The Insider: Issue 014
Don’t even think about skipping this week’s Insider. You’ve been warned. Read on, friends.
Last Week This Week
Realogy, which accounts for about 25% of the residential resale market in the U.S., called upon NAR to revise its IDX/VOW listing display policy to make listing agent and brokerage attribution more prominent, and to include contact information.
Current display rules require that the listing brokerage be displayed, but not the listing agent. Contact information is not required under the existing rules.
A few things to think about on this:
Big brokers with lots of listings (like, for example, Realogy’s brokerage operation) would love to sell more of their own inventory, and this will likely help them do that.
If this policy is adopted, it will impact Zillow, which converted to IDX last year, but not Realtor.com, which still gets non-IDX MLS feeds. Zillow would therefore be more impacted (perhaps negatively, to the extent that it would “leak” leads it currently funnels to its buyer agent advertisers) than NAR’s namesake website.
This would likely sting for Redfin, a big brokerage that’s buy side heavy and relies on IDX.
In the context of the class action lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny looming over the industry, which are largely focused on how buyer’s agents are compensated, this could be looked at as an anticipatory defensive move by Realogy to hedge against the possibility that cooperation and compensation as we’ve known it gets obliterated.
That’s a lot of inside baseball stuff, but this is one of those cases where it makes sense to track the game closely.
Have You Heard About This?
How a Foil-Wrapped Home Survived a Raging Wildfire
The Caldor Fire’s been ravaging through the forests near South Lake Tahoe in Northern California, destroying everything in its path. While dozens of cabins in Strawberry, El Dorado County, were decimated, one home was spared — saved by what appeared to be aluminum foil wrapped all around it, like a giant baked potato cooking in a tremendous campfire. The California wildfires have been devastating to homeowners throughout the state over the years. This story is truly remarkable.
What's Inside
A brand new From the Source focus group drops this week wherein we ask 4 smart, productive agents a very big question: What is the next digital signature — the tech that would change everything for you?
In this week’s Floor Time, we will go deep inside the topic of NFTs and listings. Join the 1000watt team and a panel of 3 NFT experts in real estate as we dig into the truth behind this mysterious topic. Join us here at 9:30am PST on Friday, September 17th.
Inspiration Point
Smells Like Magnetic Copy
We’re loving the slightly unhinged product copy throughout Whiskey River Soap’s line of soaps, candles, matches, puzzles, and other such giftable items. Thanks to them, our Instagram feed is no longer taking itself so seriously. It’s a nice reminder that gifts don’t have to be so darn predictable. And neither does marketing and brand copy.
Totally Innocent Cleavers Need Not Apply
Speaking of amazing Instagram content, not sure how we’ve been missing out on the TSA’s Instagram account. We’re on it now and it’s not at all what you’d expect from a government agency that hates shoes, shaving cream, water bottles and firearms. The images are silly, the captions are of the “didn’t see that coming” ilk, and the content is always relevant to the organization, whose charge seems to be endlessly reminding travelers of the rules they didn’t bother to look up. We love where this one goes: “Some things just give us the chills, like this totally innocent, not at all creepy cleaver. We wanted to flesh out the full story on this one, so we did some investigative work, like any hard-working social media team would do…” (Read on here.)
Quote of the week
"When you understand that nobody wants to read our sh*t, you develop empathy.”
— Steven Pressfield
