Last week, Greg dove into the topic of Zillow and referrals with his piece called Buying Leads on Layover. Just a week after Move announced the acquisition of Opcity, Zillow announced a new additional Premier Broker pricing product based on a “performance advertising expense” or, more plainly, a referral fee due when the transaction closes instead of a general advertising expense paid up front. He goes into how we got here, and what it means.
With my essay, I pondered the question of “How long will real estate companies keep going?” I started thinking about it following listening to a recode podcast with Elad Gil. Here’s the quote that caught my attention:
I think the thing that’s happened is a lot of founders end up selling when they could’ve kept going because these companies have such large market caps. So the big question on my mind is less about whether there’s going to be innovative big companies outside of those big five, but more how long will they keep going? Because Uber could have sold earlier or other companies could have sold earlier and they kept going. So the real question is who will keep going and who won’t. And then who, similarly, will be aggressive and ambitious.
At Google, the primary way that Larry Page would get upset if you were going into a product review is if you weren’t thinking big enough. He’d always say, “Why can’t this be a billion dollar thing instead of the hundred million thing you’re talking about?” A lot of founders don’t do that and so they never do that next wave of a product or the next cycle and so they just lose out. I think there are some companies who are doing that now, like Uber with Uber Eats and other services. But I think many founders stay in their lane a little bit more and I think that’s actually a detriment to innovation.
Winners and losers, in every industry, are more often than not decided by answering “How long will companies keep going?”
Real estate is no different. I went into who has kept building leading through thick and thin, which I dubbed the “real estate perseverance landscape”.
Weekly Radar Sample
RETREAT TO MORDOR
Millionaires buying bunkers in New Zealand in anticipation of the apocalypse isn’t a new concept, but since I’m traveling there in February I thought it was a good time to revisit some of the particulars around plans that include shipping “two 150-ton survival bunkers journeyed by land and sea from a Texas warehouse to the shores of New Zealand, where they’re buried 11 feet underground.” I’m not confident that 11 feet is going to accomplish much and wonder whether announcing the plan in public is of sound operational security for a group of the wealthiest capitalists in the world, but I’m also more interested in the plan to save the billions of humans without the capital and resources of Silicon Valley’s elite. -GF
ROBOTS AND WAREHOUSES
We all know robots are coming, in a big way, to virtually every industry. GreyOrange raised $140M to continue developing fully-automated robotics for warehouses. Butlers help warehouses utilize space more optimally, with error free and real-time picking and on-demand stock audit. After watching the video, I started to wonder if this technology could empower any building with extra space to play a part in the warehousing and shipping ecosystem? Not unlike how BluePrint Power enables buildings to play a role in the energy marketplace as power nodes.
Mastermind Member News
- Module pre-sold its first adaptable, energy efficient home to a customer in Pittsburgh. More details on the house can be found here.
As a reminder, the purpose of the Geek Estate Mastermind is two fold:
- Curate the world’s most innovative and diverse community of real estate creatives, doers, and pioneers.
- Make our members wildly successful in their careers building real estate companies.
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The post Buying Leads on Layaway / How Long Will Real Estate Companies Keep Going? — Geek Estate Mastermind Newsletter #45 appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.
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