After the holiday season has passed, real estate leaders from around the country will kick off the new year at Inman News’ Real Estate Connect event in New York City.
The real estate conference is now only a month away. It will be held Jan. 12-14, 2011, at the New York Marriott Marquis hotel in Times Square. About 1,500 industry notables — agents, brokers, executives, marketers and techies — are expected to attend. Inman News marks its 15th year of Real Estate Connect conferences in 2011.
Real estate franchise giant Realogy is based just an hour outside New York City in Parsippany, N.J. For the first time, a panel at the conference will feature all five CEOs from Realogy’s residential franchises: Sherry Chris of Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate; Rick Davidson of Century 21 Real Estate; Mike Good of Sotheby’s International Realty Affiliates; Jim Gillespie of Coldwell Banker Real Estate; and Charlie Young of ERA Franchise Systems.
In a separate panel, executives from Manhattan’s largest brokerages — Prudential Douglas Elliman, The Corcoran Group and Halstead Realty — will discuss their own real estate market and highlight trends that could impact the rest of the country.
Among the other speakers this year is David H. Stevens, assistant secretary for housing at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and commissioner of the Federal Housing Administration. Stevens is former president and chief operating officer of Long & Foster Cos. He will talk one-on-one with Inman News Publisher Bradley Inman.
At a separate session, Inman will also discuss making blog content profitable with Lockhart Steele, founder of real estate blog network Curbed. Curbed’s neighborhood-focused blog sites feature quirky, often celebrity-related, real estate trends and receive about 1.2 million visitors per month, according to audience analytics company Quantcast.
Among the technologists speaking at this year’s conference is Doug Imbruce, founder and CEO of Qwiki, a startup that takes search results and turns them into clickable, one-minute video clips about a particular topic. Qwiki recently won the grand prize at TechCrunch Disrupt, a startup conference hosted by tech blog TechCrunch.
This year’s "Connect Tech" workshop will include sessions such as "APIs, APIs, APIs — Everything you need to know to sex up your website with data"; "Tablet mania — What it means for real estate: Buyers, sellers, and developers"; and "Designing great experiences: The unsung art of user interface design."
Another panel will feature the heads of at least three major online real estate companies: Pete Flint, CEO of Trulia; Spencer Rascoff, CEO of Zillow.com; and Errol Samuelson, president of Realtor.com. They will talk about servicing broker and agent partners, strategies to engage consumers, and how to turn leads into profits in 2011.
On Tuesday, Jan. 11, Agent Reboot, a one-day event exclusively for real estate agents, will kick off a 24-city tour. Agent Reboot has been retooled with new sessions and speakers after its 12-city tour this year. The latest speakers to sign up for the event are sisters Samantha Kleier-Forbes and Sabrina Kleier-Morgenstern, stars of HGTV’s hit show "Selling New York."
Both are executive vice presidents at Manhattan brokerage Gumley Haft Kleier and will share advice on how to survive and thrive in a competitive real estate market.
