The Insider: Issue 021

Welcome, folks. You’re in for a wild mix of light and heavy thoughts as we explore fun with words, the Swedish secret to exceptional brand storytelling, and what happens when a company puts its profits on the line to preserve principles.

 

Last Week This Week

Opendoor cut a deal with Realtor.com to display live, preliminary offers on properties in 44 markets. This comes as Realtor.com has been gaining on Zillow’s traffic lead (Zillow still has more than twice the audience, but that lead has been steadily eroding). Looks like we’re gonna have a Coke Vs. Pepsi situation in iBuying (with Offerpad being something like RC Cola?) for a long time. Also noteworthy here: we can remember a time when Realtor.com could not even display a value estimate on listings because NAR would not permit it to do so; now it’s offering an alternative to selling with an agent on hundreds of thousands of homes. Things change.

CoStar CEO Andy Florance continues to go all scorched earth on Zillow, laying it on thick at the Inman show in Las Vegas. People seem to eat it up, but we continue to believe that this is not, for those who loathe Zillow, a “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” situation. CoStar did not make a play in residential to save realtors from the exactions of shady portals; they did it to make a shit-ton of money. Friendly reminder.

Realogy seems to be getting serious about its iBuyer play, RealSure. First they cut a deal with Blackstone-owned Home Partners of America to handle acquisitions, then, last week, appointed a serious-looking CEO and hinted at direct-to-consumer advertising. Realogy made an iBuyer play in 2018 and the early reports we heard were, shall we say, mixed. The kinks are getting worked out.

Have You Heard About This?

Vintage Words With Friends
We had a lot of fun with this nifty time-travel engine Merriam-Webster released. Enter the year you were born and see a list of words that were first used in print that year. Some of our 1000watt team favorites: eye-candy, tiki bar, air guitar, yuppify, Chilean sea bass, moonwalk, technobabble, idiotproof, athleisure, digital nomad, mixtape, and couch potato. This was all the proof we needed that interesting words can lift moods and crack open our zoom fatigue.

What's Inside

We have a brand new 3 Things dropping this week featuring Adrienne Meisels, founder of myPlanit, that you won’t want to miss.

Did you read the Original Research on consumers’ luxury perceptions? Did the results surprise you? We’d love to hear what you think about it! Join the conversation in the LinkedIn group and tell us how we can make these reports better.

We’re doing a From the Source focus group with recent buyers this Wednesday. We’ll be digging into buyer agent commissions, awareness of “power buyer” companies, and more. If you have a question you’d like us to ask, just shoot it to us by replying to this email.

 

Inspiration Point

 
Firande — A Very Swedish Celebration
We watched the IKEA Festival that took place last month on the Swedish company’s global website. The festival featured home visits, home concerts, home cooking and more. You can still watch the highlights here. We’ve been studying the IKEA brand and were floored at how this event expressed so much of their big vision (“creating a better life for the many people”), and truly expressed a brand story that goes beyond “what we do,” i.e, sell inexpensive, Swedish-inspired furniture and housewares. So much of the big campaigns we see in real estate only go as deep as showing “what we do” — agents handing over keys, placing a “sold” onto a yard sign, and smiling with other smiling people. We’d love to see more IKEA-like approaches, and less selling of the furniture.

Not Just Another Sweater
By now, we’ve all heard about Facebook’s new plans for Metaverse. Aside from some typical social media snark and mockery around the accompanying name change, we surfaced this thread from Patagonia, doubling down on its boycott of Facebook last year. In it, CEO Ryan Gellert explains how the 16-month advertising boycott has impacted their business, and yet they will not let up until the company takes action to mitigate the harm its platform is creating. What’s fascinating about this thread are the comments from people professing their brand loyalty — like this one: “Even though I live in Florida…so not much need for most of what you sell, I ordered two sweaters from you because I so respect what you stand for!” This is what deep, strategic brand building can do. Having a point of view that’s real, felt and honored in everything your company does is not only good for your brand, it’s good for the greater cause you support. Profit’s important. But it alone doesn’t drive the sort of emotional connection Patagonia has created.

 

Quote of the week

“If the story is not great or if the story is not human, no technology will save you. Not today. Not anytime in the future.”

— Piyush Pandey