On a fairly regular basis, I hear people comment that this person’s or that program’s form letters or fliers are bad/not for their market/hokey, you-fill-in-the-blank.

The value in ‘canned’ content is not necessarily in that you can take them as they are, and start using them. While it is true that there are some things, some times, that can be good they way they are, or pretty close, it is rare. The value is in the fact that the content, the concept, is already there for you, and pretty much done. What is left for you to do is to tweak it to your personality, and/or your market. The value is in not having to start from scratch. Starting form scratch takes a great deal of time. That’s where the value is; the time savings.

There's a bit of buzz about Redfin's recent site upgrade. 

Live as of last Wednesday, the upgrade has added bank-owned foreclosures and FSBO listings to their inventory display.  

The bit of the controversy comes the question of how they were able to get around the MLS co-mingling display issue; the FSBO listings are listed alongside those from the MLS.  (Ref. 4.13 in MRMLS IDX policy... "Listings obtained through IDX must be displayed separately from listings obtained from other sources...")

Today’s successful mega-producers are generating plenty of business, but unlike the customers of yesterday, today’s real estate customer is beginning online. According to the latest figures, in excess of 90% (94%) are beginning their search online. In my last installment, I explained how successful agents today are going way “upstream” to capture their business — before the customer has had the opportunity to be attracted by old-school marketing techniques. If you haven’t read it yet, you owe it to yourself to start there.

It's a beautiful day today in Southern California.  So, this post is a quickie and addresses a couple of questions I got on a previous article I wrote about Google's Street View, and which I've been meaning to post here on a slow, rainy day... (ahem).

In my last post I discussed the difference between yesterday’s pull marketing and today’s push marketing. I explained how pull marketing is reactive — “If you build it they will come.” Push marketing, on the other hand, is pro-active — “If you build it they won’t come so you have to go get them.” (Click to view previous blog post.) Many agents today have experienced that very phenomenon: doing lots of advertising and getting little if no results.

Before we launch into this segment, let’s recap the last installment. In it I was discussing how in the 1960s and 70s, our industry was in a Broker-centric Era. The brokers had all the power. Customers had very little access to listing inventory except through them. Agents had no business except through them. Modern real estate brokerage was in its infancy. By controlling the inventory, broker-owners were able to build real estate dynasties. It was common place to see multiple office operations with teams of agents, and it was during this climate that companies like Century 21, Coldwell Banker, ERA, and other similar broker-centric companies became huge empires.

In Google's perpetual march to catalog the world's information, they've been making headway in cataloging neighborhood images on their Street View service.  For those who haven't heard, Street View is a perspective in Google's online map service.  But, rather than serving up just a top-view from, say, a Thomas guide-type perspective, or the zoom-able view of a satellite image, Google has enlisted armies of specially configured cars. 

(Courtesy:  Xeni Jardin, BoingBoing)

When CNN’s Pulse on America program featured us two years ago, they were investigating an interesting phenomenon in our industry. Click to view video. It seems that today there are two real estate worlds coexisting simultaneously. Like in the movie The Matrix, there was the “perceived” world and then there was the “real” world. In our industry there is much the same today. Those agents who are practicing real estate this new way, are doing quite well — many better than ever. But those who are hanging onto the old-school real estate model are finding themselves working harder and harder and making less and less money.

First American CoreLogic, a member of The First American Corporation family of companies and America's largest provider of advanced property and ownership information, analytics and services, announced this week the release of REiSource, a new Web-based real estate information gateway to the most complete and accurate suite of property profiles, new homeowner and refinance lists, resale trends, mortgage leads and custom reports for title insurance companies.

I just love the youth – their enthusiasm, their energy, their eagerness and their burning passion for life. 

It’s true that generations come and go and each one is unique – each reacting and changing what previous generations have done over time.   

And now it is time again. Baby Boomers are slowly making way for the next generation to assume leadership of the industry. Not that this is a one–day event, but rather a decade of transition. One that we are already part of. 

It is important to note that the impact of both Gen X and Gen Y outside real estate is already very significant – just think of MySpace, Dell Computers, eBay, Yahoo, Google, You Tube and Facebook – all legacy of that generations’ alumni.