With our sensors on full, we’ve scanned the real estate metaverse online to find some of the latest links to research, industry thinkers and opinion that can help you chart a course to success in 2010.

Traditional housing reports lack useful data for the modern real estate consumer. What Gen X and Gen Y need to know in the future goes far beyond the traditional CMA.

Some questions Matthew Ferrara thinks REALTORS should be asking of FHA – before it’s too late.

According to a new survey by NAR, by a factor of 4, most buyers think open houses are far more useless than they were just a year ago.

Hindsight is always 20/20, they say. Unless, of course, you spend most of your time navel gazing. So it’s almost myopic to point out that some ideas’ time has come. And other ideas’ time has passed. On one hand, it’s time for every sale to include in-house ancillary sales. On the other hand, [...]

Download a copy of the latest survey of REALTORS by the Center for REALTOR Technology and you’re certain to be fascinated – startled, perhaps – at what’s happening on the Bat-belts of modern agents trying to make buying and selling homes a twenty-first century experience. While the report is no page-turner – in [...]

Real estate is essentially a research industry: trouble is, most agents and brokers think the most important research is about houses, prices, square footage and such. Considering the data that sits in most MLS systems – unverified and incomplete – you’d think they would know better by now. In fact, the best research [...]

Yesterday found me on the 15th floor of the New York Times building in Manhattan, part of a trio of industry thinkers including Mike Staver and Steve Harney. Joining us for three hours of  ”ask anything” discussion were some of the city’s finest brokers and managers. The host, Leading Real Estate Companies of the World, [...]

In one of the cruel ironies of the housing market today, the total number of units sold this year isn’t that far from historically normal volume. According to the National Association of REALTORS, the seasonally adjusted annual rate for sales in May is around 4.77 million – generally trending the pre-bubble long-term volume  for a [...]

Everyone knows about the 90/10 rule: 90% of the business is done by about 10% of REALTORS. Translated to a consumer experience, this means that most buyers and sellers have about a 1-in-10 chance of getting the “best performing” agent to sell their home or represent them in a purchase. Even a generous assessment of [...]

For the past few years, one trend in the real estate industry has increasingly worried me. Without hesitation, most REALTORS in our workshops can tell us all about their local market: the number of homes available, listed and sold this month, the average days on market, even the top agents by inventory or revenue. They [...]

As part of a new ongoing series of posts on our blog, we’re going to apply our brainpower here at Matthew Ferrara & Company to looking at the latest numbers from real estate industry research and helping our readers make sense out of their meaning. Many organizations from NAR to Case-Schiller to research firms and [...]

Recently, some readers of my blog have commented that I continue to take the mickey out of the REALTOR industry for its marketing use of postcards. No mention that I’ve offered alternatives to the postcard marketing option for twenty years. Oh, let’s see. EMail. Blogs. Websites. Phone calls.
Maybe it’s just time for a collective postcard [...]

Amongst the growing list of reasons some REALTOR firms are losing market share today, there’s no lack of ‘blaming the consumer’ causes. Brokers and agents who repeatedly target the “market” or the “economy” as the culprits are just substituting politically-correct keywords for “the consumer” as the problem. Buyers won’t come off the sidelines. Sellers are [...]

Well, I don’t know what took so long, but Microsoft finally seems to have read its emails, listened to its voice mail and talked to its customers. According to a headline over at Engadget, Microsoft is going to support Windows XP until 2013. It’s about time!
Customers worldwide are breathing a sigh of relief as the [...]