Closingtimepodcast.com for the latest news from the real estate world, helpful tips for buyers, sellers and other agents, and all of our previous podcast episodes. Keep up with us on Facebook and Instagram. We also offer home video tours, Realtor branding videos, ariel shots, live streams and more.. closingtimepodcast.com and click on the CMG Real Estate Link..

Over the past year, the decidedly analog business of buying and selling real estate has been upended by a flurry of new money and start-ups trying to usher in a world where homes are bought and sold online. Now, Amazon is creating a partnership that goes in the opposite direction by using its gigantic retail platform to facilitate phone calls with human real estate agents.

On Tuesday, Amazon said that it was working with Realogy, the nation’s largest residential real estate brokerage company and owner of Century 21, Coldwell Banker and other brands, to create TurnKey, a service that will help prospective home buyers find real estate agents. To entice customers, Amazon will give buyers up to $5,000 in home services and smart-home gear when they close.

Amazon is now as much a search engine as it is a store, and the deal fits into the company’s effort to capitalize on its status as an online destination by making money on advertising and other services. It’s also a way to encourage people to adopt products like Alexa speakers and Ring doorbells and to promote its list of handymen, furniture assemblers and other home services.

For Realogy, who will pay for those benefits, the partnership is a way of using Amazon to find home buyers and help its brokers separate the closers from the lookie-loos by rebating a portion of its commission, in the form of free Amazon stuff, to anyone who actually buys a house.

Keller Williams Realty President Josh Team said Thursday during an Inman Connect panel that his brokerage is investing $1 billion into technology before directing a jab at Compass CEO Robert Reffkin: “Not buying marketshare.”

During a discussion entitled “The Inman Interview: Can Your Technology Compete?” Reffkin touted purportedly unrivaled engineering talent and Compass’ vision of building a first-of-its-kind property search platform. Teamcountered that Keller Williams is already delivering top-shelf technology to its agents.

The two executives never directly disparaged each other’s firms. But they traded some thinly-veiled barbs.

“This isn’t hyperbole or vision,” Team said about Keller Williams’ tech platform, implying that Compass’ is just that. “This is real.”

Keller Williams’ suite of tools combined with its integration of an in-house lender is helping agents guide customers from the time their contact information arrives in a database to the moment they order an appraisal, he said.

NRT CEO Ryan Gorman compared Compass’ recruitment of agents and efforts to gain market share in competing marketplaces to “shoplifting,” at Inman Connect Las Vegas Thursday morning

NRT’s parent company Realogy is suing Compass over “unfair business practices and illegal schemes to gain market share at all costs.”

“We don’t sue for show,” Gorman told interviewer Clelia Peters, the president of Warburg Realty. “This is the real deal… the industry should take it seriously.”

Gorman encouraged everyone in the audience to read beyond the headlines and take a full look at the lawsuit. He said after reading it, people won’t wonder why Realogy is suing Compass, but rather why it took them so long to do so.

Half of the real estate economists and experts surveyed by Zillow this week believe that the next recession is coming in 2020, according to the second quarter Zillow Home Price Expectations Survey.

Of the 100 real estate experts surveyed, half said a recession was likely to come in 2020 with 19 percent specifically pinpointing the third quarter of 2020 — which lines up directly with the months leading up to the presidential election. Thirty-five percent of those surveyed said they believe a recession is likely in 2021, meaning 85 of 100 experts believe a recession is coming in the next two years.

Although experts say housing won’t cause of the recession, the potential slowdown will have an impact. More than half of those surveyed said they expect home buying demand in 2020 to be significantly lower than in 2019, while about a third of those surveyed said they expected it to be about the same.

The combination of slowing demand and an impending recession could be good news for potential buyers in the short-term and cause further slowdowns in overall U.S. home value appreciation going forward.

Home values are currently growing at a 6.1 percent annual pace, according to the survey, but growth has slowed in each of the past four months compared to the month prior. Panelists expect that trend to continue.

Panelists, on average, said they expect annual growth to be around 4.1 percent at the end of the year and slow further to 2.8 percent in 2020 and 2.5 percent in 2021.

The results of this year’s survey line up with a similar survey from May 2018, when more than half of the economists surveyed said they believed a recession was coming in 2020.

Last year, about nine agents with the Laurie Finkelstein Reader Real Estate Team in Florida sold 608 homes, meaning, on average, each agent closed more than 60 transactions in 2018.

Eric Beane, an agent on the Laurie Finkelstein Reader Real Estate Team, said the success of the team is all about culture, training and accountability. The comments came as part of the Teams Track on Wednesday afternoon at the Inman Connect Las Vegas conference.

“We’re all about the culture, and we’re all about not only growing the agent, but narrowing their focus and using systems and leverage to really make sure you’re producing at a high level,” Beane said. “People come and go, especially when you have high standards.”

The entire team meets at 8:30 a.m. every single day, Monday through Friday. That meeting is mandatory. The team has high standards too, with members needing to close at least three transactions per month. The agents have 90 days to get up to speed. One of the systems the team has in place is the use of the showing assistant model. Those assistants are usually newer agents on the team and are paid a fee of $30 per showing and a $300 bonus if the transaction closes.

Because the entire business is a team, each member gets a lot of attention from the two-person in-house marketing team and photographer. The marketing comes at no cost to the agents on the team.

Beane also provided advice to agents looking for the right team for their business.

“The biggest thing is, whether you’re on a team or a team leader, you want enough opportunity to grow as big as you want,” Beane said. “If your team leader is not providing that, you’re going to find somewhere else to go.”

He also shared some advice to those looking to build their own team.

“Keep it small and focus on quality over quantity,” Beane said.

A decade ago, real estate transactions were mostly local affairs. Despite the dot com bubble around the turn of the century, real estate was still hanging on to its analog procedures, and consumers were mostly okay with that, according to Spruce Holdings CEO Patrick Burns.

But in the years since, something changed.

“Consumers are demanding convenience,” Burns said Friday at Inman Connect Las Vegas. “They’re demanding transparency because the rest of their lives are like that.”

Burns explored how the real estate transaction is changing today during a panel talk titled “Closing process getting a major shake-up.” His company specializes in title and escrow services.

As frequently noted, consumers today have smooth, transparent experiences in every aspect of their lives — it’s easy to request a ride, order food, or buy a mattress with the tap of a button on an iPhone. So they’re expecting more from the real estate transaction process.

And increasingly, companies are trying to satisfy that desire. Redfin, for example, lets home shoppers request a home tour from their website. And a whole slew of iBuying companies will give sellers a quote almost instantly, then close on the property in a fraction of the time it takes for a conventional transaction.

These types of experiences have given consumers the expectation that every transaction in their lives should be similarly smooth and straightforward. As a result, Burns’ argument went, they want — or demand — that type of service when closing a real estate deal.

Orlando is home to Disney World, Universal Studios Florida, SeaWorld Orlando and a host of other popular tourist sites. In other words, it’s a major vacation destination.

But despite the constant influx of travelers, only 17 percent of the real estate agents in the Orlando market have ever sold a vacation rental, according to Erica Muller, CEO of vacation rental marketplace company Vrolio. More surprisingly still, Muller said Thursday at Inman Connect Las Vegas that when it comes to agents doing more than $600,000 in vacation rental sales volume, the percent drops to 1.7 percent.

Muller, who was speaking during a Connect panel dubbed “Someday we”ll all be on vacation,” said that these numbers mean there is a tremendous opportunity for additional agents to get into the vacation rental market. She specifically estimated that there is “enough volume to go around for at least 50 percent of the market,” but also noted that agents who want to jump into the world of short-term rentals need to develop a very specific set of skills.

Among the things agents who focus on vacation rentals need to understand is property management. Muller pointed out that some owners have managers, and that those managers may own or control the property’s books. When a new owner comes in, they may want to switch managers or take over themselves, but if they can’t get the books — which include information on things like vacancy and profitability — the transition may not go smoothly.

Agents, then, need to anticipate this type of issue and help their clients work through it.

There “is $7 to $8 billion in commission revenue each year” from the short-term rental sales market, meaning that there is a ton of money pouring into the sector and agents stand to earn a piece of that pie. The potential, in other words, is huge.

But whether they get onboard or not, the vacation rental industry is heating up and the only question is who will make money from it.

that in the past, he used to produce videos that displayed his company’s brand logo. That approach might have made sense if people were watching an old school TV commercial, but it doesn’t work today.

“People don’t want to like a real estate page, because people fear being bombarded with ads and professional content.

Instead, he recommended building social media pages for content about specific topics.

For instance, set up pages focused on things like local restaurants and historical societies

You’ll sometimes sees selfie-style videos that are shot from below a person’s face, which is not flattering. Other times, videos are lit poorly, or the image is obscured because the camera lens is dirty.

The point is, real estate agents need to be conscientious about what exactly they are doing with their phones while shooting video, she said.

Hold the phone “about an inch above eye level,” and moving around in any given room to see which spot has the best lighting

Whissel pointed out that most people are engaging with social media content on their phones, which are oriented vertically, not horizontally. And Lemons-Ryhal said that “vertical content is the fastest growing content in the history of the internet.”

Shooting and posting videos in a vertical, or portrait, orientation means that they can take up consumers’ entire phone screens. That will make the videos both more engaging, as well as simply easier to understand.

Lemons-Ryhal also pointed out that Facebook Stories and Instagram Stories — both ephemeral, Snapchat-like video platforms that many social media experts have extolled at Inman Connect — use vertical video. Shooting video in that orientation, then, makes it easier to use on those platforms.

Lemons-Ryhal described Instagram as the only place where it is “socially acceptable to use 30 hashtags.” Other social networks either don’t use hashtags at all, or incorporate them much more sparingly.

On Instagram, hashtags can actually be an important way to reach new audiences and boost engagement. But even there, Lemons-Ryhal urged moderation.

“Every study has shown that nine is the ideal number of hashtags,” she said.

Whissel compared creating video for social media to Hollywood movies.

“When a Hollywood movie drops there’s a trailer,” he said. “You want to do that with Facebook.”

Whissel recommended breaking longer video content down into clips that can be posted on multiple platforms. He also said that he pulls quotes out of his videos, superimposes them on a still image or photograph and then posts the resulting “quote card” to Instagram.

“You want to take all this content and repurpose it,” he explained. “Get it into all these different channels.”

Building an online following is tough, especially if you’re just asking friends and family to like your Facebook and Instagram pages. But Whissel offered a more targeted strategy: look and see who interacted with a particular video or post, and then invite them to like your page.

“These people become a part of your audience,” he explained. “This is one of the best ways to grow your page.”

Much of the discussion about social media focuses on Facebook and Instagram, but Whissel described what is essentially an ongoing YouTuberenaissance.

As a result, Whissel advised agents to put “every single video you create on YouTube.” Agents also need to be smart about using the platform, adding descriptions and tags that accurately represent their content.

If they do that, agents should be able to use YouTube as yet another channel through which to broadcast their brand and meet new clients.

“The more time you put into these things,” Whissel concluded, “the more people you’re going to get watching your videos.”

“List to last” is a common refrain in the real estate industry, but in order to get that far agents have to win over home sellers and get them to sign on the dotted line.

In a session titled “Nailing Your Listing Presentation” on Wednesday, expert panelists at Inman Connect Las Vegas offered attendees five tips for doing just that.

Yes, really. Do your research on the home sellers and on the house before the listing presentation, panelists said.

This means Googling the sellers and looking them up on social media, including LinkedIn. It also means looking up their tax records to see if they have multiple houses or what their financial situation might be

On that note, do everything and anything to be found. It’s huge. While some agents may shun review sites like Yelp, consumers don’t. And it’s no longer acceptable not to have a Zillow profile. 

Use a different computer than your own to see what your online footprint is and review it from the standpoint of a prospective seller.

No  cookie-cutter presentation. I want to hear their story. Where are they now and where do they want to end up,” Soto said.

Then she asks for a tour of the home and sits and talks strategy.

Sethavanish asks for a tour first because she wants to gauge the sellers’ personality type and see what they focus on when talking about the house

Home sellers’ No. 1 objection during a listing presentation is commissions,

How do panelists respond to requests to reduce their commission? “‘No. Any other questions?'

Another common objection? Zestimates that say a house is worth more than what the agent thinks the list price should be.

A timeline shows the work the agent will do to sell the home, according to Colucci.

If the agent gives the sellers the timeline before they sign a contract, in the back of their mind they’re already listing the house with that agent, Sethavanish said.

Closingtimepodcast.com for the latest news from the real estate world, helpful tips for buyers, sellers and other agents, and all of our previous podcast episodes. Keep up with us on Facebook and Instagram. We also offer home video tours, Realtor branding videos, ariel shots, live streams and more.. closingtimepodcast.com and click on the CMG Real Estate Link..