The real estate trade press was abuzz last week with the launch of @C21 Home Matters, the new blog from the gold-jacketed stalwarts of the traditional real estate industry, Century 21. Given that real estate blogging has been around for 6+ years at this point, I am not sure that launching a blog this far [...]

We have recently been recruiting for additional real estate agents at findwell. Our agents are hired as employees who are paid salary and benefits, so we have to be selective when adding new employees because we are making a long-term commitment to them as an employer. It shocks me how poor the job seeking skills [...]

As part of their 3rd quarter earnings report on Tuesday, national online brokerage ZipRealty announced that they will transition all of their agents from being employees to independent contractors. This is big news for one of the brokerages who pioneered an alternative compensation model for real estate agents, removing the salary and benefits that used [...]

Are you a real estate agent in the Seattle area? If so, there is a great one-day event happening Wednesday, August 18 at the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue. I actually attended this same event in San Francisco and found the social media and marketing presentations super informative and helpful. It is also a great opportunity [...]

It will come as no surprise that the number of realtors has declined fairly dramatically during the economic and housing downturn, but the exodus from our industry is a long way from over to return us to a more realistic number of agents practicing real estate in the US. Just for fun I decided to [...]

The title of this post is sure to spark some controversy or even animosity from fellow real estate brokerages. I believe that there is a fundamental flaw in the real estate industry regarding agent and brokerage compensation. What is the goal of every real estate agent? Agents want to sell as many homes as possible [...]

The data about home listings that you see on most real estate websites comes from organizations called Multiple Listing Services (MLS). Each geographic area is served by one or more MLS, and all of the local real estate agents become members of the MLS so that they can share data about the homes that they [...]

In the last week, a major controversy has erupted between real estate agents and the National Association of Realtors. The Indianapolis Board of REALTORS has blocked one of the agents from allowing their IDX listing feed from being indexed by Google. You can read more about it on this post from Agent Genius. What is [...]

We constantly get a lot of grief from other real estate agents who criticize our commission structure. Since home prices remain relatively high in Seattle, we believe in charging lower real estate commissions than are currently charged here, yet offer the same level of service that you can get from another full-service agent. The other [...]

Does it make a difference if your real estate agent is paid a salary or a commission? Will you get a better deal or better service one way or the other? This is a highly contentious question, and I’m sure that other agents will have strong opinions on it. First, a disclaimer. Our company believes [...]