Friday Flash: Revenge of the nutjobs?

Move released a mobile version of its FIND application this week. FIND, you may recall, is an MLS add-on that allows agents to dive deep into on and off-market property information.
The big picture here:
Agents are WAY behind consumers when it comes to accessing property data on mobile devices. The lag isn’t because agents are laggards; the real estate business-to-business software vendors are.
Agents who should have had “The MLS at their fingertips” years ago are routinely embarrased by consumers equipped with MLS-based mobile apps like Redfin or Estately.
That finally seems to be changing. MLS system vendors like FBS are releasing high-quality apps for agents. RPR seems ready to release “Mobile RPR” Soon.
We’re getting there.
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Speaking of RPR…
When I get my RIS Media magazine every month, I go straight to the ads. I like to see who’s saying (and spending) what.
Every month there’s a full-page ad for RPR.
Why?
RPR is a free member benefit to NAR members. The NAR can, presumably, promote RPR through its own magazine, email blasts, website and conferences. Adoption, after 5 years and a gazillion dollars, should be through the roof.
But they’re advertising this thing through outside channels to try and goose usage?
It seems off.
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Buying and selling homes online without an agent is something almost no one thinks will ever happen – not even Spencer Rascoff.
But every now and then a brave and ambitious nutjob emerges to tell us it will.
This time it is Kathy Dryden, founder of Allre, a startup that presented this week at the Techcrunch Disrupt conference. The company has created software that, in their words, allows “buyers and sellers to complete an entire real estate transaction with no agents and no commissions.”
Their software covers pricing, offer presentation, transaction management – pretty much the whole enchilada.
It seems implausible to me. But maybe, just maybe – one of these times, if not this time – the nutjob will be right. Implausible sometimes becomes conventional quickly these days.
Keep your head up.
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I was interested in traffic, I’d write a blog post called “What Apple Watch and iPhone 6 mean for real estate”.
But the post would be lame. I really have no idea what the watch or new phone mean for real estate in any concrete sense.
My only thought is that this will accelerate a trend we’ve seen for a while: the end of real estate “search.” Soon, the property information we’re looking for will come to us on something like the Apple Watch just when we want it, without us “asking” through a search query. The enhanced notifications in iOS8 will make it unnecessary to even open many apps, ever.
And we will soon purchase homes using Apple Pay.
Kidding 😉
Enjoy the weekend.