That’s it. No app, no AI. All I had to do was put my rate, credit score, and term into a form when I signed up. It was free, but I probably would have paid a few dollars a month for it during the days of rolling refinances. The emails came from DoIRefi, which was created by a guy who also built one of the earliest real estate listing syndication tools, Postlets. 

DoIRefi seems to have gone away with the 2022 rate spike, but it’s still on my mind. Because if you haven’t noticed, there’s a bazillion-dollar race for homeowner attention and dollars going on. Rocket (mostly) and Zillow are setting the pace, investing billions in building and marketing environments into which people enter and – if all goes well – never leave.

This isn’t a new effort, but it may as well be. Mortgage servicers have been notoriously bad at this stuff (1000WATT worked with a large servicer on a project eight years ago that largely focused on direct mail and remedial enhancements to a dot-com-era client portal). Most real estate brokerages and agents simply abandon clients after closing.

My monthly email from DoIRefi seemed like the smartest thing ever within this rather desolate context. I never heard from my agent or my mortgage broker, and whatever correspondence I got from my servicer was lost in the tide of scammy mortgage junk washing onto my front porch every day. Meanwhile, within the mortgage and proptech space, innumerable companies talked up “end-to-end” or “click-to-close” platforms without scale, and the many “flywheels” that filled investor decks materialized as little more than a vaporish mist. 

That was then

As it happens, Rocket services my mortgage. I arrived via Mr. Cooper. I can assure you that what they call an “integrated homeownership ecosystem” in their investor deck is the real thing. My loan dashboard is elegant, useful, and full of relevant offers. There’s a CTA to sell my home that takes me to a strong pitch for Redfin, including information on “flexible listing options to sell your home on your terms.” Value and equity estimates for my home tie to Rocket loan products. The latest home listings in my neighborhood are there. 9.1 million Rocket servicing clients likely have a similar experience. The Mr. Cooper deal was completed less than a year ago. Rocket’s total mortgage volume is approximately 25X that of Zillow Home Loans as of Q2 2026. 

This is a new level of scale, integration, and velocity made manifest.

And, uh, this…

Rocket spent $1.09 billion on marketing and advertising in 2025.

Right. Billion. 

Did the Super Bowl ad with Lady Gaga make you feel nice? It made me feel nice. Lots of people are feeling nice about Rocket now. Nice feelings shared by millions make for magnetic brands that span lifetimes.

Driven to distraction

We continue to fight about portals, private listings, and MLS rules — and for very good reason. If I’m a broker, brand exec, agent, team lead, or proptech operator that isn’t within Compass, I certainly would be concerned about locked-up listings I can’t sell, the shrinking addressable market for my software, and/or the decay of the MLS.

Honestly, though, I’d be thinking about the absorption of current and future clients into Rocket and Zillow’s world more. Because despite Compass’s unprecedented scale and willingness to mess with homes, it is, after all, a traditional real estate brokerage that has little command and control over its independent contractor agents. This ultimately limits performance. 

Rocket and Zillow have much more command and control, even in their relationships with agents. The long arm of Zillow reaches deep into the operations of its top team partners in a way Compass can only dream of. Lead Redfin agents follow a standardized process as W-2 employees. Deploying AI to create a whiz-bang platform you want your agents to use with consumers is cool, but it’s going to be dramatically less impactful than the AI models Rocket is using on me, or that Zillow will no doubt continue to deploy within its mortgage operation. 

Please don’t understand this as fear mongering. Aside from joining the odious “seller choice” chorus, I admire what Rocket has done over the past year a lot. It’s breathtaking, really. 

My point is that the quaint world of my refi email is now ancient history, and a new era in which serious efforts at long-term client retention will determine winners and losers has begun.

Enjoy the weekend. 

The post Friday Flash: Driven to Distraction appeared first on 1000WATT.

Betty, the local agent, handled the client. She had no website. No socials. No reviews. No listing or sold portfolio. No philosophy. No belief system. No promise. No positioning.

She did a good job for her clients, who referred her when asked.

To promote herself, she leaned into the only thing she had that positioned her in the marketplace: herself.

Hi, I’m Betty. I love dogs. I bake pies. I wear hats. I’m on the PTA. I own a phone, and as you can see in my photo, I know how to hold it.

It wasn’t sophisticated. It wasn’t called branding because self-promotion and branding were still understood to be different things. 

In context, it worked because that’s all she had.

You are not Betty

You are not the agent of yesterday. Yet the artifacts of ancient self-promotion have calcified into a modern-day doctrine we now call personal branding.

It’s been repackaged, workshopped, keynoted and sold to everyone.

It’s an arrested development that diminishes today’s serious, full-time professional by branding a modern business with a strategy designed for a far simpler era.

Unlike Betty, today’s agent may have a book of business, transaction history, referral network, systems, people, technology, standards and an actual operating philosophy. They counsel clients on pricing, direct marketing and run increasingly sophisticated businesses.

In 1985, Betty had to rely on a hat collection and recipes to get business because she had none of the above.

You are not Betty.

Reducing yourself to a personal brand strategy focused on your name, hobbies and persona puts you in the same category as her in the public eye.

I know this is not a popularly held understanding. Personal brand vendors will disagree.

I’d like to introduce them to Shawn Jardine.

Shawn had a choice

Shawn Jardine runs a small operation in Phoenix. It’s essentially her. Given her prominence, her visibility, her reach, if anyone should be building a Betty brand, it’s her. 

She’s got the personality. The charm. The looks. A killer name. 

A few months back, while she was here in Tucson filming a community she sells, I met up with her for lunch. I wanted to learn more about her YouTube-only strategy. 

“I don’t waste time doing small things. YouTube is the best channel for my business, and it’s where my prospects are searching for information. I have no time for social media games and distorting myself to get views.”

Her singular focus on her YouTube channel has created a staggering follower count and viewership. People watch, learn, and come away with a clear sense of Shawn’s value. 

The conversation drifted toward her vision for growth and her recent rebrand.

“I also don’t take my business advice from real estate gurus who latch on to trendy topics and pretend to be experts at it. I study how things are done in the real world of business, I hire seasoned experts, and I apply their proven strategies to my business.”

There it is.

Rather than go the personal brand route, she built SW55+ (Southwest 55+). The brand represents the people she serves and the products she sells. It speaks directly to the emotional, financial, and logistical complexity its audience is navigating, both in life and in real estate.

“SW55+ is clear. It says everything the marketplace needs to understand. Shawn Jardine says a person who sells real estate. My name can’t house any emotional resonance, and it would also limit my ability to grow and exit one day for top dollar. The Shawn Jardine personal brand is small. Doing small takes as much energy as doing big. I chose big.”

I wanted to probe the emotional argument for branding around oneself.

“Do you ever feel lost in the SW55+ brand?”

She laughed.

“I own the brand, Marc. That’s far more prestigious and valuable than being the product.”

The personal brand hallucination

A person eventually becomes a constraint on how big a brand can become.

To grow beyond that person, the brand has to stand for something wide enough, meaningful enough, and compelling enough for other people to see themselves in it.

Fame, recognition, and a public persona are not the same thing as a brand. Plenty of celebrities have all three without building something people can meaningfully belong to, buy into, or carry forward without them.

Yet real estate has embraced one of its stranger hallucinations: that an executive, an employee with a title and a LinkedIn account, or a real estate agent with a website and a logo can somehow manufacture a brand through visibility.

That may create some recognition. Maybe. It may create attention. Maybe. It may even create some level of fame if you want to call it that. 

But brand is bigger than that.

If you’ve built a business no Betty-era agent ever did, don’t brand yourself the way she did.

She had no choice.

You do.

The post Betty Had No Choice. You Do. appeared first on 1000WATT.

AI music tools access the whole recorded inheritance of the human race, created by the most gifted people we have ever produced, and the best they can do is return soulless crap that most of us spot in seconds.

No one likes it.

Blandfill

Like the music industry, real estate has built a gargantuan library of material. Ours was not crafted by the most gifted writers, marketers, and designers of the age. It’s a library filled with reproductions. Fifty-plus years of inbred, recycled copy, photographic styles, and design.

Consider the 8 million postcards a year announcing new and sold listings with the same headlines, copy and design. Every balcony exists for sipping morning coffee, an activity almost no one does. Websites poured from the same mold. Luxury brands, the same palette and serif monogram.

Templates drive our creative spirit, not originality. 

Xeroxing one another has always been a strategy in real estate, which might explain why no one in real estate is talking about this. But outside, in the marketplace, they see it. We asked a sample of 1,000 consumers who bought or sold a home recently why they ignore agent marketing.

Top answer on the board: the industry all looks and sounds alike. The rampant use of AI is only making this worse.

A vice president at a large real estate company emailed me last week. He wrote:

“Feels like the whole industry caught a virus of sameness and can’t shake it.”

It feels like it because that’s exactly what it is. Think about it. AI receives tens of thousands of identical prompts a minute from real estate. Everyone is fishing in the same pond with the same bait, pulling up the same fish, cooking it the same way, and serving it on the same plate.

We ship it. AI eats it. Repeat.

Slop in, slop out.

Sameness is only half the problem. Brands are meant to be distinct. Marketing is meant to feel like it came from someone. AI works in the opposite direction. Its output is not yours. It is the collected voice of everything, averaged into something competent, familiar and soulless.

Use enough of it and you don’t build a brand. You build blandfill.

Love letters

A newsletter arrived in my inbox last weekend like the 4 train pulling into Union Square station to cart me off to grade school. Mechanical. Cold. (Fond memories.)

The machine fingerprint leapt from the first paragraph in that sickeningly familiar not this, not that, definitely not this, but this framing. It instantly screams AI wrote this. You feel the absence of the person supposedly speaking to you.

That’s the problem.

Marketing is supposed to be personal. It is one of the few places where a business speaks directly to other human beings. There should be intimacy in that exchange. Some sense that the people behind the brand are present. 

Instead, we’re advised to treat AI as our partner. It’s not. It’s a grunt. Tasking it to write your thought leadershit, headlines, listing descriptions, social posts is like asking your housekeeper to design your new home and then wondering why it looks like one giant cleaning closet.

We’re handing one of the most human parts of the business to the least human thing there is.

Imagine using the same voice for pillow talk. Not here. Not there. Definitely not there. But here. That would be insane. 

Or letting AI write your kid’s birthday card.
Son,

Turning nine is not about cake. It is not about how many candles you blow out. It is definitely not about presents. It is about growth, a milestone in the ongoing journey of becoming who you were always meant to be. You are not simply my son. You are not simply a kid who loves dinosaurs and knows every one by name. You are a testament to what happens when curiosity meets heart.

Love, Mom

No one uses AI to help them talk to the people they love. Your audience deserves the same consideration. Marketing is you asking something of them. Ask cold, and you tell them exactly what they’re worth to you.

Love letters. That’s what marketing is supposed to be. Especially now, when everyone around you is shipping heartless machine-rendered copy and design. 

Unmistakable

Give “the grunt” the work no one will pay attention to.

Format this flyer. Draft some boilerplate. Check the grammar. Condense this data into something readable. Do some research. Don’t make shit up. 

The work that matters, write yourself. 

Mannequins look human, but they are dead behind the eyes. That’s AI output. Don’t be that. Be unmistakable.

Ship AI crap, you’re no different from the rest of the mannequins doing the same thing in real estate. Keep doing that, and the only thing the market will have left to compare you to is your fee.

The post Blandfill appeared first on 1000WATT.

Sure, people who sell, buy, and own homes have preferences that shift over time. We follow that closely here at 1000WATT. But it’s wrong to assume that these folks are shot-callers. As I have pointed out for ages, people’s involvement with the real estate process is far too broadly episodic to build into transformative change, which is usually brought about by persistent pain or annoyance. 

I’m thinking about this because I’ve heard some claim that The Consumer won’t tolerate a degraded home search experience — one pulled apart, like a piece of string cheese, by a short-sighted industry.

The Consumer will tolerate plenty. We tolerated the dramatic decline in the air travel experience. We tolerate shrinkflation. We tolerate $20 glasses of wine, the Ticketmaster/Live Nation monopoly, and furniture that falls apart in five years. Believe me, we’ll tolerate a home search experience that’s been made worse in ways we largely can’t see or compare relative to recent experience.

The “Enshittification” of home search is upon us. In time, the regulators may do something about it, but consumers? Sadly, they’ll suck it up.

…

Relatedly, one of my favorite reads these days is Worse on Purpose, which explores how the process of Enshittification is playing out with everything from mattresses to pet care. I look forward to the piece titled “How buying a home got worse on purpose.”

…

Every year at our Signal event, we “launch” a fake company onstage. It’s a deliberately provocative thought exercise, and a chance to show people how our creative team brings ideas to life. Last month we (Heather Harmon, who has been my collaborator on each of these exercises, and Amit Kulkarni, who joined us this year) unveiled POOL, a “National Home Exchange.” 

We walked through the business model, and a website, onstage.

We tackled this because it’s clearly time for a new grand compromise on when listings are contributed to a shared database, and how, when, and under what terms they are pulled from it for public display or use in derivative products.

POOL is based on three premises:

1. Everything flows from the act of winning a listing. Nothing else happens without that. This is not a chicken-or-egg scenario. Listing agents and brokers have a primacy that should be reflected in the business model. Therefore, as we say on the website, “Add data to POOL, get paid. Take data from POOL, pay.”
   
2. A listing must be placed in POOL within 72 hours of signing a listing agreement. This is the flip side of the give-take principle above. You don’t get to benefit from a shared resource while simultaneously degrading or free-riding on it. That’s three days to go wild promoting the property outside the POOL. Enough. Coming Soon is a status in POOL.
   
3. Full public display of listings should be maintained. But if you’re monetizing listings instead of selling homes, you will pay into POOL. To quote the website again, “POOL makes it easy to put listings in the light of day — without listing brokers and agents getting burned.” 

Now, obviously, some companies would be unhappy with parts of this set-up. But that’s what a compromise is. Compass would not like mandatory 72-hour submission, but they’d still get to maintain 3-Phase Marketing. They’d also get significant royalties. Zillow and other portals would not like paying for listings, but they’d gain a single feed under one set of rules (and save millions on data normalization, MLS relations, and litigation).

A POOL-like compromise avoids some of the more self-destructive options on the table. Redefining paper brokers out of the MLS is an express bus to antitrust hell. Turfing public listings display won’t bring about a consumer revolt, but will ultimately provoke regulators. Continuing on as we are is only good for lawyers and reporters.

I’ve been made aware of several POOL-ish concepts brewing. And a few MLSs have unveiled broker royalty plans. May the best idea win. Because we most definitely need a new one.

Because I don’t think I can endure the Enshittification of real estate.

Enjoy the weekend. 

The post Friday Flash: The ‘Enshittification’ of home buying appeared first on 1000WATT.

People assign meaning to everything, naturally and constantly. So the smartest thing a brand can do is architect its own meaning and communicate it, until people take that meaning as their own. That is where real emotional value lives and creates a strong attraction to the brand. 

Offer them none, and they will build their own version. It is usually not the one you wanted.

For years, through projects, I have asked Realtors, brokers, and agents what they mean in the world. After a long silence, I get a loose description of their function. Meaning appears to be so elusive. If the people inside this business cannot land on what they mean, how do we expect the public to land on it?

When the public isn’t provided meaning, they create it for themselves. In that quest to find meaning, consider what the public is being served by the industry to form meaning. Sweeping legal verdicts. Lawsuits over how homes get marketed. Broadcasting our private bits of crazy on social media because someone called it personal branding.

The public observes. They formulate their own sense of what it all means. It is not favorable.

What are we even doing?

I’ve been watching this industry argue itself into making listings private, pulling days on market, hiding the very things the customer needs to make decisions. It reminds me of an old episode of Tales from the Crypt titled “Cutting Cards.” Two gamblers, rivals, keep raising the stakes against each other. Money, then fingers, then limbs. Neither will walk away. The last scene shows them in a hospital, out of arms and legs, playing checkers by pushing the pieces with their noses. Still competing. Still sure they are about to win.

This feels like us, so fixated on beating each other that we are gambling away the things that made anyone want us in the first place. Hide the price, hide the address, block the photos, then sell the hiding back to ourselves as a consumer-first strategy and call it a win.

What are we even doing? We appear so lost. Taking things from the people we serve and calling it an advantage. No one believes this. 

We have forgotten our own meaning. I no longer recognize the industry I joined and don’t understand what some of our leaders are doing. I cannot wrap my head around why so many brokers keep caving to the worst ideas in the room. I am bewildered by what agents do to brand themselves. 

Nothing we do expresses what this industry means to the people we are built for. Without meaning, we follow anyone who sounds certain, and as a result, we have handed the wheel to the loudest players in the room. Not the smartest. Or the ones most committed to meaning. 

The Kitchen Table

Picture two people at their kitchen table. They have lived in their home for 18 years. This room held 6,000 breakfasts. It heard every problem in the world discussed and, most of the time, solved.

For these two people, this home is the safest place they know. Today, over breakfast, they decided to let it go.

Close your eyes for 60 seconds and put yourself at that table. Listen to how they talk about what comes next. Feel what they feel. The nerves. The fear. The confusion. And under all of it, the hope.

Understand what you are to them, beyond your role: 

You are the strongest line of defense standing between this family and financial ruin, on the largest transaction of their lives. You are how the safest place they ever knew passes into the right hands, at the right price, with no one harmed.

That is the meaning that has become too elusive. 

This is what this industry means to me. It is what I believed the day I entered it. It is what I will fight for in every stitch of work I have left in me.

Hold onto it. Act as you believe it. Start living it. Please. Do it for the two people at the table. Do it to be worth sitting across from them.

The post What are we even doing appeared first on 1000WATT.

The lines are never as clear as we think they are. Humans who buy things are knots of complexity and paradox. Young people desire cigarettes precisely because they seem adult; millions of us tune out the disclosure of side effects when captivated by the promise of a pill; we know that past performance does not guarantee future results, but our act of buying in belies the knowing.

The space between caveat emptor and malintent is something to be argued about — in the court of public opinion, or in a court of law, among legislators, or among regulators. 

You will be unsurprised to find that this brings me to the question of how real estate agents are currently presenting the idea of listing privately to home sellers. 

This isn’t a hard question to answer. You just have to ask.

We asked 1,000 homeowners who had sold a home with an agent in the previous six months whether that agent mentioned listing privately and, if they did, how they presented it. We screened out real estate agents, investors, loan officers, and anyone involved in the residential real estate industry.

Their answers shocked me. You probably know that I believe Compass’ pursuit of private listings at scale as a central part of its business strategy is both wrong and dumb, so call me fragile. But even if you are totally jazzed about putting thousands of homes inside a black box, you should probably be a tad concerned about what these recent sellers told us.

First, this:

Then we asked the 60% that responded “Yes” a follow-up:

All right then. Compass, the largest real estate brokerage ever to exist, has led a movement that seems to be hitting living rooms, big time. Their downward and outward pressure to pitch private listings is being felt by American homeowners. 

While many earnest champions of “full disclosure” and “seller choice” can proclaim confidently from outside those living rooms, we now have a peek at what’s actually going on inside them.

Ask yourself: Does this feel good? Does it feel smart? Does it feel like maybe we’re playing with fire?

We don’t have a survey from before Compass started its private exclusives crusade, but let’s assume we’re all reasonably intelligent people here, OK? And please don’t come at me with the “private listings were always a thing” argument, or the “It’s not just Compass” jab. Comparing this epic flex of scale and power to the effects of yesterday’s here-and-there private listings, or smaller companies’ efforts to mimic the Compass strategy, is either an error of reasoning, a paycheck-conditioned contortion, or a fatuous game of rhetorical self-pleasure.    

But whatever, that’s just my opinion. And it’s not my opinion, or that of anyone else inside our industry bubble, that you should worry about. It is the opinion of those outside our industry, the ones with real power, that look at the blurry line we’re dancing upon and see an argument they can win. Maybe that’s a plaintiff’s attorney, a crusading journalist, a 2028 presidential candidate, a Justice Department with different inclinations … we don’t know.

The risk, however, seems clear.

Enjoy your weekend. 

The post Friday Flash: Dancing on the line appeared first on 1000WATT.

You vetted several agents. You chose the one who showed you they were prepared to help you achieve your goal. You trust this person.

Because you’re going down rabbit holes a lot these days, you come upon a fight going on inside the real estate industry about home listings.

One side in this fight says Zillow, which you’ve been glued to for months, is a bully that unfairly uses homes listed by real estate agents to make money from real estate agents.

You don’t care about this. It’s not your problem. You just want to buy a house.

The other side in this fight compares marketing homes to marketing designer handbags, Ferraris, or other luxury goods. This side says it’s OK if you have to look in a bunch of different places to find homes because you seem to be good with subscribing to several different streaming services in order to entertain yourself.  

This side also talks a lot about “seller choice.” But from where you sit, it looks like sellers are doing just fine.

The company leading this side of the fight, Compass, is big in your market. You visit their website and see that they’re teasing a bunch of “Private Exclusive” homes that you can “unlock.” You click the button that says “See Private Exclusives,” only to be taken to a page that directs you to connect with one of their agents. But you have an agent. You see now that it says, “Listings are only private online. All buyers & agents can access in our offices or by contacting Compass.”

Because neither you, your partner, nor your agent is stupid, you get the message.

This, you feel, is your problem. There are homes beyond your reach. Not handbags. Not Ferraris. Homes — one of those places where maybe someday you can sit at the kitchen table in your underwear, eating a bowl of cereal with your kid, and feel for just a little while like you’re in control of your life, where you can be you.

This makes you mad.

In a world aflame with conflict, where so much seems to slip beyond your grasp, someone is now messing with homes. Ugh.

You think: F these people.

…

This could be a moral argument, but I understand that moral arguments are just for softies like me. So let’s be practical and think about it this way: If you’re Compass, what does “winning” really look like? 

It may look like sustained profitability. It may also look like a lot of bad will from buyers who find it disgusting that the words “private” and “exclusive” are anywhere near something like homes for sale (practical tip to the otherwise brilliant folks at Compass corporate: At least rebrand the damn thing). This blowback is the calculated risk. The risk gets bigger as Compass gets bigger.

This industry eats bad PR for breakfast. Maybe it’s nothing. But maybe, through a confluence of forces well beyond the bounds of our increasingly tone-deaf industry debate, this blows back on Compass, and also, I fear, others drawn down this path at a lesser scale with less intensity.

To be clear:

Brokers should have greater control of their data.

Intra-brokerage double ending is not intrinsically bad. (Our research shows consumers understand what this is and have no problem with it either.)

We are working with brokerage companies right now to recapture profits and brand power. Honestly, there are ways to do this without the risk of provoking consumer backlash.

It’s healthy that Zillow, dominant for a decade, is feeling heat.

It’s also healthy that the MLS system, insulated from competition for too long, is being dragged into the ring.

But there is a line beyond which the pursuit of a goal takes you into counter-productive territory. It is easier to see that line when you imagine yourself in the shoes of the people who aren’t actively engaged in this fight, but may soon be moved to respond to it. 

The post Friday Flash: In their shoes appeared first on 1000WATT.

You have a brand and positioning problem. 

A short detour through Cadillac

For generations, Cadillac did not sell cars. It sold size, heritage, and status. When people reached a certain status in life, they walked into the showroom and bought one. 

That is a brand at work.  

Cadillac became a synonym for best in class. “Bought a new Zenith console radio. It is the Cadillac of console radios.”

By the mid-‘80s, the luxury buyer had changed. German and Japanese imports rolled in. Gas prices climbed. Consumption trended out. Advanced car tech trended in. Luxury came to mean restrained European sleekness, not a boat on wheels.

Cadillac kept selling from a dated script. 

A decade later, people had stopped paying attention. Buyers no longer saw themselves in the brand. By the early 90s, the showrooms looked like museums. Sales fell. No amount of ad spending could stop it.

The brand had one choice left. It had to change the entire perception of what a Cadillac was.

What was required was more than a big idea. The brand needed to disrupt the old perception entirely and reframe itself in a way no one would have expected.

Whoever came up with the Escalade was not a risk-taking genius. They had read the marketplace and made a calculated move. The model did not fit the lineage. That was the point. It still carried Cadillac’s DNA. Size and quality. It was modern. It was relevant. It epitomized what people wanted in a car the way Cadillac had in its prime.

The Escalade was more than a new model added to the line. It was the new story of the repositioned brand. It saved Cadillac. 

If your recruiting system isn’t working, your brokerage needs its Escalade and it needs to reposition the brand around it. .

Perception is the product

If agents believe your brokerage is old and stodgy, and that is not who you are, you do not have a recruiting problem. You have a brand and positioning problem.

If agents believe your brokerage is not innovative, and a glance under the hood proves otherwise, you do not have a recruiting problem. You have a brand and positioning problem.

If agents believe your brokerage has no vision for the future, and you absolutely do, you do not have a recruiting problem. You have a brand and positioning problem.

If agents believe your brokerage cannot compete at the high end, and you list properties in the multi-millions, you do not have a recruiting problem. You have a brand and positioning problem.

A campaign alone cannot fix this. Deep down, you know it is true. Campaigns can sell what you have. They cannot close the gap between perception and reality. A campaign to convince agents you are not what they believe you are is the most expensive argument you will ever make.

It is a bad investment.

A position the market cannot see is not a position

Take a position.

If you are pro-consumer, that has to be the loudest thing about you. If you are pro-agent, that has to be the cornerstone of your brand. If you are built to take a new agent from zero to a million, that journey has to be the story your brand puts on display, not a home search.

If your stand is not strong enough, you need to create your Escalade.

If your position is something the marketplace doesn’t recognize, then it’s a private opinion, not a “best kept secret.” You need to make it public. Assemble the story, produce it, put it on display.

Do this, and the right agents will take notice. They will call you. This will reduce the time you spend trying to take their agents, and they will find it much harder to grab yours. With a stronger position and a clearer brand, you will stop matching offers and giving away the ship to agents who will leave the moment a competitor waves a bigger number.

Repositioning will buy you leverage. It will create something the other side wants.

This is the only recruiting strategy I know that will work.

The post The only recruiting strategy that will ever work appeared first on 1000WATT.

From Zillow’s POV, Compass is now laundering banned listings through friendly MLSs willing to pinch Zillow in the feeds.

From Compass’ POV, Zillow is trying to squash hidden listings by… making sure they remain hidden.

Seller’s rights, buyer access, fair housing, grandma getting ripped off, and bright-eyed young buyers getting leveraged. 

A hall of rhetorical mirrors. I’m nauseous.

A lot of people keep asking, “What about The Consumer?” The question is swallowed in a smoke of half-serious answers advanced by people paid to make them. It seems pretty straightforward to me. Leveraging or monetizing listings has led us astray and will likely damn the industry in the end. We need to find our way back to selling homes.  

But the important question no one is asking, let alone answering, is “What about The Agent?” Really, while two multibillion-dollar companies duke it out in an increasingly stupid fight, the average agent just wants to sell a home or two this month so they can pay their own damn mortgage.

Contrary to what news coverage and social postings may lead you to believe, the vast majority of working agents couldn’t give a rip whether Zillow or Compass prevails. For every 100 Zillow haters spinning out in a Facebook group, there are 100,000 agents who go through their day thinking nothing at all about Zillow. For every 100 Compass agents cheerleading Robert Reffkin’s every Instagram and LinkedIn post, there are 1,000 Compass agents who don’t use private exclusives, don’t care about this fight, and just want their livelihoods not to get messed with.

The sad thing is that this silent majority of agents does stand to get hurt if the fight keeps escalating.

The MLS is the one constant in a working agent’s life, the thing that’s always there, complete and clear. While many brokers have legitimate gripes with our unnaturally siloed system, which costs them unnecessarily, almost every agent I know has no beef with their MLS. It’s the air they breathe.

So, yeah, let’s consolidate. It’s time. Let’s replace IDX. It’s time. Let’s professionalize MLS BODs. It’s time.

But let’s not mess with agents. Let’s not use their MLS as an instrument of corporate power plays. Let’s not jerk them around by suggesting they join an MLS half a continent away. Let’s not confuse them with new policies that shift for reasons to which they are indifferent.

So many in this industry like to pay homage to “The Agent” and “The Consumer.”

Let’s start acting like we mean it. 

Peace.

The post Friday Flash: What about the agent? appeared first on 1000WATT.

Take these for what they are. Musings pulled from white noise. 

…

“Pre-market” and “off-market” exist only because “on-market” exists.

Compromise the latter too much, and the former becomes a trap you have to pay your way out of. Consider Australia.  

The trick is to push the existing system right up to the breaking point, no further. 

…

If I had large amounts of money and power, I would not start a national MLS outward from an existing player, or inward from several existing players. I’d use cash and compromise to present brokers with good reason to do something entirely new.

MRED is a fine MLS managed by capable people. But it runs primarily on a software called Dynaconnections, which is, I dunno… maybe not the sleekest interface for new users to grapple with, and (guessing here) probably not exactly “AI ready”.

And of course, politics. Getting other agents and brokers to jump into a Chicago thing, or other MLS execs to consider partnering with an MRED thing, will be tough.

Realtracs is somewhat more interesting, inasmuch as they’ve always built their own software, and have re-jiggered their corporate structure to be, shall we say, less MLS-y.

There will be more MLSs “going national” soon. 

Will they all get drawn up, like a net filled with fish, into a mother ship? Who’s pulling the strings? 

…

We need a new industry Grand Compromise. One in which both Compass and Zillow (neither of which are 1000WATT clients, by the way) give something to get a workable go-forward path. 

Zillow must concede that Compass has accumulated enough mass to dictate certain changes. Compass must concede that Zillow is now zapping enough of its private exclusives to create a chilling effect among its agents, and holds the ultimate lever – an undeniable consumer audience – that it has demonstrated a willingness to use in this fight (see Zillow Preview). 

…

RE/MAX / Real makes sense to me, and maybe needed to happen, but feels daring nonetheless. 

RE/MAX gets a good tech story. Real gets differentiation from EXP, and the newcomer snapping at its heels, LPT. It also gets the mass needed to survive if the MLS gets completely unwound. 

If the Real tech is successfully woven into the RE/MAX franchise offering, it could offer sustained profitability as well. Of course, there are those who think real estate franchising is a dying model at all but the high end. But why couldn’t you offer (license?) the RE/MAX brand to teams “brokered by” Real that value instant recognizability? Or push some of the Real’s recruiting model into RE/MAX shops looking for a new hook? 

There are lots of interesting possibilities here. But these are very different companies with very different cultures and agent profiles. I know smart people at both of them, and I’m rooting that they make it go. 

… 

So the brokerage/franchise deal-making tracks. But I also feel like there’s nervous prey vibes around all of it. Zebras getting close on the savannah to up their odds against an unseen predator lurking in the bush.

Maybe it’s a phantom. Maybe, if we someday get out of this market trough, and “boomsday”, as LPT CEO Robert Palmer calls it, finally comes, we’ll have fewer but more profitable companies and fewer but more productive agents.

I hope. 

…
The MLS has been a great marketing leveller.

To simplify:

You get a listing, create good media assets, and put it in the MLS. You may have to check a few boxes (a little social posting, a “just listed” card to the neighbors), but you’re effectively done. The listing is everywhere, immediately.

In the listing world toward which we seem headed, marketing becomes more important. A differentiator. No more set-it-and-forget-it.

…

Our Signal event is coming up in a month. I am especially excited about this one because of the change happening right now. The turmoil and fighting is going to upset some things, but I sincerely believe that this is a time filled with opportunity. We’re going to do our best to point people towards it.

We are close to selling out. If you want to join me, grab a ticket.

The post Friday Flash: Nervous excitement appeared first on 1000WATT.