The Business of Real Estate

We keep hearing about the virtues of renting.  Owning, we're told, appears to be out of fashion with the economic or business case in question (unless, of course, you can pick the price bottom). The mantra now appears to be "rent, rent, rent".  Most all of the industry website's seem to catching ...

Do brokers engage in competition or do the local commission chips just fall where they may (mostly into the pockets of the communities' top agents)? Should a broker come into the office each day (week or month) offering innovative tools to enhance an agents' business and help them eliminate the c...

According to Experian Hitwise, during the month of July the results regarding market share for US real estate websites looks like the chart below. What we see is that these sites are either a part of a larger portal (MSN, Yahoo, AOL) or they are unique brands (Zillow, Trulia) and/or they are one-...

Last week The National Association of Home Builders / Wells Fargo Housing Opportunity Index (HOI) released their stats on housing affordability.  It says that housing is as affordable on a nationwide level as it's been in 20 years (the index takes into account local income levels and sales price...

This is how easy it is to drive new customers to your business. For a second pretend you own a hardware store and “hammers.com” (the Company) calls to offer you exclusive use of their domain name (brand) through a Marketing Partnership; the domain and all its’ functionality (customer database agg...

We all want to drive new buyers and sellers to our local business, website, blog etc.  Over the years most agents have branded themselves, "Agent Jane Smith" and brokers have branded themselves, "HomeTown Realty". On their own, do these brands make customers go crazy with interest and actively pu...

Without question – buying and selling teardowns and new construction.  Buyers and sellers of teardowns are really just interested in location and the accompanying survey – not much work there.  As far as new construction - well, it’s new.  No hidden defects, no “to do” list etc. – buyers either l...

We’ve read a lot about this lately, but needed to see it for ourselves to further verify this trend.  As you may know, our brokerage arm is a licensed real estate agency (in IL) that markets and sells redevelopment property i.e. teardowns.  Some of our current listings were purchased by builders ...

Yes, that's 1 Billion dollars.  Does that mean the end or the begining of new real estate models?  The investment community must see that real change is upon us. Are you in the game - the game is online.  Nice job Zillow!

Warning this commentary is a little education and a lot of advertising.   We are sure there are a lot of great companies that offer a good marketing product for those interested in "selling yourself".  teardowns.com, on the other hand, is a marketplace that's different.   It is a marketplace that...