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All Indications “Point” to MREDpalooza Being a Great Success
Point2 Joins with MLS Industry Heavyweights for Major Event
Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED), Chicagoland’s multiple listing service (MLS), has announced that Point2 is sponsoring and attending MREDpalooza as a ZAP! level Sponsor.
Point2 provides real estate marketing and lead management software to brokers and agents in North and South America, Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa, as well as listing data aggregation and syndication solutions to real estate multiple listing services in the United States, and Boards and Associations across Canada. Point2’s solutions also include the consumer real estate listings portal, Point2 Homes, in addition to property management software for small to medium size organizations managing up to 1000 units.
Real Estate Digital (RED), another Zap! level sponsor, will be unveiling its line of MRED SelectSites, state-of-the-art agent and broker websites, at MREDpalooza. RED is a leading provider of integrated technology, media and data solutions to real estate franchisors, brokerages, agents, MLSs and Realtor® associations.
In addition to having booths at MREDpalooza, both Point2 and RED will be demonstrating and explaining their full lines of products throughout the day in their own private training rooms.
”Point2 is excited to be participating in MREDpalooza,” said Saul Klein, Industry Principal of Point2. “MRED is recognized as an industry leader and the quality of their programs always exceed expectations. You’ll kick yourself if you miss this one.”
“We are thrilled to be part of MREDpalooza this year, which promises to be Chicago’s tech event of the year,” said John Hensley, Chief Product & Technology Officer of Real Estate Digital (RED). “There’s no better place to launch the MRED SelectSites web platform than at this premier event!”
Market Leader has also joined the MREDpalooza sponsorship lineup. Market Leader is a real estate software company providing a full suite of solutions from lead generation to customer relationship management.
“Not to sound too over the top, but we have been astounded by the reaction of the real estate industry to MREDpalooza,” said MRED CEO Russ Bergeron. “Clearly vendors and MRED customers alike see MREDpalooza for the wonderful opportunity it is, and we’re looking forward to seeing everybody at the Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont on June 18th.”
MRED has a few sponsorship and exhibiting opportunities left, and encourages anybody interested to get in touch as soon as possible. All MREDpalooza participants will enjoy significant interaction with thousands of MRED’s customers.
About MREDpalooza
MREDpalooza is the largest free real estate tech expo in the country. Taking place Tuesday, June 18, 2013, from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, Illinois, MREDpalooza will be a great opportunity for MRED’s customers to learn, at no cost, about a myriad of real estate products and services to enhance their businesses.
MRED is planning for several thousand attendees and scores of vendors, many of whom, like Point 2, have already committed to attending. Training sessions and demos will be offered throughout the day, providing more in-depth understanding of many of the products and services. Those wishing to attend or exhibit at MREDpalooza are asked to visit MREDpalooza.com for free registration and sponsorship information.
About MRED
Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED) is the real estate data aggregator and distributor providing the Chicagoland multiple listing service (MLS) to nearly 40,000 brokers and appraisers and 8,000 offices. MRED serves Chicago and the surrounding “collar” counties and provides property information encompassing northern Illinois, southern Wisconsin and northwest Indiana. MRED delivers over twenty products and services to its customers, complementing connectMLS™, the top-rated MLS system in the country per the latest WAV Group MLS Technology Survey. For more information please visit MREDLLC.com.
100 Million Online Consumers to Attend MREDpalooza
Top Real Estate Websites On Board For Huge Summer Event
LISLE, ILLINOIS (May 6, 2013) – Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED), Chicagoland’s multiple listing service (MLS), has announced that national home search websites Zillow, realtor.com, and Homes.com are sponsoring and attending MREDpalooza, the largest free real estate tech expo in the country. Zillow and realtor.com are ZAP! level sponsors, and Homes.com is a ZOINK! level sponsor. They join Trulia.com, which MRED earlier announced as a POW! sponsor, MREDpalooza’s highest level of sponsorship.
Also sponsoring at the ZOINK! Level and attending are mega real estate brokerages Coldwell Banker Residential and Baird & Warner. Each has a significant presence in the Chicagoland real estate market with their own web-based home search tools. Combining the number of visitors to each of these major player’s websites delivers over 100 million consumers every month.
“We are pleased to participate as a sponsor of MREDpalooza and looking forward to seeing many MRED members at this event,” said Susan Young, Senior Manager of realtor.com, Industry Relations. “We will demonstrate the many free realtor.com benefits that they will want to use, especially the new Find application. MRED members will want to take full advantage of this free research tool when it becomes available to them next week.
“Zillow is the leading home and real estate-related marketplace on mobile and the Web, dedicated to helping home shoppers, sellers and renters find vital information about homes, and connect with the best local professionals,” said Chris Crocker, Vice-President of Partner Relations for Zillow. “We are excited to be a sponsor of MREDpalooza and showcase our newest suite of tools to help real estate agents attract and retain new and current clients.”
“Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage is proud to partner with MRED and sponsor MREDpalooza,” said Fran Broude, President and Chief Operating Officer of Coldwell Banker Residential. “In one of the most rapidly changing eras of real estate technology, tools and training, an event such as this championed by one of the most forward thinking MLS organizations in the country is exactly what all Chicagoland real estate agents need.”
“We’re pleased to support MRED in its efforts to provide a continued focus on technology,” said Jennifer Alter Warden, President of Residential Sales for Baird & Warner. “We’re especially excited for this opportunity to introduce our suite of innovative tools that enable broker associates to work whenever, wherever and however they want.”
“We are thrilled that all of the major players in real estate share our conviction that MREDpalooza is the place to be this June” said MRED CEO Russ Bergeron. “MRED customers are going to have the opportunity to meet, be trained by, and learn about the greatest real estate organizations and tools in the business. MREDpalooza is officially a ‘can’t miss’ event.”
MRED still has a few sponsorship and exhibiting opportunities available. All MREDpalooza participants will enjoy significant interaction with thousands of MRED’s customers.
About MREDpalooza
MREDpalooza is the largest free real estate tech expo in the country. Taking place Tuesday, June 18, 2013, from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, Illinois, MREDpalooza will be a great opportunity for MRED’s customers to learn, at no cost, about a myriad of real estate products and services to enhance their businesses.
MRED is planning for several thousand attendees and scores of vendors, many of whom have already committed to attending. Training sessions and demos will be offered throughout the day, providing more in-depth understanding of many of the products and services. Those wishing to attend or exhibit at MREDpalooza are asked to visit MREDpalooza.com for free registration and sponsorship information.
About MRED
Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED) is the real estate data aggregator and distributor providing the Chicagoland multiple listing service (MLS) to nearly 40,000 brokers and appraisers and 8,000 offices. MRED serves Chicago and the surrounding “collar” counties and provides property information encompassing northern Illinois, southern Wisconsin and northwest Indiana. MRED delivers over twenty products and services to its customers, complementing connectMLS™, the top-rated MLS system in the country per the latest WAV Group MLS Technology Survey. For more information please visit MREDLLC.com.
Chicago Real Estate Was Awesome in March
We may have had ridiculously cold weather in March, but the heat in the real estate market more than made up for that. Prices popped: In Chicago, the median sale price was 8.9 percent above where it had been a year before, and for the nine-county region, it was up 2.2 percent, according to Illinois Association of Realtors data released Monday. And the time it took to get a house sold was a little more than 20 percent faster than it had been in March 2013.
In fact, March was so good in Chicago real estate that for once, our recent tendency to be the opposite of the national norm was to our advantage: On the national scene, the number of homes sold in March was down 0.6 percent from February. Here, March was up 33 percent from February.
“Poor Chicago”? I think not.
After lagging behind much of the nation’s real estate recovery, Chicago’s recovery may finally be taking root. “A lot of places have already gone where we’re going now,” says Russ Bergeron, the CEO of Midwest Real Estate Data.
Data that MRED’s Gayle Ludemann compiled for me late last week gets into detail about what happened in March. A few things stand out:
• The proportion of distressed sales dropped. In March, 43 percent of the homes sold in the Chicago area were foreclosures or short sales. That’s down from 47.2 percent the month before, and down from 45.9 percent in March 2012. (There were more homes of those types sold, but the increase in the sales of non-distressed homes was even bigger, so their share of the market shrank.)
That’s a sign that we’re moving back toward a market where distress isn’t such a dragging-down factor for sellers whose homes aren’t in distress. “Moving,” not “moved.” We’re still at more than two out of five homes selling in distress.
• Asking prices are going up much faster than selling prices. In the chart above, the green line shows asking prices and the red is selling prices. The way the spread between them has grown in the past few months worries me: I’m concerned that sellers may be too happy about the turn in the market, and in their enthusiasm could ask too much, leading to a whole new dip when buyers refuse to reach for it.
While sellers may be better able to sell now because rising home values have lifted more of them up from underwater, many sellers are still holding out for a time when prices are even higher, according to this analysis and others.
But Bergeron sees the leap in asking prices as potentially a good sign: “I think sellers are feeling more confident,” he says. “Hopefully they’ll start getting some of those prices, [because] what we’ve been lacking is seller confidence.” Buyers have been very confident, because of the combination of low prices and low interest rates making this the perfect time to buy. But “a lot of sellers have been sitting back waiting to get their best deal,” he notes.
• Are sellers getting better deals now than they were a year ago? It depends on what they’re looking for. They’re certainly getting their homes sold faster: homes that weren’t in distress sold in an average of 140 days in March. That’s 38 percent faster this March than last year.
But on price, ‘better’ is not such a clear term. MRED’s data show that non-distressed sellers are getting a better percentage of their asking price: In March 2012, they were selling at 88.57% of their original list price; a year later, that had gone up a little less than three percentage points, with sellers getting 91.2% of their original asking price. But the average sale price on traditional, non-distressed homes rose a less than one percent in the same period. This suggests that sellers are doing better in part because they’ve cut their expectations.
And that loops us back to the past few months’ growing gap between asking and selling prices. Let’s all keep our eyes on how that gap changes in the next couple of months, okay?
Article via Chicago Magazine
Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED) Three-Peats with Top Help Desk Award
Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED), the Chicagoland multiple listing service (MLS), is pleased to announce that its Technical Help Desk has been recognized as one of the Top 50 Call Centers in the United States and Canada by BenchmarkPortal for the third consecutive year. MRED’s Help Desk has been identified as one of the best small centers in the category of organizations having 5 to100 full-time call center personnel.
Since 1995, BenchmarkPortal has conducted annual statistical analyses of call center operations throughout the world. BenchmarkPortal hosts the world’s largest call center metrics database in conjunction with the Center for Customer Driven Quality located at Purdue Research Park, Purdue University. The BenchmarkPortal team of professionals has gained international recognition for its call center expertise and innovative approaches to Best Practices for the call center industry.
BenchmarkPortal compares the performance of contact centers throughout North America by evaluating their key metrics against industry peers, to objectively identify centers who are achieving superior results both in financial and qualitative terms.
“MRED’s Help Desk is among the best in its industry,” said Bruce Belfiore, CEO of BenchmarkPortal. “This award was granted on the basis of objective, metrics-driven performance. MRED stood tall against its competitors according to the world’s largest database of call center metrics. This is not easy to do, and we congratulate them on their accomplishment.”
“MRED celebrates the continued excellence of our Help Desk,” said Russ Bergeron, CEO of MRED. “We have a substantial commitment to customer service, and it is gratifying to see our efforts and dedication recognized annually by such a prestigious organization as BenchmarkPortal. I am proud of MRED’s Help Desk Manager Stephanie Abrams and every single one of our Help Desk staff members, who are on the front lines serving our real estate professionals.”
About MRED
Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED) is the real estate data aggregator and distributor providing the Chicagoland multiple listing service (MLS) to nearly 40,000 brokers and appraisers and 8,000 offices. MRED serves Chicago and the surrounding “collar” counties and provides property information encompassing northern Illinois, southern Wisconsin and northwest Indiana. MRED delivers over twenty products and services to its customers, complementing connectMLS™, the top-rated MLS system in the country per the latest WAV Group MLS Technology Survey. For more information please visit MREDLLC.com.
About BenchmarkPortal
BenchmarkPortal’s activities began in 1995, and it is now a global leader in the contact center industry, providing benchmarking, certification, training, consulting and research. The BenchmarkPortal team of professionals has gained international recognition for its innovative approach to best practices for contact centers. BenchmarkPortal hosts the world’s largest database of contact center metrics, which is constantly being refreshed with new data. BenchmarkPortal’s mission is to provide contact center managers with the tools and information that will help them optimize their efficiency and effectiveness in their customer communications. For more information, please call 1-800-214-8929 or visit BenchmarkPortal.com.
MREDpalooza Sponsors Stepping Up to the Plate
Support for Major Real Estate Tech Expo is Streaming In
LISLE, ILLINOIS (March 6, 2013) – Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED), Chicagoland’s multiple listing service (MLS), announced that support for MREDpalooza, the real estate tech expo event of 2013, has already started flowing in. Product vendors and service providers are seizing the opportunity to participate in an event hosted by one of the largest MLSs in the country.
ShowingTime was the first to commit to sponsoring MREDpalooza. The ShowingAssist™ product equips MRED real estate professionals with showing management tools enabling them to schedule showing appointments, generate feedback and create listing activity reports for sellers. Having had some significant enhancements over the past year, MRED highly recommends attendees Zap into ShowingAssist™ training at MREDpalooza. Together, ShowingTime and MRED make quite the dynamic duo.
Listingbook AI, CoreLogic Realist, and SentriLock are a few of the other companies that have leapt into MREDpalooza sponsorship with a single bound.
“ShowingTime is proud to be a sponsor of the first ‘MREDpalooza’,” said ShowingTime President Michael Lane. “We’ve seen strong adoption of all of our products in MRED – from our front desk software, to our appointment center service, to our online scheduling products – and look forward to being at MREDpalooza to meet many more MRED customers in June.”
“Our industry partners and sponsors have a sense for the best opportunities with which to inform clients and prospects about their products and services,” said MRED CEO Russ Bergeron. “We have already seen terrific response from those deeply involved in real estate and the MLS business. I am confident that our customers are about to experience a great informational, training, and educational opportunity at MREDpalooza, the likes of which they’ve never seen.”
MRED still has sponsorship opportunities available. All MREDpalooza participants will enjoy maximum exposure to MRED’s real estate professionals.
About MREDpalooza
MREDpalooza is one of the largest MLS tech expos in the country. Taking place Tuesday, June 18, 2013, from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, Illinois, MREDpalooza will be a great opportunity for MRED’s real estate professionals to learn about a myriad of real estate products and services to enhance their businesses.
MRED is planning for several thousand attendees and scores of vendors, many of whom have already committed to attending. Product training sessions will be offered throughout the day, providing more in-depth understanding of many of the products. Those wishing to attend or exhibit at MREDpalooza are asked to visit MREDpalooza.com for registration and sponsorship information.
About MRED
Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED) is the real estate data aggregator and distributor providing the Chicagoland multiple listing service (MLS) to nearly 40,000 brokers and appraisers and 8,000 offices. MRED serves Chicago and the surrounding “collar” counties and provides property information encompassing northern Illinois, southern Wisconsin and northwest Indiana. MRED delivers over twenty products and services to its customers, complementing connectMLS™, the top-rated MLS system in the country per the latest WAV Group MLS Technology Survey. For more information please visit MREDLLC.com.
MRED CEO Bergeron Retains Spot on Inman News Honor Roll
LISLE (January 22, 2013) – At last week’s Inman Real Estate Connect® in New York City, it was announced that Russ Bergeron, Chief Executive Officer of Midwest Real Estate Data LLC (MRED), has again been selected as one of the top 100 most influential real estate leaders.
The Inman 100 is an annual list of individuals whose actions have helped change the real estate industry in the last year through their leadership, innovation, ingenuity, power and persistence. The complete list of honorees is available on www.inman.com/Inman100. Mr. Bergeron has been selected for the Inman 100 every year from 2009 through 2013.
“Russ Bergeron was brought on board because of his national profile and the influence he wields across the country,” said Rob Schaid, President of MRED. “On behalf of our leadership, we congratulate Russ and could not be more pleased that he continues to be recognized as a force in our industry.”
“I am honored to once again be recognized by Inman News,” said Mr. Bergeron. “It is gratifying that the hard work done by everyone here at MRED results in recognition from such a respected organization. I look forward to the continuation of our efforts to lead our industry forward; and to creating opportunities for all the real estate professionals served by MRED in what appears to be a recovering and dynamic real estate market.”
About MRED
Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED) is the real estate data aggregator and distributor providing the Chicagoland multiple listing service (MLS) to nearly 40,000 brokers and appraisers and 8,000 offices. MRED serves Chicago and the surrounding “collar” counties and provides property information encompassing northern Illinois, southern Wisconsin and northwest Indiana. For more information please visit www.mredllc.com
About Russ Bergeron
Please click HERE for the biography of Russ Bergeron.
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