Thursday, January 30, 2020 / by Vanessa Saunders
By Vanessa Saunders, MBA, MIMC , Broker Owner, Global Property Systems
I recently attended a real estate conference in New York sponsored by Inman News, the nation's largest online real estate news publication. I met a lot of old friends, made some new ones, and heard some interesting discussions. But the discussions I heard at Inman this time weren't about best practices and how to service clients better. Many of the attendees - brokers, bankers, techs and yes, agents - were discussing one thing: Are real estate agents soon to be extinct?
The reason so many were talking about this dystopian view of the real estate profession is that the handwriting appears to be on the wall for REALTORS® as we know them. Sean Black, a long-time real estate expert, Co-Founder & CEO of Knock.com and a founding team member of Trulia summed it up this way in a recent article in Forbes: "This arcane, inefficient structure is the way residential real estate has been done for the past 50- ...
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Tuesday, February 12, 2019 / by Vanessa Saunders
McDonalds, the iconic American fast food hamburger joint has met its match in Ireland. The Galway-based fast food firm Supermac persuaded the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) to cancel McDonald’s use of the “Big Mac” trademark, opening the way for Supermac to expand across Britain and continental Europe.
So what was the first thing that happened when Micky Dees lost its Big Mac protection? Burger King unveiled a new line of fast-food menu items called "Not Big Macs" for a limited time at locations in Sweden, according to a press release it shared with Marketing Dive.
The burgers are regular Burger King products, simply with temporary name changes. The items include "Big Mac-ish but flame-grilled of course," "Like a Big Mac but actually big," "The burger Big Mac wished it was," "Kind of like a Big Mac but juicier and tastier" and "Anything but a Big Mac."
This is not the first time Burger King has taken the low road and launched it's own p ...
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hudson valley real estate, hudson valley property, hudson valley home, buying a home, hudson valley home owners, funny blog, new technology
Tuesday, February 5, 2019 / by Vanessa Saunders
An article in today's Bloomberg News reported that Gerald Cotten, a Canadian entrepreneur and the co-owner of Quadriga CX, a crypto-currency asset-exchange company, died unexpectedly in India of complications from Crohn's Disease without telling any of his clients or business partners the password to his digital "wallet." This means that those who entrusted their bit-coin accounts to Mr. Cotten now have no way of accessing the $200+ million tucked away in Quadriga.
We first blogged last October about crypto-currency transactions and how they might impact real estate deals. The news today is a sobering reminder that all our technological expertise is worthless in the face of human failure.
Bitcoin, like several other brands in the crypto-currency space, is used for cash-less transactions for purchasing or selling anything. Stocks and bonds, property of all kinds, even homes have sold on the crypto-currency market using Bitcoin, Block Chain or several other iterations of this kin ...
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hudson valley real estate, home investment, buying a home, financing, new technology
Tuesday, November 20, 2018 / by Vanessa Saunders
Does it seem to you that robo-calls have increased a lot lately? Would you like to do something to keep them from reaching your cell phone? Many good options await!
For a number of years, the National Do Not Call Registry did a pretty good job of preventing unwanted solicitations or scam cell phone calls. Legit companies cooperated and violators paid heavy fines. Then in the last few years, scammers started using new technology that allowed them to make unlimited calls basically for free to virtually every phone number in North America, including Canada, the U.S. and parts of the Caribbean. This made it a numbers game for scammers. They only needed a fraction of of the people they'd call to believe whatever pitch they made and send them money. Their numbers are "spoofed," allowing them to appear to come from somewhere other than their actual source.
The result? By some accounts, nearly 31 BILLION robo-calls were made in 2017. Estimates suggest that in 2018, the calls will e ...
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