Mediaboss Marketing

Jay Thompson is a former brokerage owner who spent over six years working for Zillow Group. Hes also the co-founder of AgentLoop. He selectively retired in August 2018, but cant seem to leave the real estate industry behind. His Inman column is published every Wednesday.

REX, the discount brokerage that shuns the MLS while filing lawsuits left and right, has allegedly closed down brokerage operations.

Maybe. Or maybe not? The company is uncharacteristically quiet, though in some ways, it makes sense not to fire out a press release about your imminent demise. So much for transparency.

While the executives may be tucked away silently in a room with a view, the agents and support staff are actively looking for jobs according to several sources.

REX has often made headlines, though not so much for things brokerages tend to covet sales volume, transaction sides, and agent count.

Instead, REX has gained attention for suing the National Association of Realtors, Zillow, and the state of Oregon. They may be involved in other lawsuits as well. To be honest, its hard to keep up with what seems to be the most active legal department in the real estate space. The number of lawsuits, countersuits, and appeals REX legal is wrapped up in is mind-boggling.

Toss in some click-bait fame for calling out the real estate cartel and blaming Zillow for hiding listings, and youve got a brokerage that many agents love to hate. I mean, there were actually agents defending Zillow over some of REXs claims!

REXs business model seems to comprise not putting listings into the MLS, and avoiding paying buyer agent co-broke fees, while riding the disruption train in the name of changing the way people buy and sell homes.

Other than former agents and staff looking for work, the only hard evidence REX has shuttered brokerage operations is the fact their corporate brokers license in Texas is in an inactive state. (Licenses in Arizona, Colorado and Nevada are still showing as active in those states real estate licensing databases.)

You cant broker real estate without an active license. The fact that REX is carrying zero listings also provides strong evidence its brokerage arm has ceased operation. Other than this empty listings page, there is absolutely no reference on their website that theyve ceased helping consumers buy and sell real estate.

This pegs the irony meter given REXs proclamations that theyre all-in for the consumer. When do you plan on letting those consumers know you cant help them?

In an interesting twist, just a few weeks ago, Insured technology financing pioneer PIUS announced the securing of $10 million in funding for REX, with an accordion feature that provides REX an option for an additional $35 million. After the news that REXs brokerage operations might be spinning into oblivion surfaced, Inman reported that Joe Agiato, PIUSs CEO, told Inman, PIUS performs an in-depth assessment of a companys technology and IP portfolio, and based on this, PIUS insures the value of the loan to provide greater amounts of capital at lower rates.Agiato said REX is still operating, albeit on a smaller scale. PIUS remains confident in REXs technology, which is the basis of our financial relationship.

Reading between the lines here, it sounds like this funding round is based on REXs tech stack, and not its actual brokerage operations. A good thing because all signs are pointing to those brokerage operations no longer being in service.

Assuming REX really has shuttered its brokerage operations (and it would appear it has), the impact of that on the industry is negligible to non-existent. Another brokerage failed. So what? Not to sound callous, but it happens all the time. This isnt a simple industry, and profit margins tend to be razor-thin. Success is never a guarantee.

Although Im not at all a fan of litigating your way to growth and profitability and lets face it, litigation seems to be a top priority with REX I dont like seeing any business fail. People need jobs, and the industry needs competition and new business models.

But in the grand scheme of things, one less brokerage in the mix wont have any significant effect on the industry. The REX agents, many of whom Im sure are stellar performers, can hang their license with another brokerage literally in minutes.The only thing REX has fessed up to during this news cycle is that their antitrust legal pursuit of NAR and Zillow will continue. Theyve hired high-profile attorney David Boies to continue carrying that torch. I have no idea what Boies charges, but I bet hes not cheap, nor is he doing this pro bono.

Only time will tell what, if any, impact these legal gyrations may have.

Should REX be shifting from direct brokerage operations to providing some sort of tech solution for brokerages (or consumers) then maybe that matters? Or maybe not.

It all depends on what that technology provides and what problem it addresses. Given that all anyone seems to know about REX is gleaned from copious legal filings, we cant say what their tech stack may offer.

Im sure someday well be hearing more from and about REX. If history is any indication, that will be limited to some lawsuit, countersuit or appeal. Who really knows, or cares, what else may lie ahead for them.

Less than an hour after I submitted this column to the Inman editors, more news broke about REX. And it wasnt another lawsuit!See Inmans take at REX pivots to single-family rental market as its Hail Mary, and Real Trends breaking story, REX survives as facilitator for corporate landlords. Looks like REX has adjusted its focus to institutional buyers in the single-family rental market.REX co-founder and COO Lynley Sides, and REX General Counsel Michael Toth are laying the fault of their brokerage failure directly on Zillow, taking #BlameZillow to whole new levels.

NAR must be to blame as well given they are co-defendants in REXs lawsuit. I guess when in doubt, point fingers at anyone except whos looking back at you in the mirror. Pivoting to helping institutional/corporate buyers of rental properties certainly wont endear any agents to REX. I suspect those steering the REXs ship through the storm couldnt care less what agents think of this move. Theres still nothing about the collapse of the brokerage business or this new direction mentioned on REXs consumer-facing website. Thinking they must have issued a press release about this business model and customer base shift, I clicked on its sites press page, and got a 404 Page Not Found error.

Ditto for the blog page. You can, however, still buy plenty of REX branded swag. Maybe the employee with the password to edit the website got laid off? Maybe REX thinks presenting a false front to consumers is OK. Maybe theyre just tired. Surely at some point, REX will let the consumer know they cant help them anymore. Only time will tell. Will this pivot to help corporate landlords impact the real estate industry? Hardly. Institutional investors have been around since Day 1. Theyll still be around whether REX is successful with this new model or whether it meets the same fate as its brokerage operations.

Jay Thompson is a real estate veteran and co-founder of AgentLoop living in the Texas Coastal Bend. Follow him on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. He holds an active Arizona brokers license with eXp Realty. Called the hardest working retiree ever, as the founder of Jay.Life, he writes, speaks and consults on all things real estate.

The rest is here:
Not with a bang but a whimper: Why REX shuttering doesnt really matter - Inman

Eden PR have been appointed to lead the PR strategy and delivery for the first and only all outstanding/excellent schools group in the UK.

The Nottingham based agency has been selected as the agency of choice by Forfar Education to lead on the PR activity programmes for its expanding network of independent preparatory schools following a detailed proposal, pitch and chemistry meeting.

Founded in 2016, Forfar Education, which has a strong family ethos at its heart, currently owns and manages several of the UKs leading prep schools. These include Cameron Vale in Chelsea, Horris Hill in Newbury, The Gleddings in Halifax, Brackenfield School in Harrogate, Park School in Bournemouth and Argyle House School in Sunderland. The groups aim is to create inspiring schools that teach self-belief, deliver academic excellence and produce pupils who are confident, kind, resilient, happy and equipped to navigate and succeed in whatever the future may bring.

Director and Head of New Business at Eden PR, Emily Winsor-Russell, said: Were delighted to announce that weve been appointed by the leadership team at Forfar to deliver a headline-making, thought-leader creating PR approach for its network of excellent schools.

As many of the Eden team are parents themselves, with personal backgrounds linked closely to the teaching profession, our understanding of the important themes, opportunities and challenges for the school sector is intrinsic were naturally inclined to identify and develop impactful and brand-elevating media relations for Forfar. Getting to know the school leaders has been a real pleasure and were thoroughly enjoying working alongside such passionate and inspiring educators.

In the past year, we have expanded our extensive media relations services alongside an established digital and social marketing offer. Working with some of the most well-known names in sectors across the UK from logistics to property, recruitment and insurance to funeral care, alongside event and exhibition support, we have continued to grow the team and range of services since 2000, delivering exceptional results for clients requiring creative, eye-catching and headline-grabbing media relations and communications strategies.

Marketing Director at Forfar Education Claire Grundy said: The Eden team stood out to us from our very first contact with them as being immersed in and extremely knowledgeable about the topics that matter to our schools. They demonstrated a clear, innovative and engaging vision for where we should take our media communications strategy and have immediately hit the ground running with excellent press content across the group. Were looking forward to expanding our footprint across the UK and showcasing the fantastic news stories from our schools in partnership with Eden.

Situated in the heart of Nottinghams historic Lace Market, we are a team of public relations experts with a wealth of knowledge and exceptional track record across B2B and B2C portfolios. The team combines a mix of communications professionals from a tapestry of backgrounds, from journalism marketingto stakeholder comms andsocial media. Contact us now to discuss your PR needs or to chat about howour services can help boost the reputation and build awareness of your business, brand or campaign.

Read more here:
Eden PR top of the class for outstanding schools group - East Midlands Business Link

Armed with the critical data that call tracking provides, you can dig into whats really happening with your paid social campaigns.

Social media is viewed by legal professionals as the most valuable channel for providing leads, according to CallRails research. But social media strategies require careful planning.

If all your decisions arent data-informed, theres a high probability youre losing valuable marketing dollars. Fortunately, with the right tools in place, your law firm has the ability to test different methods and truly understand what resonates with your audience and why which ultimately saves your firm money.

But no single platform is the same. And if you dont know your stuff, you wont get a high ROI on your paid social media spend. To maximize your firms social media marketing dollars, first you have to know how to implement paid social media on the various platforms:

Facebook

Facebook has an immense user base that measured 1.93 billion daily active users at the end of 2021. With such a widespread audience, firms are offered the opportunity to reach a huge amount of potential clients via the platform. Advertising with Facebook Ads is a simple, effective way to deliver your brands message to the right audience. The platform makes it easy to target key demographics and see the results of each campaign with Facebook Insights.

Instagram

Instagram ranks second after its counter-platform Facebook, when we look at active users measuring about 1 billion users per month. And as the network continues to grow, its popularity and frequent new feature launches offer great opportunities for firms to join the space and find ways to succeed. Similar to Facebook, Instagram allows you to create ads that reach the right people. While the specific metrics may vary, marketers have the options to target specific audiences with demographical settings and monitor how each campaign performs.

LinkedIn

With more than 740 million members, LinkedIn is the most widely used social media platform to share content for B2B purposes. Targeted LinkedIn ads are useful for driving professional, quality leads to your website. The social network makes it easy to measure campaign performance directly from your account with LinkedIn conversion tracking.

Twitter

For a more conversational social platform, Twitter is a top contender. The platform has a massive population of brands and individuals constantly interacting at rapid speed. In fact, there are over 500 million tweets on a daily basis. Twitter offers a number of different types of paid campaigns to cater to specific needs and goals. There are campaigns for increasing your followers, driving traffic to your website, and promoting your apps, all of which can be tracked using Twitter analytics.

So, you know how to build the ads. But how can you effectively strategize your firms social spend?

The answer is simple: call tracking. Armed with the critical data that call tracking provides, you can dig into whats really happening with your paid social campaigns, allowing you to get a better grasp on your ROI. And there are two primary ways to do it.

With visitor-level call tracking, marketers can correlate keywords with social media campaigns, phone calls, and website visits. This lets you see which keywords are driving the most clicks and calls for your business, allowing you to better optimize your campaigns to improve ROI.

Similarly, you can use source-level call tracking to attribute phone calls, conversions, and web traffic to specific paid social campaigns. By assigning a designated phone number to each individual campaign, youll be able to accurately track your paid social campaign performance with ease.

Once you get your ads set up with the correct call tracking features, youre sure to be a social media superstar at your firm. To learn even more about maximizing your firms social media spend, check out this Content Hub from CallRail.

Read more here:
Paid Social Media Optimization 101: Make the Most of Your Firm's Marketing Dollars - Legal Reader

This week, Byron Lazine and Nicole White welcome Tom Ferry to discuss the housing bubble talk, home affordability and marketing.

Byron Lazine and Nicole White are two agents in Connecticut who give us their thoughts on the weeks news every Friday in The Real Word, a weekly video column on Inman.

Byron Lazine and Nicole White spoke with Tom Ferry about an Inman article that outlines how talk of a market bubble may be scaring builders away from new construction starts. Ferry said that while he understands the way in which discussions can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, there are too many millennials in the market for a bubble to actually occur.

The uncertainty around interest rates, banking and the political landscape breed anxiety, and the best thing a real estate agent can do is talk about it head-on and contrast fear-mongering headlines with other data points.

Next, Lazine, White and Ferry discussed a Wall Street Journal article about the Biden administrations efforts to address the housing shortage with an affordable housing plan. Ferry said agents should be reading multiple perspectives from across the political spectrum.

Agents have a fiduciary duty to help all of their clients, and they should keep any specific political leanings out of their thinking.

Housing is too fundamentally important to get hung up on one or two specific political issues, Ferry said.

Ferry selected two Marketeers: Compass team leader Lydia Gable who said that seller seminars are working well for her, allowing her to be the educator in her market. Lazine loves the content potential of the resulting footage for social media marketing.

Next was Ferrys Growth Mastermind and their discussion of mega open houses with direct mail, door-knocking and banner ads inviting neighbors to lunch at the property. Add a QR code for mandatory registration at the open house, grab the attendees information, and follow up with a personal BombBomb video message.

Want to nominate a marketeer of the week? Drop your thoughts in the comments section below, orshoot us an email.

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Tom Ferry talks housing, marketing: The Real Word - Inman

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Ever since the outbreak of COVID in 2019, social media usage, not surprisingly, has increased significantly. To stick to the safety protocols of COVID-19, many firms had to adapt to a more remote-based working environment, which resulted in a significant rise in digital marketing and social media usage. This held especially true for law firms, which created more content than ever in 2021. This change in trend was noted by Good2BSocial, an internet marketing consulting firm responsible for creating the Social Law Firm Index (SLFI). The trends within the findings and rankings of law firms remained somewhat consistent for the years 2020 and 2021, with one of the most notable trends being the increase in usage of podcasts and videos. While many law firms may have developed new tactics and taken alternative approaches to effectively increase their social media engagement, not all content proved to be effective; some issues occurred as a result of increased content generation.

Over the past two years, firms have generated content excessively. While some of it may have been useful, such as COVID-19 microsites which served as a valuable source of information to the public, others did not quite serve the same purpose. Within this glut of content, firms tended to forget the actual purpose that content should serve and publish content just for the sake of it. As a result, the true purpose of content somehow got lost in the process and does not serve either party. Neither clients nor the firm benefited from much from this hastily written content. At the rise of the pandemic, firms were generating substantial content, but as things simmered down, much of the content started losing its sustainability. Although quite a few firms used content for press releases, a few wise ones from the lot tried to put the data to better use and create opportunities for business development. Not only is excessive content a problem in itself, but since these platforms exist way past their abandonment, it leaves a very negative impression of the firms. According to David Brenton from BluShark Digital, content should only remain on sites so long as it stays important, relevant, and can be a useful resource. If not, firms need to take it down.

Up until recent years, Facebook was one of the most used online platforms to reach any audience, but since last year, firms have shifted their focus to Instagram to promote different cultural news. Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) has been one of the most promoted one amongst all news. DEI efforts are initiatives taken in the workplace to ensure diversity. This has gained massive popularity in the news recently and most firms, whether big or small, have taken their influence on social media to support it in many cases. However, these firms should realize that their sole focus should not revolve around this, as it should be one aspect of their social media presence. For example, if they want to promote leadership and reach more clients, they should opt for a more business-related platform, such as Linkedin.

Videos and podcasts have a much greater impact in regard to social media channels and allow a firm to stand out from the others. This explains their drastic rise in recent years. With the technological advancements made in recent years, they have become incredibly cost-effective and do not even need an official shoot in many cases, but simply a good graphic designer or animator to do the job. Podcasts also have a similar impact if used effectively and are thus gaining much more recognition recently.

Read more from the original source:
The Rise of Social Media Influence and Digital Marketing within Law Firms - Blue Virginia