Friday Flash: A door opens

There’s lots of chatter on the street about the next move for zipLogix – the forms and transaction management business owned by NAR and CAR – now that Dotloop has been sold to Zillow.

A door has been opened. Dotloop is an outstanding product, but has now been marked with a “Z”, Zorro-style, and the FUD is flying. Plus, the industry needs to stop being sloppy with deals in light of TRID and we all kind of knew that, sooner or later, TM just had to become a serious thing.

Will zipLogix raise outside money? Will DocuSign be involved directly? Will the team be able to raise the bar on product quality and usability?

Lots of questions. The bottom line: It’s game-on in the race to nail the digital transaction experience once and for all.

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Giveback Homes, a “real estate social good platform”, helps people who sell homes build homes for people who need them. 1000WATT has gotten to know the GBH team and they are righteous people.

This week they announced a broker program that makes it easy for brokerage companies to get involved. The Agency in LA is leading the way.

Check ‘em out.

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Realtor.com launched a new “Express” home search app. I kind of like it.

It’s interesting to think about what the strategy is here, though. Is this just a PR play? A test? A “we need to move faster than our old code base permits” kind of move?

I dunno. But at least Move is moving again.

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Going to NAR in San Diego next month? Care about data? (Hint: you should.) Consider going to this data science meetup.

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I was in Pittsburgh at the Howard Hanna annual convention this week. They’re a client and I was there to support them.

Two things:

1.   In the West Coast mind, Pittsburgh is a sooty, polluted “rust belt” city. How wrong. This is a beautiful town. It has emerged from the hard years while retaining a sort of dark, almost gothic, vibe that’s pretty cool. It’s a real city, like Cleveland.

2.   The culture at Howard Hanna is something to behold. The agents love their company. They sell real estate to the Big Middle of America inside the coasts and outside the celebrity Realtor/tech-obsessed bubble in which a lot of us (including me) spend so much time. I’m flying home reminded of what I already know, but sometimes forget: culture and leadership rule.

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OK, look: I know the debate between native and web on mobile is complicated. Right now, native is where it’s at. The apps you download are faster, snappier and more directly hooked into your phone’s capabilities (camera, GPS, notifications, etc.) than any mobile web experience. I get it.

But I can’t help thinking back to 2005, when I had debates with my lead developer at the company I was running about building “web or Win32” software. The native path won out, but it was only another couple years before Google Docs hit big time. Today, I hardly know what to do with a Word document. It’s outside the system in which we all work today.

I bring this up because this week Google announced a new initiative to make mobile web pages a lot faster. I hope it moves us forward. Because if we can stop installing software on our phones like we used to install software on our Dell towers, things would be a lot easier for everyone – developers, publishers and users.

Anyway: keep your eye on the mobile web.

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In case you didn’t see our announcement last week: 1000WATT has partnered with Lion & Orb, a tech-savvy public relations firm led by real estate man-about-town Audie Chamberlain.

1000WATT is now able to help companies develop their story and bring it to people in creative ways through the media.

That’s it. Enjoy the weekend.