Real Estate Investment :What is Trending? Social Media facilitates your Input

Article Summary:

Article Content:
Last year as we approached the annual National Association of Realtors® (NAR) conference discussion, the residential brokerage industry was centered around the Tax Credit, the growing number of firms that were struggling to stay in business, and the exploding number of Realtors® that had dual careers.

Then the surprise announcement in San Diego was made and RPR (Realtor® Property Resource) and AVM (Automatic Valuation Models) became the buzz of not only the convention, but also for the rest of the year.

During the last year we’ve seen that RPR has celebrated various milestones, we’ve seen mergers and acquisitions of real estate firms is at an all time high, and we’ve seen frequent debates on which national franchises are growing and which are struggling.

On the Social Media side, we actively started exploring augmented reality and location-based services. It has been fun to watch how these concepts develop from ‘startups’ and ‘games’ into fledgling but blossoming, business applications.

Well, one of the benefits of the Internet and Social Media is that researchers and trend spotters like us now can reach much further and wider to gain information.

So we are extending an invite to you.

If you have seen any trend, strategy or innovation that you think is substantial – meaning that it has a high probability of impacting residential brokerages business on a national level – we want to hear about it!

Drop in comments at the bottom, find me at the NAR convention, or alternatively, I also have a great team back at the office continuing the research. Just send an email to Tom at tom@realsure.com or to Tinus at tinus@realsure.com and share with us your thoughts. We don’t guarantee that we will necessarily agree or publish anything, but we will listen and follow up.

The 2011 Swanepoel Trends Report (160 pages) closes its research the first week of December and is scheduled to hit newsstands February 1st as it does every year.

About the Author



During the last fourteen years, nineteen-time author Stefan Swanepoel has widely become regarded as the leading researcher on the business and technology trends impacting the real estate industry. For more information on his annual Swanepoel TRENDS Report and the annual Swanepoel SOCIAL MEDIA Report visit www.RETrends.com.

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