Lessons Learned from Zillow & Nest

Jonathan, Keith, and Jim talk about Zillow, the sunsetting of Zillow’s Premier Agent Program, who owns the “Voice of Real Estate” title.

- Zillow and Customer Satisfaction Scores

- Vetting leads

- The value of a high quality agent

- What if waiters and waitresses paid for their shifts?

- Are consumers qualified to rate agent competence?

- Zillow Group hit with second class action lawsuit over Premier Agent

- Zillow’s evolution from media company to owning the transaction

- The value and efficiency of fewer, better agents

- Where is NAR in this conversation?

- Zillow is now the voice of real estate

- What is the NAR’s product?

- Uber and discrimination

- Will agents be forced to be on Zillow?

- Building a local brand in the age of Zillow’s dominance

- Zillow learning from Nest

We just had our Nest summit, where we brought brokers and agents from our 14 offices to Charlottesville. We were going to send this out to just our 300 or so agents, but thought you might like it too. Jonathan, Keith and Jim talked about 5 big topics: Zillow’s “moon mission,” iBuyers (Opendoor, Knock, OfferPad, Redfin, Zillow Offers), the end to end real estate transaction, Fair Housing in light of the Newsday investigation, the new Clear Cooperation MLS 8.0 policy, smart phones and technology, and a few tangential topics woven in.

Greg Fischer, Chief Technology Office at West + Main in Colorado, joined us and we had a great discussion ranging from tech to relationships, the role of the realtor, and community, and he gave one our favorite “what detail do you sweat” answers we’ve had so far.

- The role of technology in real estate in 2020

- Community and relationship marketing and tech

- Overrated and underrated tech

- What tech we’d like to see in real estate

- Collecting and sharing data to benefit Realtors, clients, and the consumers

- That time when we had access to lockbox data

- Grubhub’s use of data

- Indie brokerages and big box brokerages

- Building and facilitating culture

- Showing up

- Being selective in who you hire, and having standards

- Indie brokerages in the next five years; the need for access to capital

- Touched on Curbio

- How do you come up with new ideas?

- What detail do you sweat?

Jonathan, Keith, and Jim with Nest Realty covered several topics this time:

- NAR’s Clear Cooperation policy (MLS 8.0)

Arguments against the policy

Building platforms with exclusive listings

Bright’s $5K fine

- Living in a HOA

What if I want to paint my house pink?

Be nice.

Less civility?

HOAs are tiny governments

License to be less

- Chicken sandwiches

Popeye’s chicken sandwiches

1,000 chicken sandwiches a day

$65 million marketing win

Popeye’s Bring Your Own Bun

Is there a similar thing in real estate?

Was/is lead gen the silver bullet?

Back to the Basics still works

We’d love to hear your feedback or answer questions. Take a voice memo and send to us at [email protected]

Nest's Jonathan Kauffmann, Keith Davis and Jim Duncan sit down with New Dominion Bookshop's Julia Kudravetz and talk about the similarities between real estate brokerages and independent booksellers in the age of Amazon. New Dominion is the oldest independent bookseller in Virginia and located in downtown Charlottesville, Va.

- Julia's story about how she came to buy New Dominion Bookshop

- How and why she spearheads so many community events

- Transitioning a long-existing brand to a new era

- Ryan Raffaelli's Harvard Business School's study, How Independent Bookstores Have Thrived in Spite of Amazon.com Community, Curating, Convening

- How her client base and demographics have shifted

- Balancing being in different communities

- Amazon. The elephant in the room and undercutting prices: Showrooming…The value of humanity, personal experience and recommendations…"Does Amazon do real estate?"… Rework's podcast

- Value of having an amazing retail storefront and how that affects and impacts her business

This time, Jonathan, Keith and I with Nest Realty were joined by Dr. Jessica Lautz from the National Association of Realtors for a wide-ranging conversation, from student debt, birth rates, limited inventory, changing demographics, millennials’ dependence on Realtors, and a lot more.

If you like our podcast, please share it with a friend or colleague, and rate us wherever you listen to podcasts.

Link to NAR’s Research and Statistics Division: https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics

Jessica Lautz

[email protected]

Topics we covered:

- Changing Factors in Buying a Home

- Why we don’t have enough homes

- How views on ownership value is changing

- Interest Rates

Sticky or Magnetic : Interstate movement

- Pets

- Economics in home buyer decisions

- Understanding Demographics as a Realtor

- Media and the Market

- Untapped Value of NAR to the Realtor

- Never-ending question of Student Debt

Every good thing comes to an end, and the U.S. Economy is in the longest sustained growth period in our history, but there are signs of slowing. This expansion has been driven over the last year by the effects of the 2018 tax reform and ongoing Federal Reserve involvement. We cover a whole host of areas regarding the U.S. economy.

- Discussion of the economic cycle

- Regionality of the expansion and the slowdown. There is no national norm right now.

- The important numbers to keep your eyes on, and how the trade war impacts jobs and inflation.

- Unemployment rates and job creation numbers.

- Employment productivity in new construction and modular homes

- Labor shortages, layoffs, and the future of construction jobs

- Zoning change to drive housing policy

From pre-med to making amazing beer, Scott Roth, President and COO of Three Notch’d Brewery in Charlottesville, Virginia talks about his journey from Lehigh University to Charlottesville, finding the right partners, scaling a growing business, and inflection points. We were intrigued and maybe a bit surprised by how similar a growing craft brewery is to a growing real estate firm.

- Staying on top of and ahead of consumer expectations

- Nuances and competitive advantages of brewing and distribution

- Value of hiring the right talent and team

- 6 years from 3 to 10 to 160 employees

- Building and sharing culture with locations that are “islands” away from the home location

- Keeping things local.

- Three Notch’d are the fifth, soon to be fourth, independent craft brewery

- Looking for inspiration from Bell’s, Deschutes, Sierra Nevada

- Goal is to own their backyard (Virginia)

- How does Three Notch’d see their industry evolving in the next 5-10 years? The parallels to real estate are remarkable.

- The inflection point

What do an internationally-known wedding photographer and Nest Realty have in common? It turns out, quite a bit. Join us for a fascinating conversation with Eric Kelley, who has shot 650 weddings since 2004, and travels "all over the world, from Budapest to Ireland."

Photographers who inspired Kelley:

Jen Fariello

Holland Photo Arts

Jack Looney

Jose Villa

The value of wedding planners

Scaling Up book

Referral.Network

- Eric's four criteria for accepting a job

- Date, location, scope of the job, other vendors on the job

- Independence, confidence, and fear

- Sharing availability

Engage Summit, the Wedding Business Summit

- The focus on the client experience, the process of sitting down with the client, setting expectations and the approach.

- Who is your ideal client? Bridging the gap between people.

- Legacy clients

- Planning for the future

- Pre-empting questions, and the value of having a team in place.