In my “day job” as a trainer and consultant to real estate agents and brokerages, I have been researching vendors that provide IDX search tools. IDX is Internet Data Exchange and it is a set of rules that allows brokerages to display listings from other brokers on their web sites. IDX provides the ability for…
Lest you think that I am Google’s payroll (I am not, but that’s not a bad idea!) I want to tell you about a page that Google has just for you, the Real Estate Professional. You NEED to click on this link: Google Tools for Real Estate Professionals now and read every word and follow…
I was asked to complete that sentence the other day by a woman who had just received her real estate license and hadn’t yet made the choice of what brokerage to join. She wanted my take on what I would do to be successful in today’s real estate market. That’s a really good question, but…
I was reading Chris Brogan’s post on “Slicing Your Social Media Pie” over at American Express’s Open Small Business Forum on Saturday, and it got me to thinking about our business. Chris asserts that “There are three basic components to social media: listening, creating, and communicating. That’s it. Listening is how you find out what…
Last night I had the extreme good fortune to attend the Installation of Barry Zwahlen as President of the Contra Costa Association of Realtors® (CCAR). I say it was “extreme good fortune” for multiple reasons, which are too numerous to mention. But, perhaps the foremost reason is that since my wife, Diane Gilfether was the…
2009 is finally over and 2010 is here. The New Year holiday has always felt like new opportunity for me. I enter January with high hopes for the things that I want to accomplish in the year ahead and this year is no different. Many of you have journeyed with me last year as I…
If you have been following along these past 2 months (and actually taking action!) you have built a blog and you have some articles on it. And you are probably wondering where are all of your readers! Sad to say, for most of us, success at blogging is usually not an overnight phenomenon. Even though…
In the first part of this series I detailed the 6 traits of successful agents (as I se it) and in the subsequent posts I have focused on trait number 5 at least as it pertains to some of the hardware and software systems they use. In this post I want to talk some more…
Over the last three weeks I have been talking about how a real estate agent can make a living in the Web 2.0 world. We started by setting the stage, talking about phones, then computers. This week I want to talk about the software that you will need on your computer. There is a wide…
Two weeks ago I introduced this multi-part series of posts on how successful Realtors® are making a living these days. In that post I talked about the 6 traits of successful agents and the one thing that none of them do. It will be important to keep those traits in mind as we talk about…
