Book cover via Amazon

I’m tough to buy gifts for. It drove my wife and son nuts. But they have always racked their brains and come up with some outstanding things for birthdays or Father’s day. This year my son and daughter-in-law got off easy.

Knowing how involved I had become in Blogging and social media, they bought me three terrific books for Father’s day. The New Influencers by Paul Gillin, What No One Ever Tells You About Blogging and Podcasting by Ted Demopoulos, and Blogging Heroes by Michael A. Banks. I started on Blogging Heroes first.

Blogging Heroes is described as a set of interviews with “30 of the worlds’ top bloggers”. The book was fascinating to me because of the diversity of the people interviewed and the blogs they ran. I’ll spend more time talking about that another time.

One of the first interviews is with Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine and author of the Long Tail. In it Chris says “There is no one blogosphere. There is an infinite number of blogospheres. My 220 feeds are not your 220 feeds”.

In our business blogs seem to fall into a number of categories. There are the peer to peer blogs, the vendor to Real estate professional blogs, the real estate professional to consumer blogs, and some consumer to consumer blogs. Each one of them has a different message for their reader, because each of the writers has a different ax to grind, and each set of blogs creates a different blogosphere that may not give any credence to , or even acknowledge the existence of the others.

In the peer to peer arena, there are examples like the blog you are reading, Teresa Boardman’s Real Estate Weenie, and of course the large players at AgentGenius (winner’s of Inman’s 2008 Innovators Award) and BloodhoundBlog. All of them are written by active real estate professionals, though AgentGenius and BloodhoundBlog are both written by multiple authors. Each of these blogs have unique personalities. Reading each of them would provide the reader with a different perception of the real estate industry, its key players, and the roles and motivations of real estate’s professional organizations.

With the exception of the views and opinions in this blog, all of these blogs have some bias generated by the position of the authors and their experience in the real estate industry. All of them (current author excepted) have opinions that are based on their experience in the industry, and unless you have held every position in every company and professional organization, that leads to a bias built around the limits of your experience. For example, a real estate professional may not truly understand the consumer’s point of view, and their stresses and issues if they have never bought a home. An agent who has never owned a company may not understand the challenges facing the owner of a brokerage. Some one who has not participated in a professional organization may not have any idea of the actual workings or motivation of that organization. But still they write – and pontificate in some instances about what they think is wrong, or unfair, or needs to be corrected.

There’s part of me that thinks that’s OK. Everyone has the right to an opinion, and to voice it. And they don’t even need to be right (though I prefer to be personally). However the problem comes in when the posts get read. The reader may not have the knowledge to dismiss an inaccurate statement, or to differentiate between a well supported opinion and an unfounded one. All too often something is taken as gospel because its on the Internet and therefore it must be right. And that’s where knowing who’s in your blogosphere becomes crucial.

You can choose to live in a blogosphere that is full of rhetoric and bombast, where the light shines all to infrequently. Or you can choose to live in a blogosphere where positions are supported by facts and discourse can lead you to change your mind, or you can change the minds of others if you make your point well. Me, I know where I choose to live.

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• Resources for Bloggers

transformational technology Originally uploaded by Will Lion

When we get involved in social media to build our businesses, often there is that last Century thinking behind the 21st Century technology. We try to determine who we are in a vacuum rather then seeing the world through the eyes of our consumer.

Some of it is inevitable. The prejudgements we make because we know that we come from a good place in trying to help the consumer, without acknowledging the lack of trust the might have because we assume the trust rather then earning it.

The first job of any salesperson is to find out what they can do to satisfy the needs perceived by the customer or client rather than the needs as perceived by the salesperson. And we need to use our Social skills in a technological setting to help the consumer know us by satisfying their need for information and direction even before we meet – Not how to build our database (that’s so 1990s)

Hopefully, if you’re reading this post, you read my earlier post from Inman Connect in San Francisco earlier this week. That was sort a neat tech moment, written on my phone, a Treo 755, during the conference in the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

It was just one of several exciting moments for me, starting with meeting Teresa Boardman the minute I walked into REbar Camp to listening to Kris Berg who is as smart and funny as she is pretty, or finally meeting Benn and Lani Rosales.

Add to that days of meeting and listening to bloggers from all over the country like Jonathan Dalton and Jay Thompson from Phoenix, or Kelley Koehler (AKA Housechick) and her husband Chris, or Missy Caulk and Maureen Francis, Andy Kauffman and Vicki Moore .

All of these people have in common a relationship through AgentGenius a national real estate blog started by Benn and Lani. The blog, a family enterprise has been nurtured and grown through their efforts and in a relatively short period of time has become nationally recognized. Earlier this year, I began reading the blog and shortly after, I was invited to start writing. I enjoyed the blog, I found that it was itneresting and diversified. There were articles on business models, ethics, staging, technology, news, and a wide range of topics. There was industry news as well. It was on this blog that the News of the NAR- DOJ settlement was first broken to the real estate community.

Like anyone, I appreciated the writing and the writers at AgentGenius because they were who I was familiar with, and who, I became friendly with over spaces of thousands of miles. And though I didn’t take the quality of writing for granted, I did become accustomed to it.

Today; the following appeared in Inman News;

The Inman Innovator Awards honor forward-thinking technologies, Web services, business models and innovators in online real estate, brokerage and media companies….

The Agent Genius blog took honors as the “Most Innovative Blog.” Agent Genius is a popular multi-author real estate blog that is designed by and for real estate agents. The company features posts about new real estate technologies and business models, as well as discussions of industry topics and trends.

Congratulations to all my fellow geniuses, and especially to Benn and Lani Rosales for their vision and their tireless efforts to build a place worth visiting.

I already did a version of this post on AgentGenius which turned into a rant on service. But the nice thing about posting to more then on place is that I can take a single idea and expound on it from different perspectives.

 This perspective is the resistance I believe the majority of people have to adopting new technology. Not that everyone doesn’t want the newest camera, or cell phone, or remote controlled home theater, but technology that changes the way we do some fundamental things.

Buying and selling our stuff for example.

Driving to a property this morning, I passed the store pictured above. Its a business model that represents this resistant thought process.

People used to sell their stuff to other people they knew, or put an add in the local newspaper. Then our society became more mobile, and with the advent of the family drive, swap meets and yard sales became the cheap easy way to sell our stuff to strangers.

But when the Internet became the new place for people to cruise around, EBay was born, and people started to sell their stuff on the Internet, there was a new easy place to do business.

Now buying on Ebay is simple, you sign up for a free account, shop by looking at pictures, and pay with your credit card. Just like buying from a catalogue (an old time honored method of buying stuff), but selling stuff is harder. You need to take photos, set up an account and become a trusted seller. You need to accept payment through various sources, and pack and ship things to strangers. For many people, wayyy too much drama.

Enter “Sell it On EBay” a business model where you take your stuff to a physical location and they sell it for you on EBay. Sort of a virtual consignment shop. Consignment shops, if you’re not familiar are stores where you took your stuff, and they sold it for you to people who walked into their store. Sounds like its the same process doesn’t it?

Web 2.0 is sort of the same situation in my opinion. We use websites, to advertise properties and disseminate information to consumers who might wish to buy a home or an investment.  Not too different from real estate magazines, or their predecessors, the real estate classified ad. Each move forward makes the ad shinier and possibly more effective, but they’re all ads.

Social media is the newest and latest way for professionals of all sorts to establish credibility and display their professional knowledge. There are volumes of electronic publications discussing this new wave of real estate professionals, but the task is an old one – meeting consumers and positioning yourself so they will choose you when they are ready to act.

Before twitter, we went to social gatherings in person to network. Cocktail hours, local taverns, church meetings, or the Diner where everyone in the neighborhood met for breakfast before work.  Blogs? They used to be newsletters that we mailed or distributed to people in our neighborhood. E-Flyers? Too obvious for me to explain. LinkedIn the electronic equivalent to the business card exchange.

But even with all of these electronic methods of meeting new people and exposing yourself to the consumer, many real estate professionals avoid these venues, because, like the seller on EBay, learning the new techniques is outside their comfort zone. Or at least it is now. If the social media arena matures and stabi8lizes, more and more late adopters will participate, and then the question will be – what old thing has been re-invented now?

As people in the real estate industry talk about blogs, it seemed to me that agents would find it easier to start blogging about who they are and what they know if they didn’t have to learn it all on their own, and maintain a rapid pace of writing from the very start. In a recent post at AgentGenius  there was some conversation about BINOs (Bloggers In Name Only). People that create a blog, but don’t do sufficient writing or promotion to maintain the blog and achieve enough recognition from the consumer and other professionals to make the Blog a success in terms of consistent readership.  It would seem that part of the problem is that there is a lot to learn in publishing a blog, unless it is satisfying some literary compulsion to write on a daily basis.

 My experience was different. While I was a BINO with an abortive ActiveRain Blog, and a post or two written on a Blogger platform, my real writing experience started with Agent Genius, through commenting, and a gracious invitation from Lain Anglin-Rosales and Benn Rosales to write for AgentGenius. AgentGenius,  though certainly not a place for most people to start writing, is a great place to write for me because there is a sense of community, a flow of ideas from different places. Differing points of view, differing styles of writing, different areas of expertise. Ideas flow to write a new post from one you have read or a conversation that started between two other people.

Though much of our job as real estate professionals is still the same as it has been for years,Social Media is obviously the newest communication frontier for  technologically comfortable consumers. Because of that it is important to have the agents at CENTURY 21 Advantage Gold participating in that arena.  The question was how to accomplish that.

There were a number of challenges. One was the unfamiliarity of our agents with Blogging. We don’t live in Virginia or Arizona or California, or St. Paul (home to Teresa Boardman and BoomerJack Boardman) where Blogging is old hat and more generally accepted because of the experience and visibility of well known participants in New Media. So the question was, how do we encourage our agents to Blog and help them reach effective standards while presenting an accurate representation of both our company and our agents?

Having started using WordPress, the solution presented itself in the ability to add contributors or authors to individual blogs. And so C21AGVoices was born. We asked several technologically advanced agents to participate and several managers and partners. Each was asked to write at least one post each week, hoping  that as the Blog gained more readership within the company, new participants would present themselves.

The basics standards of the posts are simple, and are maintained by reviewing the Blogs before posting. This is less for the purpose of moderating the content then it is to help the new writers achieve style, be consistent in spelling and grammar, helping with addition of graphics and educating the fledgling authors in the perks and quirks of using Wordpress. Comments are not moderated at this point, andthere is no plan to do so, though  that may change as the blog grows. Then again, it may not.  If the contributors like the process, they may begin to publish their own Blogs and will grow in the world of Social Media. If that happens, the project has been succesful. If that does not happen, but our company had a Social Media platform for agents to utilize, that is also a desirable conclusion.

C21AGVoices may be one of the first Blogs of its type, at least in the real estate industry because it is created be the company rather then a third party, and was built like Jay Thompson’s  company blog (apology to Jay but I couldn’t find the post announcing it, so this link is to his personal blog).  Please take the time to stop by and meet CENTURY 21 Advantage Gold’s Bloggers, and provide your input here. Its an experiment in progress and your help, questions and ideas are all welcome!

Photo by KIWI NZ

I got an email earlier this week from one of my Partners.

“Would you suggest defending our listing? Check out Philly Blog – the blog is 2040 St Albans. The blog poster was a previous buyer in a failed transaction. The home inspection revealed defects. The seller was willing to correct most but not everything. The deal fell apart last week.
Bruce had an open house there this weekend and a neighbor told him about the recent posting trashing the listing. “

I called my partner and we talked about the property. He indicated that this buyer’s agreement had failed because the buyer and seller could not agree on which repairs requested by the home inspector were to be made at the seller’s expense. He also told me that the buyer was still circling around , possibly hoping that the seller would reconsider and make the additional repairs he wanted. We speculated about whether this was a strategy on the part of the buyer to discourage other potential purchasers’ from looking at the home so that they could renegotiate without fear of competition.

I have printed the post below. Before reading it, you should know that this is an area of Older homes (100 years or more) which is located near a major teaching hospital, in an area that is very popular with young professionals.

The remarks from the MLS read as follows:

Public:Great total rehab in the Graduate Hospital area.New brick front with window flower boxes,steel front door and new windows.Enter into a living room with a gas fireplace with a stunning cherry wood mantel, bamboo HARDWOOD floors, recessed lighting throughout.Kitchen has granite counter-tops with a breakfast bar, stainless steel, refrigerator, oven,cook top and dishwasher.Slate tile back-splash,beautiful contemporary kitchen cabinets, track lighting with under counter spot lights.Separate dining room with a service bar/window to the kitchen. Powder room with pedestal sink finished in travertine tiles.Large wooden deck with stockade fence and flower bed complete the lower level.Second floor has been changed to a more useful floor plan consisting of 2 bedrooms, an office/den/nursery.Bedrooms have built in closets with shelves,baskets and hanger poles.Full bathroom with his and hers oval vessel sinks, cabinets and a sky light.Laundry room with washer and dryer located on 2nd floor for convenience.All NEW mechanicals.

Her is a link to pictures of the property on an IDX site (though if you would like to buy the property, please call the listing agent Bruce Stranix at  215-465-1400  I’m sure he would appreciate it). Which shows, I think a pretty nice property.

I went and read the post which read;

My fiance and I were looking at a house at 2040 St Albans. It looks very nice on the inside, hardwood floors, recessed lighting, etc, etc. We put a bid down, worked through some negotiations, and had the house inspected. This is when the fairy tale ended. There was so much wrong with the house, our inspector (of 35 years) said that “although I’ve never said this before, I highly recommend you don’t move in here unless they fix everything on my report.”

The Seller initially agreed to fix everything, then after a day or so agreed to fix everything but 2 items, then, once we got it in writing, the Seller decided there were now FOUR items she refused to fix and she wouldn’t drop the price of the house either. We quickly decided we didn’t want to deal with her anymore and terminated our offer.

The reason I am posting this is not for the bad press for the Seller, it’s a lovely house. However, I HIGHLY recommend you listen to your inspector if you reach this point. There were SEVERAL GLARING issues with the house that the Seller had simply skipped over while rehabbing it (probably hoping they would continue unnoticed).

Anyways, if you are looking at the house and want more information, please PM me. I can even provide you with our inspection report so you can confirm the repairs have been made.”

Now the house is priced almost $10,000 less then a comparable house located two doors away. Roughly 20 feet. And as you can see from the photos in the link above the property is pretty attractive. And though the post is not incredibly inflammatory, it is perhaps more subtly damaging since it doesn’t discuss what repairs the owner didn’t want to make, nor why a home inspector would be providing advice on purchasing or not purchasing a home. I mean I could understand a home inspector saying, ” This home is unsafe if this repair is not made” but that’s a lot different from “although I’ve never said this before, I highly recommend you don’t move in here unless they fix everything on my report.” Why would he care who made a repair?

So the questions in my mind, which I hope some readers can clarify are

1. Do you think a post like this is damaging to the seller or is this a case of “no publicity is bad publicity unless they spell my name wrong”?
2. Was this consumer trying to perform a public service or was his post a self-serving strategy?
3. Do you think this is a good strategy for this buyer?
4. Why didn’t he specify the repair issues if they were so important?
5. Should posts like this be moderated by the host, and if so how?
6. Does the post deserve a response?
7. What type of response should that be?

Currently, we’re going to leave this alone and see what happens. I think the property speaks for itself, and any new consumer will have a home inspection of their own, and draw their own conclusions. Hopefully people will call the office if they read this and our agents will be able to discuss with them what the real situation is.

This is a new one for me , and I would love your input.

Today, Inman News announced their 11th Annual Innovator Awards finalists.

In the category of Blogging the finalists were;

Blog
1000Watt Blog
AgentGenius
Big Picture Blog
FBS Blog
Homegain Real Estate Blog

It is not amazing to me that Benn Rosales and Lani Anglin-Rosales achieved such recognition so rapidly, nor that Inman recognized the quality of the writers at AgentGenius. It does however amaze me that they managed to achieve such recognition with me as a contributor.  Thanks to all of the other Geniuses for not letting me slow you down!

Who Needs a Second Life?

I don’t need a program called “Second Life”. I’ve tried it but I just don’t “get it”. I know I can fly, but I keep bumping into things when I try. I’m not interested in trying to be a different body type or sex on screen. Not because I am not interested in adventures, that just doesn’t constitute an adventure to me. I’m not interested in buying virtual real estate, because I want to buy real real estate. And until they can figure out how to get to taste the virtual chocolate, I would rather order my Sundaes in first life, even if that means that I have to get on the treadmill to pay for it.

A thought occurs to me for a new virtual reality game. You eat here, and if your avatar works out, you don’t gain weight. Or maybe we could set things up so you drink all night with your friends and your Avatar makes bad decisions and gets hungover-Now I’ll bet people would line up for days to play that game!

But I have a Second Set of Friends

All of that having been said. I spend a ton of time with people who (in the words of Teresa Boardman ) live in my computer. Thanks to Digby and Twhirl and Outlook there are constantly little boxes popping up and bells chiming on my computer with notes from or about people that I never met yet feel as if I know.

They are creative, and funny, sharing photos and quips from all over the country. They are supportive, sharing their experience in new media, and their strategies working in the real estate business and the challenges with their friends and families. Even while writing this, I had to break to read a post Entitled Share The Love  written by Danie Rothamel. And I can go on and on about these people , most of whom I never met,

So How does this Translate?

When I was younger in the business, I remember seeing the name of a local REALTOR published in a National Magazine. I was really impressed that I knew someone who was receiving that kind of attention. Today, I am in constant contact with this group of forward thinking people who are becoming media stars to other REALTORS, and consumers.

As a newcomer to the group , I found out a couple of things that I now believe to be true;

1. People’s personality, good or bad, comes through when they interact over the computer
2. People’s sense of community is as strong in the computer as it is outside the computer
3. People who are your  friends in the computer will rush to defend you if you’re attacked
4. Some people in the computer, actually sound like they write when you meet them!
5. When you meet the people outside the computer, they are often exactly as you thought they were. (see my post on MovePhilly for an explanation of this one)

So I now have a great group of people who are supportive, helpful, articulate, and advancing their businesses while they blaze the way for the profession. Of course, if you’re reading this, you’re already on the way to finding them.

Blogging is new to me

Well, sort of. I’ve been blogging for a little while now on AgentGenius as a contributor. But that’s a blogging community so that isn’t totally my responsibility. And I have been “practicing”on Blogger with a fledgling effort called MovePhilly, but I really wasn’t sure what I was doing there.  I felt like there should be a purpose to the blog. Some need to communicate on my part or some perceived need by the potential readership.

I knew what I was doing on AgentGenius. It’s an Industry Blog. The readers (I felt) were mostly real estate professionals or members of related industries who spoke to each other about the issues and concerns they had about their jobs, their professions, technology, Social Media, and the real estate market. Some of the writers are agents and they write about the tools of the trade. Some provide tips and techniques. Some writers have backgrounds in mortgage or technology, so they write about new applications and economic issues. And all of them have blogs of their own.

Why Do We Blog?

So when I started writing there I would link back to other people’s blogs to see what they wrote about. Jim Duncanwrites about Charlottesville, VA where he works and lives, adding industry commentary as he wishes. Jay Thompson plots to take over the Universe one step at a time by selling real estate in Phoenix where he works. Chris Griffith writes about whatever please her in Florida, and Ines Hedegus-Garcia writes about La Vida Loca in her Miamism blog. The business purpose of these blogs are obvious. To create a voice to be heard by their potential customer base, allowing consumers to learn about them in a non-threatening manner, while increasing their visibility to the on-line consumer.

What is not so obvious, until you read them for a while or follow them on Twitter is that they are also finding creative self-expression in this “business” tool. Teresa Boardman is well known for her photographic efforts chronicling life and community in St. Paul Minnesota. Chris Griffith is clicking away in Florida, with some outstanding results. People write about things that are important to them, or puzzle them , or new finds that they want to share with their professional community. But one and all, they have found clear and compelling voices to express themselves.

So What is my voice?

Me, I run a company. While I like home buyers and sellers, and want to provide good information to them, my interests are more about the real estate industry. I’m passionate about being a REALTOR. I love buying and selling real estate. I love teaching and coaching. I love testifying in court (yes I’m an expert witness) or consulting about industry trends.  And I love technology and toys. So I think that’s what I’m going to talk about here. I think, that in doing that, I just might find my voice.

Stick around and let me know if you think I found it.

Before I start, I want to make a few commitments to anyone who finds this post.

I will not post information without confirmation or attribution.

I will try to provide as much useful information as possible.

I will try to keep this interesting (as much for myself as for my readers – whoever he or she may be)

I will attempt not to moderate comments, though I will reserve the right to modify this policy as I see how that plays out. I do believe in free speech, but I also believe that it is irresponsible to yell “Fire” in a crowded theater.

I will seek out contrasting (and possibly conflicting) viewpoints, and will always try to to treat the writers with respect.

I am tempted to make this list much longer (I sometimes get verbose as you’ll learn) But lLet’s see how this works first!