Just wanted to say thank you to all of the ActiveRain members who stopped by our booth so far here at NAR to check out our new video learning community, Real Estate Brainchain. We appreciate your support and feedback and have enjoyed catching up with you all here at NAR. The feedback so far has been great - lots of positive comments, great suggestions and even some trainers who are interested in becoming part of the network.
In any case, for fun, here's a video from the community, just for A/R members to enjoy. Hope to see more of you at the conference today, too!
November 12 - San Diego, CA - As the National Association of REALTORS Annual Convention opens this week in San Diego, Matthew Ferrara & Company announced the launch of its latest learning service, real estate brainchain (www.rebrainchain.com). The new online video learning community features high-quality training lessons for real estate professionals on a broad variety of topics like sales, marketing, technology and management. As easy to use as YouTube, but with real estate specific content, brainchain launches with almost 100 ready-to-learn lessons featuring some of the industry's top trainers.
"Brainchain changes the paradigm in online learning for REALTORS," says Matthew Ferrara, CEO of Matthew Ferrara & Company, the parent of brainchain. "In the last two decades, we have repeatedly delivered innovations in real estate training, first by incorporating technology into the classroom, then by creating the industry's largest delivery system of webinars. We'll deliver more than 3500 webinars this year alone, but we still don't think that's enough availability and affordability for the industry. That's why we're introducing real estate brainchain."
The new platform uses the latest video innovations to change how real estate professionals use the internet to grow their business. While many real estate agents have been using the web to learn for quite some time, "we're focused on the educational paradigm," says Derek Deveau, Director of Development for brainchain. "Many agents have attended live webinars online for years; the challenges we're solving there are to make the content available all the time, and to make them far more exciting than just slide shows and computerized voices. By using a state of the art video studio, we can record and broadcast live, with a higher learning impact. People learn quickly and easily using television today. We're doing the same thing on the web." Likewise, Deveau adds, we're eliminating the scheduling hassles that keep some agents from attending the classes they need at the times they need them.
Brainchain is much more than just online videos, says Ferrara. "As a professional education company, we don't just create content. We study how people learn and what helps them retain that learning. In most cases, that involves two factors: Learning in discrete amounts of time, and learning when it's important to solve a problem. With brainchain, most of our lessons are under 10 minutes, so you can pay attention, focus, absorb, and then go apply the learning right away in your business. And since it's on-demand, our members will watch the lessons they want, when they want it, which creates the motivation to concentrate and acquire the skills. In two decades of training experience, we have seen that students learn more when it's in small bites and on topics they are really interested in." Brainchain also adds social networking elements to its platform, creating a true video learning community.
Laura Fisher, Director of Site Development says that brainchain is designed to get members teaching and talking to each other. "The site's full of extra features. There's a forum where members can discuss hot topics and share ideas with each other. The Think Tank provides access to the trainers who are in the videos, so students can contact them and ask questions. And every member can blog about how they are using their new skills and knowledge to advance their careers. By combining social network features with high-quality video learning, we're really creating a skill-development environment that has something for everyone, and lots of new content every day."
The real estate brainchain platform will launch at NAR with almost 100 learning lessons ranging from "how-to" lessons on technology, social networking and office productivity, to real estate sales lessons on prospecting, farming, staging, pricing, marketing and management. "Brainchain links together great minds, like Martha Webb, Matthew Ferrara, Rich Sands and others. Each has dozens of lessons that can be watched and combined to create new ways of thinking - new "brain chains" - for real estate agents of the future," Deveau adds. "It's going to make an amazing amount of knowledge available to the greatest number of people in a format that's both easy and fun for anyone to use."
For more information about real estate branching, visit www.rebraincain.com or contact us today.
Just want to encourage all of you who are going to the NAR conference to stop by our booth - Matthew Ferrara & Company - where we'll be launching our new learning service featuring some cool online learning approaches. Juet mention you saw this posting on ActiveRain and we'll even give you a free trial!
Plus, don't forget to attend my training session on Saturday morning: Real Estate, The Next Generation!
According to NAR and Radar Logic, home prices rose month-to-month from April to May in 10 cities in America, like Boston, Charlotte, Seattle and Denver. Words like “recovery” are used in the press release, because, at least from the Voice of REALTORS, the word “inflation” is off limits. Since the press release is just a snippet, it’s likely to be passed around without much analysis. Too bad, because it’s likely to mislead a lot of consumers.
Let’s just do a little math: According to the data, home prices rose around 3-5%. According to another report from NAR, the median sales price natiowide in the first quarter was around $196,600. If we take the median increase of 4% of the median price, you’ll get $7864, which is awfully close to the $8,000 tax credit for first time home buyers. Which means, if we’re really honest, the home price increse isn’t due to positive market forces, like recovery, but negative forces, called inflation. And a very specific type of inflation: market distorting, government subsidy-dollar inflation.
That’s not any sign of a housing recovery. That’s simply called smart sellers. They know that buyers have access to free Greenbacks, so they bumped up their selling price (or just didn’t lower it by the same amount during that period.) This means buyers will still be overpaying for homes (in real terms). And since 1 in 2 sales nationwide this year has also been to the first time buyer, eligible for these tax dolalrs, it will also harm othersellers, especially those whose homes are not attractive to first-time subsidized buyers. They will see this headline bounced all over the media and rebleated by uncritical agents, and think they can now go back to overpricing their homes.
Recovery?
Let’s be real. Headlines like this are hurting the housing industry, not helping.
In one of the cruel ironies of the housing market today, the total number of units sold this year isn’t that far from historically normal volume. According to the National Association of REALTORS, the seasonally adjusted annual rate for sales in May is around 4.77 million - generally trending the pre-bubble long-term volume for a typical year. Some segments continue to decline - such as housing starts - but it makes sense to stop adding more units to the million-plus excess inventory units available already. Clearing the excess inventory remains an important goal for the market. Only when supply and demand level off will prices stabilize. Yet real estate companies find themselves doing the same (or more) work for less results. Even selling historically normal units prevent a revenue decline; and nobody’s picking up “extra” units these days. With median home prices down 30% to around $173,000, volume strategies alone cannot sustain most brokerages. Thankfully, the consumer has provided real estate professionals with a ready-made solution. It’s up to brokers and agents to start selling it. Just like they used to.
“Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” So quipped Mark Twain after hearing his demise had been published in the New York Times. The same might be said today about the real estate industry. A lot of hullabaloo has been making its way through the web these days - the end of brands, numbered days for independent agents, consumers ready to do it on their own. Trouble is, it’s mostly punditry that supports these assertions. Certainly, real estate brokerage is under a lot of pressure to produce profits, cut costs and improve customer satisfaction these days. Even more likely is the potential for the industry to further downsize, eliminate waste and fracture between awaygrossly inefficient organizational structures and innovative models. But dead?Methinks some people doth protest too much.
A month ago, I received the strangest email ever: An agent in LinkedIn blasted an email to her connections announcing her next open house. Sadly, it was little more than a cut-and-paste of the abbreviation-dumb newspaper ad she probably also ran. No photos, nor punctuation. Not even a hyperlink.
More recently, a steady-stream of Facebook invitations have been arriving, with impersonal introductions like, “If you know someone who needs a REALTOR in AnyTown, USA, send me your referrals!” Oh, sorry; I thought you wanted to be my friend.
But the social networking abuse reached a tipping point yesterday: It seems some virtual tour vendor has made it “quick and easy” to mass-post your tours across multiple networks at once.
Oh, goody: REALTORS are about to have no more friends.
You’ve seen it, everyone is using it and maybe you have even joined but how can Facebook help you make money in Real Estate? This class will give you a step by step process on how to start leveraging Facebook to prospect, build your Sphere of Influence, market yourself and increase your income potential.
Learn how to:
Get started with simple and advanced Facebook tools
Integrate other internet tools with Facebook
Use Facebook to reach your clients in way you could never do before
Maintain daily communications and build your sphere of influence
Leverage social networking to create a pipeline of customers for life (and referrals, too!)
Join Jill Courville, Senior Instructor at Matthew Ferrara and Company and top producing real estate agent for a quick-study on how to turn Facebook into your personal prospecting engine and supercharge your real estate business.
Once again, as REALTORS converged last week for their MidYear meetings in Washington, D.C., the forces of stability and sameness were present, coming up with last-gasp-ways to protect the tattered vestiges of Real Estate, the Last Generation. New white-papers and shiny-Powerpoint presentations proclaimed the “we-can-renovate” mentality of Gen 2.0 MLS systems struggling to enter the 3.0 version of the industry. Much like Google and Yahoo - who refuse to admit their advertising model is crumbling in the face of social networks - MLS’s are trying one last time to burnish a brand that has already worn off the chrome. What’s left underneath are the mostly rusted pieces of a structure whose time has come and gone, even if some REALTORS still believe the Comparables Book will someday make a comeback.
It’s time for the real estate industry to implode the MLS model so they can build something better suited to the next generation of real estate practices.
To prove the point, let’s try to list 10 Reasons why MLS systems really must go. Only then can we see that we’re out of fingers on which to count the ways they might survive.
They are expensive. It’s absolutely incredible that brokers pay the kinds of fees they do, on a per-member per-month basis, for essentially data warehousing. A Google Mini, which is a kind of server/software system to let you create your own in-house Google database, only costs about $4000 for 100,000 document capacity. Clearly even a few years of local housing data doesn’t reach that capacity level, but double or triple it and it’s obvious the exorbitant fees aren’t for the hardware. If a 5000-person MLS pays $100 per person annually, that’s still $500,000… and we know it’s more than that in most systems. Deduct staff, technicians and programmers, you’re still overpaying for data warehousing. How can Craigslist store so much more data for free to its users?
The data integrity is awful. And that’s pushing away consumers. Let’s stop pretending that there’s any policing of MLS data; maybe a few fields are required and a few token fines issued. But one look at any site whose data is fed by an MLS (like REALTOR-dot-we-don’t-care-dot-com) and it’s clear that once you transfer responsibility for data quality from the broker/owner/manager to a MLS staff member, nobody is watching out for the consumer. Seller are horrified to see their property information incomplete online, with “too new for photo” for days, while buyers are duly unimpressed by the quality of data and its arrangement into pathetic “listing sheets.” Data integrity is actually a barometer of brokerage oversight, which eventually falls to zero with the existence of MLS systems.
MLS “organizations” are dominated by No Men. These are the programmers, directors, engineers and others at the “software/hardware” department who essentially say “No” to anything brokers want to do with their own data. No, you can’t use your data in the ways you want. No, we can’t add that field. No, you can’t store more than 20 photos. No, you can’t feed your data by FTP but must type it in manually. No, it doesn’t work on a Mac. No, it won’t work with Internet Explorer (any new version for weeks). No, we won’t program it to look good on a smartphone. No, No, No. We won’t let you ruin our nice, neat little database!
MLS rules are anti-competitive. Forget any legal rulings, because they are meaningless. What’s anti-competitive about MLS rules is that they continually suck the life out of any competitive advantages a broker might try to implement. In a death by a thousand cuts, brokers are prevented from using their own data in ways they want - such as watermarking a photo or filtering certain results on their web page. They are forced, through horrific concepts like IDX or data-exchange, to display the uber-crappy data/photos of their worst competitors on their own million-dollar-plus websites, simply because it’s all-or-nothing in the rules. If one broker invest huge sums of his own money to get ahead with new feature on his website, you can be sure his competitive advantage will be diluted once the “MLS” adds that same feature for everyone else to benefit from later - at a group-subsidy rate.
MLS systems inhibit business model innovation. What if your company didn’t want to market properties by price - just features or neighborhood or some other feature. No chance, say the MLS software priests: price is a “required field” no matter what your marketing plan, simply because the gestalt says so. Want to link-out to your own video library. Nay, ye aren’t permitted, sayeth the Village Elders. We don’t supporteth links to the external world. And any further attempts to innovate or trick the system will land you in the Tower of London, you blasphemer!
Yesterday, President Obama announced he was prepared to break the law. After blaming the senior debt bondholders of Chrysler for pushing the company into Chapter 11, he sanctioned a plan to abrogate their covenants and force them to take pennies on their loaned dollar. No matter that their bonds were secured by the company’s assets. The rights of “speculators” are easily swept aside in populist frenzies. Notice how the President didn’t blink a teleprompter-eye when he stood with the union workers, the families and the communities - while transferring to them 55% control of the company assets. American lenders filled with American workers who loaned American savings to Chrysler for decades were expected to simply take massive losses. Apparently it’s no longer American to repay one’s debts. The Bully Pulpit declared “needs” more important than “rights.” And since mere mortals barely understand all this financial jargon, especially REALTORS, the rule of law was quietly killed. Contracts, it seems, aren’t worth the paper they’re written on in America.
REALTORS had better beware.
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This isn’t the first President to simply throw contracts out the window. Franklin D. Roosevelt passed an executive order voiding contracts repayable in gold during the Great Depression. He further eroded the contract-relationship between Greenbacks and gold (essentially, treasury contracts) by setting the daily price of gold by fiat, from his bathtub each morning. Back then, millions of contracts held by bankers, speculators, lenders, retailers and other American citizens were instantly eviscerated. Today, the New New Deal improves this rewriting policy to not only abrogate contracts but quickly steal any available assets and transfer them to preferred political gangs. The United Auto Workers will receive five times the assets un-paid-for. Bondholders receive an ample serving of populist scorn.
What will be the effects of such government capriciousness? How will an open policy of disdain for contracts chill the economy further - especially the housing industry?
Disclaimer: ActiveRain Corp. does not necessarily endorse the real estate agents, loan officers and brokers listed on this site. These real estate profiles, blogs and blog entries are provided here as a courtesy to our visitors to help them make an informed decision when buying or selling a house. ActiveRain Corp. takes no responsibility for the content in these profiles, that are written by the members of this community.
According to NAR and Radar Logic, home prices rose month-to-month from April to May in 10 cities in America, like Boston, Charlotte, Seattle and Denver. Words like “recovery” are used in the press release, because, at least from the Voice of REALTORS, the word “inflation” is off limits. Since the press release is just a snippet, it’s likely to be passed around without much analysis. Too bad, because it’s likely to mislead a lot of consumers.
“Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” So quipped Mark Twain after hearing his demise had been published in the New York Times. The same might be said today about the real estate industry. A lot of hullabaloo has been making its way through the web these days - the end of brands, numbered days for independent agents, consumers ready to do it on their own. Trouble is, it’s mostly punditry that supports these assertions. Certainly, real estate brokerage is under a lot of pressure to produce profits, cut costs and improve customer satisfaction these days. Even more likely is the potential for the industry to further downsize, eliminate waste and fracture between awaygrossly inefficient organizational structures and innovative models. But dead?Methinks some people doth protest too much.
A month ago, I received the strangest email ever: An agent in LinkedIn blasted an email to her connections announcing her next open house. Sadly, it was little more than a cut-and-paste of the abbreviation-dumb newspaper ad she probably also ran. No photos, nor punctuation. Not even a hyperlink.
Yesterday, President Obama announced he was prepared to break the law. After blaming the senior debt bondholders of Chrysler for pushing the company into Chapter 11, he sanctioned a plan to abrogate their covenants and force them to take pennies on their loaned dollar. No matter that their bonds were secured by the company’s assets. The rights of “speculators” are easily swept aside in populist frenzies. Notice how the President didn’t blink a teleprompter-eye when he stood with the union workers, the families and the communities - while transferring to them 55% control of the company assets. American lenders filled with American workers who loaned American savings to Chrysler for decades were expected to simply take massive losses. Apparently it’s no longer American to repay one’s debts. The Bully Pulpit declared “needs” more important than “rights.” And since mere mortals barely understand all this financial jargon, especially REALTORS, the rule of law was quietly killed. Contracts, it seems, aren’t worth the paper they’re written on in America.
;)
;)
