Weekly Real Estate News Quiz: Think You're Up On The Biggest Headlines?
The Kansas home where, in 1959, a family of four was killed in the middle of the night by strangers is about to hit the market for a yet-to-be-determined price.
On November 15, 1959, Herb and Bonnie Clutter and their teenage children, Nancy and Kenyon, were shot to death by a pair of escaped convicts in the middle of the night. The crime, which later inspired Truman Capote’s bestselling non-ficiton book “In Cold Blood,” entered American history as one of the country’s grisliest and most inexplicable murders.
EXp Realty has a new leader at the helm. Jason Gesing, who’s been with the company for nearly a decade was named CEO, Thursday, while founder and former CEO Glenn Sanford will shift his focus to running eXp Realty’s parent company, eXp World Holdings.
“Gesing has been an invaluable part of eXp since almost the beginning 10 years ago and helped us get to where we are today — from fewer than 25 agents in four U.S. states to more than 24,000 agents across North America and soon in the United Kingdom and Australia,” Sanford said in a statement.
Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED), a major Midwest multiple listing service in the Chicago area, has thrown its support behind a proposed industry-wide rule that would largely ban pocket listings, saying that the market is “placed in jeopardy” when properties are withheld from the public.
In a report released last week, MRED revealed that it was voicing support for a proposed policy from the National Association of Realtors (NAR) “so that the [multiple listing service] industry can maintain an efficient and effective marketplace.” The proposed NAR policy was announced earlier this month and, if adopted, will require agents to submit their properties to their local multiple listing service (MLS) within 24 hours of marketing them.
Major Chicago-based brokerage @properties announced this week that it has launched a new podcast in which the firm’s founders discuss various industry issues that matter to their agents.
CoreLogic, a publicly traded California-based financial services and analytics firm that provides a variety of MLS and real estate data products, reported Wednesday it generated $459 million in revenue in the third quarter of 2019, posting a net income of $41 million.
The company also posted an adjusted $0.82 earnings per share, beating the consensus estimate of $0.74 per share, according to Nasdaq.
About nine months after real estate tech firm HouseCanary turned off its public-facing real estate portal, the company is back with a new search product meant to help banks capture more lending business.
The platform, dubbed ComeHome, launched Wednesday, and according to a company statement was “built for mortgage lenders to attract, retain and convert customers into their suite of loan products.” The platform also “puts lenders directly in front of prospective buyers at the beginning of their home search” and integrates into those lenders’ existing software systems.
The National Association of Realtors (NAR) warned its members Wednesday about an ongoing scam that fraudulently asks recipients to register for an upcoming conference.
The scam involves an email that, according to a NAR statement, includes a subject line inviting people to “Register for the 2019 REALTORS Conference." However, the email is in fact a fake from a Comcast address, though it "displays as if it was from NAR," according to the statement.
U.S. District Court Judge James Nowlin has denied Keller Williams’ motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by a former tech vendor.
The lawsuit, filed by TPI Cloud Hosting, claims the franchisor hired the tech vendor to build its consumer-facing app, never paid, then copied the company’s prototype for its own proprietary app development.
Over 500 brokerage leaders gathered today in San Diego for the third annual WomanUP! conference sponsored by the California Association of Realtors (CAR). In addition to the 70 different speakers, CAR also released some preliminary findings from its 2020 WomanUP! research, which is still on-going.
In 2017, CAR discovered that of its top 100 revenue producing firms, only 14 were run by women. CAR launched the WomanUP! initiative to help more women step into brokerage leadership. As part of that process, CAR has conducted three different surveys of its membership, plus 80 one-on-one interviews over the last three years with a cross section of women brokers representing multiple business models.
Arizona agent Jon Mrgudich had been planning on touring a home listed on Opendoor with a buyer when he noticed something strange through a window. A child was running around the dining room while a woman looked on. Instead of buzzing the door open through an app on his phone, Mrgudich knocked — and promptly heard the sound of the lock clicking shut from the inside.
“I put one and two and three together and I go, ‘Alright we have a squatter here,'” Mrgudich, who works at West USA Realty in Peoria, Arizona, told Inman. “So I turn to my buyer and explain the safety issue briefly and suggest that we move on.”
The iBuyer model, which has grown in popularity for its convenience, has also posed new risks regarding squatters and people who enter the home to use drugs, party or engage in activities other than touring the home. Ever since Arizona police arrested a couple found squatting inside an Opendoor home with two children and a cache of drug paraphernalia in September, agents have been discussing safety issue they see with iBuyer homes.