Real estate

The days of the single-office, generalist, residential brokerage may soon be over.  Those who survive this down market will most likely have done so because they will have made the choice between getting bigger or becoming a specialist firm, a boutique.

This is a common theme within any industry facing the kinds of historic challenges that we are.  It’s the choice between growth or specialization.  If there is little differentiation between your firm and the many others in your marketplace, there is little reason for consumers or agents to choose you over another.  Now more than ever you need to either establish a dominant market position or find your niche and own it.

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Social networking becomes less complicated when you break it into simple steps. Last week, I presented this concept at NAR to a predominately broker owner audience. As promised, I am sharing an edited version of the presentation right here.

Click here for a larger version of this slideshow.

The four categories, as we see them are:

Social Media Profiles… or more simply put, personal profiles on the various sites such as Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace. Building your profile is the first step.

Text Platforms… blogging, microbloging.  The second step is creating a platform to speak from and collaborate. WordPress and TypePad provide blogging platforms. Twitter is great for microblogging.

Visual and Imagery Platforms… add videos and photos to make your message more engaging. You Tube and Flickr bring your networking and your story to life.

Use Listening and Sharing Tools. Listen to what’s going on and spread the word. RSS, Digg are two of many tools that accomplish this.

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It’s interesting how the simplest ideas are often the most effective. Production charts are very powerful tools in the real estate environment, yet somehow many leaders pass up the opportunity to use them. In the example below, I have chosen to measure specific areas, but you can measure virtually anything that you want to, from actual production to productive activities.

Key factors in constructing production charts

1. The production chart must be highly visual, replete with color coding, numbering and any other strong visual impressions that you can come up with.
2. A production chart should also be portable so that you can bring it to office meetings, display it in the sales manager’s office or another prominent areas.
3. Perhaps draft a form like the one below, but then have a graphics company make larger versions for you to post on an office wall.

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(This is one of my longest posts ever! Good for a weekend read…)

When you are building a brand from the ground up, you can’t do it without receiving feedback. What better place to get feedback than at the annual NAR conference where you have a captive audience of some 20,000+ REALTORS® to talk to?

I have been attending this conference for at least the past 15 years.  I still remember my very first one. I just couldn’t get enough of it… the amount of information was staggering to me, the number of participants amazed me. I planned each and every session I would attend in advance, circled all of the trade show booths that were of interest, and visited them all. In later years, I began to speak at sessions rather than attend them and, for a few years, did not even make it through the tradeshow doors. Priorities change, and people get busy being busy.

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I’ve attended more industry conferences than I can readily count.  With my destination-shopper mentality, I tend to grumble a bit under my breath about the less-than-perfect efficiency of these events when I can’t just get what I want and move on.  While I believe they are necessary, I also see them as a microcosm for what is both great and frustrating about this industry so many of us call our own.

Last week in Orlando I attended both the REALTORS® Conference & Expo and a session from BloodhoundBlog Unchained.  There was no escaping the tremendous amount of excitement, enthusiasm, cooperation, collaboration, and innovation, yet I still flew home daydreaming about what I would do differently.  So here are the seven things you would find in this young curmudgeon’s perfect conference:

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Each year that I attend the National Association of REALTORS® conference, I come away with some new buzz.  The conference is a great way to tune into buzz-worthy people, topics and catch phrases.

Here are my top 5 buzz-worthy take aways from this year’s conference.

Number 5:  www.tinyurl.com will convert long urls into tiny ones. Great for those hosted virtual tours, slide shows or web commercials that have dozens of letters in the url. Just go to this website and change the url to the street address or something else more meaningful. (For example: http://tinyurl.com/NARBuzz)

Number 4:  www.ping.fm will update your status on multiple social networking sites. Talk about one stop shopping!

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I’ve spent 15 years working for Fortune 100 corporations all around the world - technology, systems integration, outsourcing, management consulting… I’ve been through market downturns and times of uncertainty. I’ve had to manage corporate strategies when the market was shrinking and there was less to go around — suddenly, partners becoming competitors, and only the fittest surviving.

While some of this is true within real estate today, I must say what an impression was made upon me by the speeches, and the dinner conversation at the NAR Power Broker Dinner in Orlando, last Friday night.  In a ballroom filled with industry leading competitors, invited because they are the best in the business, I expected to see this crowd of the ‘fittest who had survived’ eyeing each other suspiciously and keeping to their own tables.

I could not have been more wrong. The atmosphere was more like that of a high school reunion.  The genuine friendship between leaders across different brands and brokerages was real and rose above the din of glasses clinking. There was a palpable sense of teaming together, so that the industry might come through this challenging time, rather than a focus on the success of individual businesses.

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Last week, I had the pleasure of welcoming Gloor Realty Company to the Better Homes and Gardens® Real Estate network. Located in Oak Park, Illinois, Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate Gloor Realty Company is a shining example of everything you hope for in a partner when building a real estate franchise network.

Announcement day is always a mix of anticipation and nervousness. The Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate team waited in a separate room as Rich Gloor Jr. announced to his team that he had made the decision to franchise with our brand. Then he welcomed those of us from the brand to join the group. For me, this moment is always a little unsettling. You can’t help but wonder how the agents at Gloor Realty Company are feeling about the sudden news that they are now a part of a franchise system. You can imagine my relief when I was greeted by a room full of smiling faces.

Rich continued with his presentation explaining why he and his leadership team made the decision to franchise with Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate. He discussed the marketing advantages that the relationship offered to the local agents, the tools that would allow them to become even more competitive in their market, and the value of the Better Homes and Gardens brand name.

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What an agenda.

This morning at 10:00 a.m. Sherry will be giving a keynote address at the Unchained Orlando Marketing Conference sponsored by the Bloodhound Blog guys. That’s taking place at the Crowne Plaza Hotel at the Orlando Airport.

Later in the day, Sherry will running a program, “Building and Managing a Network of Networks,”  at the NAR Conference. That presentation takes place from 2:30 – 4:00 in Room W330D in the West building. Sherry’s going to take the audience from the “tried and true” to the entirely new world of social media networking.

To top it off, this evening at the RISMedia PowerBroker dinner, Sherry has the honor of introducing one of the greatest Olympic athletes of all time, 9-time GOLD medalist, Mark Spitz.

Additionally, we’ve got a new spot in the Realogy booth #2816.

As Sherry would say, “Awesome!”

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Today we released the results of our “Living Green” consumer survey. The survey has been nine months in the making as we had it done in conjunction with the Better Homes and Gardens “Living Green” 15-city home show tour. At each stop along the way, we had pollsters interview visitors to the exhibit. As you can see in the video above, there were some pretty savvy people hosting the exhibit. Steven Whittle did an outstanding job “representing” green and all that the exhibit had to offer people in the way of raising their awareness regarding this important issue.

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