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We are happy to share the news that Camilla Sullivan has joined us full time at Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate LLC as our very own SVP of Marketing. We have actually worked alongside Camilla for the past nine months as she was our agency’s marketing lead to help us create and kick off the brand in July.
You can read Camilla’s release on our consumer site’s media center. Read the rest of this entry »
Every organization has values, either stated or unstated. The core business values you establish are crucial in setting the tone as to how your business will operate and prosper. They establish your company’s personality, they speak to what is important to your organization. Core values do not change from time to time to suit various situations, they define your company’s culture, they allow you to hold your team accountable.
In true real estate fashion, the room began to fill with agents just minutes before the announcement was to be made. Truly, the team of Wilkins & Associates Real Estate entered the breakfast meeting with anticipation and, judging by their faces, some anxiety. They hung on every word of their leader, Tom Wilkins, and only exhaled after Sherry Chris our President and CEO, and Wendy Forsythe, our Vice President of Broker Services, presented our company to them for the first time.
Amid the flurry of post-announcement questions, all seemed calm … which made me just a little leery. You see, I alone was to remain in the Poconos for the next several days to personally deliver the tools and systems of the Better Homes and Gardens® Real Estate brand to the agents 120+ agents and management team. I was scheduled to run through seven presentations in three days. Why, you ask, would I have concerns when everything appeared fine on the surface? Because we all know how people usually accept and adapt to change.
Posted by Wendy Forsythe
Twas the night before launch–all the systems are in place,
Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate–is ready to enter the race.
The listings were all entered–online with great care,
Just waiting for consumers–to go and find them there.
The staff are all nestled–all snug in their beds,
While visions of Inman Connect–dance in their heads.
Some of you might know that part of our launch strategy involves Twitter. We have partnered with Joel Burslem and his team to Twitter at Inman Connect. I admit that, at first, I didn’t fully understand how Twitter worked and what the benefits were going to be. I became even more confused when suddenly a bunch of people sent me e-mails to let me know they were “following me” on Twitter. “How did that happen?” I asked myself.
When I went on the site, all of my followers had invited me to follow them, so I clicked on the “yes” button. I was following around 40 people. I knew a bunch of them, but not all. They started sending me messages saying things like “thanks for the follow.” Twitter has its own underground language, just like everything else.
Have you noticed lately that weekday traffic is practically nonexistent and cars move at a snail’s pace on the weekend? Vacation season is here and commuters-turned-beachcombers are headed to the sandy shores or mountain-lake resorts for some R&R.
For many of us, planning for our summer vacation began in January. We searched Google and Yahoo for the perfect place to unwind some six months down the road. We had checklists for everything - what to do, where to eat, and what to bring. We even had a contingency plan just in case Mother Nature didn’t cooperate.
I’m curious. Why is it so easy to plan vacations yet so hard to plan our business? Somehow business planning just doesn’t seem to fit anywhere into the entrepreneurial real estate agent’s DNA. Oh yes, we set financial goals and even convert the dollar goal into units. Then we go about our merry listing and selling way, hardly thinking through the process of how we’ll get from point A to point B. Sometimes we hit the number and sometimes not. But would we hit the number more often if we planned? I believe we would.
Posted by Jason Steele
In searching for a new place to live, my wife and I had a number of factors that were important to us aside from the obvious: price, taxes, lot size and beds/baths. The top three for us are schools, work commute and accessibility of public transportation.
We have children who aren’t of school age yet, but being in an area with a strong school district is important to us. So, like the web geek I am, I turned to Google to search for local school ratings sites and it pointed me to GreatSchools.net. This site is an amazing resource for comprehensive profiles with ratings for more than 120,000 schools nationwide and also includes unbiased parent reviews.
First thing this morning we issued a media advisory announcing the press conference and webcast of our formal launch, which will take place on July 23, 2008 at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco!
To get all the details click here.
See you in San Francisco!
The past several months have flown by like weeks, and our brand has come to life in so many different ways. For all of us, to launch a real estate brand from start to finish was a new experience. Fortunately, when you put the entire team together, we collectively had the right combination of experience, intelligence, energy, youth, appetite for risk, aversion to risk, creativity and guts. That part was no accident. I chose very carefully who would best be suited to create an international real estate brand like no other.
Posted by Jason Steele
As you may know from my last blog post, my family and I are in the market for a new home. I began the research process of finding an agent both on the web via Active Rain and through local referrals from friends and family in our prospective neighborhoods. We chose the agent through active rain as they happened to be much more knowledgeable and in tune with our requirements for finding a new home. The agent set up an automated email from their local MLS that would send us listings as they hit the market. In addition I went to Realtor.com, Zillow & Trulia daily just to make sure I had all of the bases covered so that the perfect house wouldn’t fall through the cracks. About a week ago a very promising home hit the market in our price range and it just seemed too good to be true. The pictures on the MLS site were plentiful, good school system, taxes were in line with our expectations and most of the all the price seemed low for the amount of property/beds/baths. There wasn’t an address listed so I went off to Trulia to see if I could figure out where in the town this home was located and sure enough there was an address. The default view is “map” and the location appeared to be ideal as it bordered a large wooded area. I zoomed in a bit and then hit the “satellite” view and that’s when things really came into focus. There appeared to be a building with 4 large round towers no more than 50 yards behind the woods in the rear of the property.
My first assumption was some sort of water treatment facility so I threw a search into Google Maps and it turns out I was pretty close, but it wasn’t water — it was sewage. After seeing Erin Brokovich I decided to pass on this house, but it got me thinking that 5 years ago I may have put an offer on it.
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Sherry Chris |
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Nicolai Kolding |
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Wendy Forsythe |
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Camilla Sullivan |
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Robert Albanese |
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Jason Steele |
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Kevin Doell |
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Paulette Costa |
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