Honorable mention: a category called "Bad MLS Photo of the Day" in Athol Kay's weblog. 

New real estate wiki for real estate industry is launched. 

History of wikis in real estate
BiggerPockets (launched in 2006) claims to be the first real estate wiki but it unfortunately closed down in May 2007 due to lack of sufficient content.  Introduced shortly therafter, and still going strong, is InmanWiki (part of InmanNews, InmanTV and InmanBlog).  

Syndication is all the buzz but what really happens when you place your listing data on sites other than your local mls and your own corporate or broker websites? What are you giving them permission to do with your seller's listing data? Are they reconfiguring it? Manipulating it for sales of leads back to the agent population? Find out.

Events that Shape an Industry: Real Estate Brokerage 2007 

In follow up to last week’s post where I detailed the Trendsetters of 2007, I today list the top 10 events that made headlines and captured the attention of the real estate industry in 2007. The selection of these events was based on both 2007 prominance as well as potential future impact on the industry for the next few years.

Read the complete list with here on next page.

Every year I identify in my Swanepoel Trends Report the top 10 companies that I feel during the previous calendar year (2007) set forth actions that were different and memorable and could potentially have a far reaching impact on the real estate industry in the years to come. I call them Trendsetters. Here are my Top 10 Trendsetters for 2007.

1. Realogy

Trulia is now one of the top 10 most-visited real estate website in the US, according to the most recent report released by comScore Networks Inc. climbing 17 places to become the seventh most-popular real estate brand for the month of December 2007.Trulia.com has nearly tripled in the past 12 months from 579,000 to more than 1.6 million last month.  

Will consumers find more doors open to listings directly?

Raise your hand if you've found yourself in this scenario: You're driving with your buyer-client on a property tour. You're following a judiciously-prepared route comprised of property listings in your client's stated price range. You're both chatting about likes/dislikes of the morning's "best of" tour when you turn a corner and there's a yard with a for sale sign. For some reason, the property isn't on your list. Then your client says, "oh!, what about that one! It's like the bay windows we loved from that house on Cedarbrook but with the acreage and back bay view we adored from the one on Canyon Rim. Can we see it?"

Every year the RealSure team surveys the residential industry, seeks out any changes, analyzes new business models, interview hundreds of industry leaders, researches and reads thousands of articles and send out tens of surveys. Well the survey is currently underway and your opinions and comments will help provide a more accurate assessment of certain paradigm shifts that are currently occurring in the real estate industry.

Click Here to participate.

RealSure, Inc., publishers of the Swanepoel TRENDS Report is offering a bonus 10% savings as a thank you for participating in the quick 6- 10 question survey, depending on whether you are a broker or an agent. This is over and above the currently available 20% pre-publication discount for early purchasers.

Last weekend Directors for the California Association of Realtors (CAR) approved the creation of a statewide real estate data-sharing system – basically creating a statewide MLS.

In conversations with Realtors during the past several weeks it became obvious that a key service utilized in marketing real estate is completely backwards and could work against exposing a property to perspective buyers. The solution to this issue has also been around for more than fifteen years but was shelved or under utilized during the ten or more year expansion we experienced in real estate sales and prices.