By Jason Abrams Choosing one’s business partners and employees wisely is the single greatest challenge of a real estate “mega-team” owner. Those of us who own mega-teams know how to generate leads at a blistering pace. In fact, the

Everyone wants more leads. Love ‘em or hate ‘em – you can be using both Zillow and Trulia to get FREE leads. Yes, I said FREE. No matter what your position is on Zillow and Trulia & the infamous

By Peter Ricci According to Pew Research, as of April 2012, 82 percent of all American adults ages 18 and older use email; 67 percent do so on a daily basis; and, for the first time in Pew’s surveys,

By Jennifer Mills Klatt Over the last few years in real estate, websites such as Realtor.com, Chicago Block Shopper and Zillow have given consumers information they didn’t previously have in their hands, and it has undoubtedly impacted the way

Did you know that the guy behind the deli counter at your grocery store voted for the other guy? Want to know why it matters? It doesn’t. There are a lot of places where politics don’t matter. The deli

By Peter Ricci Message boards have long been among the most popular methods of communication on the Internet, but only recently have they entered the real estate lexicon on sites such as Trulia, Real Estate Forums and Redfin –

By Bob Corcoran This past summer, my son was looking to buy a home in St. Louis, not far from my office. I intentionally watched as he sat down at the computer and turned the occasion into my own

By Carrie Gable  We hear it all the time: one of the best ways to have an effective and thriving online presence is to monitor who is looking at your content and which elements of your marketing are seeing

By Peter Ricci Zillow has completed its fourth major acquisition in just 18 months, purchasing the real estate shopping website Buyfolio for an undisclosed sum. A fun, streamlined approach to online home shopping, Buyfolio is a New York City-based

By Peter Ricci Here’s an eye-opening stat for you: according to the latest studies by Forrester, a prominent research firm based in Cambridge, Mass., text messages increased 14 percent from 2010 to 2011, and in 2011, more than two trillion texts

By Christine Groves As we know, a home inspection is a voluntary process, but as agents, it is our fiduciary responsibility to strongly recommend them to our buyer clients and prepare our seller clients for the inevitable. With that

By Peter Ricci Yesterday, we looked at how real estate agents can establish themselves as neighborhood experts by creating custom maps in the Google Maps function. Today, in the second part of our neighborhood expert series, we’ll take a

By Mitch Levinson Chicago real estate agents and homebuilders, are you using social media as part of your marketing strategy? If your answer is no, it’s most likely because you’re overwhelmed by all of the different social media outlets

By Peter Ricci Real estate news feeds, including Crain’s and Inman News, reported yesterday that Naperville-based tech firm Cartavi has completed a successful Series A round of venture capital funding, with such investors as I2A Fund, Firestarter, OCA Ventures

By Peter Ricci The Internet has been a double-edged sword for real estate agents. On one hand, the Internet is great, because it allows you to market your business to a bevy of potential homebuyers; but on the other,

By Peter Ricci According to a new survey jointly conducted by the Department of Psychology at the University of Central Florida (UCF) and technology firm Merge, 64 percent of agents said they update clients weekly or several times weekly. But this communications