Is Red really the new Black? It’s a catchy phrase and it reflects the apparent sentiment of some of the bigger players and their backers. Along with the other term used in the same discussion, “sustained unprofitability”, it posits that Success in the real estate…

It isn’t the same as turning lead into gold but the latest talk about red and black in the real estate industry is still nice fodder for the pundits even if it doesn’t really reflect reality. Second quarter earnings announcements and SEC filings were released…

[Note from editor: We publish a Weekly Transmission for Geek Estate Mastermind members that consists of long form articles covering the spectrum from shipping container co-living spaces to the battle for listing acquisition in the first iBuyer world war. Below is a preview of this month’s sample Transmission,…

Last week, I investigated category kings further. On the residential side of real estate, the unwavering category king is Zillow Group. In addition to their flagship brand, they own Trulia, StreetEasy, and even power Yahoo! Real Estate. Realtor.com is a distant second, with no legitimate…

Zillow Group has a new career opportunity for some fortunate soul. Director, Industry Outreach. Aka Jay Thompson’s current job. The question is, who wants to replace Jay Thompson once he retires? I’m not sure who can fill such big shoes. Few are as like-able, humble,…

I started a new book this morning. Play Bigger (affiliate link). The book talks about category kings, and the fact that the king always captures 70-80% of value/revenue in a given category, 2nd place grabs enough to scrape by and remain viable — and everyone else…

If you’ve followed my posts here on Geek Estate, you know I’ve had a long history as a customer of Diverse Solutions. I’m not sure exactly when I started with them, probably sometime in 2008, but I was using their dsSearchAgent (Mapping IDX) well before they launched dsIDXpress…

I went to Zillow’s Premier Agent Summit in Seattle this week. It was a focused and well-run event, one that smartly ties in with the company’s current strategy of developing uber-Zillow-agents as its core following and revenue stream. I’ll get back to that in a…

There are some proponents for the entire industry ceasing syndication entirely (specifically to Zillow). The thinking is generally “with no listings, Zillow would become irrelevant and lose all their traffic, all that traffic would frequent agent/broker websites, and the result would be cheaper leads/clients”. So, what would happen if…

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…