the inside, “But probably the most advantageous aspect of buying real estate is that reporting requirements for suspicious activity are almost nonexistent, particularly compared to banks and financial institutions, which are legally required to blow the whistle on anything that looks fishy.” -GF

INCREASING ACCESSIBILITY OF URBAN TRANSPORTATION
We touched on urban transportation last week. There’s a lot happening in that sector, the latest being that Bird “will begin steering revenue into a dedicated fund to expand transit infrastructure in the cities where it operates. The initiative would set aside $1 per day from each scooter in operation to help cities build new protected bike lanes, as well as maintain existing ones by repainting and repairing them.” There’s no doubt that bike lanes are needed to get people off the sidewalks to use urban transportation options at their disposal. Many people, myself included, don’t like riding bikes in cities due to the fear drivers not paying attention will wipe them out. Additional bikes lanes don’t alleviate the fear but certainly can’t hurt long-term adoption. -DM

Mastermind Member News

  • Tom Ferry and Contactually teamed up to launch the Tom Ferry CRM Powered by Contactually as part of The HUB, a new “all-in-one” real estate business solution.
  • Congrats to Module for reaching a major milestone: they received a building permit for the first Module home in Pittsburgh.
  • We’re big fans of the work New Story is undertaking. The next chapter? R&D for the Social Housing Sector: they are looking to partner with members of our sector who have the focus and passion to implement new solutions for global homelessness.

As a reminder, the purpose of the Geek Estate Mastermind is two fold:

  1. Curate the world’s most innovative and diverse community of real estate creatives, doers, and pioneers.
  2. Make our members wildly successful in their careers building real estate companies.

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