Realty World Northern California & Nevada

Hard times means hard work, and Realty World Northern CA knows that this means longer hours and increased competition for you. In order to make your life a little easier we’ve brought on two new staff members who are here to help you by providing training, materials, and support on a variety of topics.

Social Media & Marketing Director, Erin Robbins, joins Realty World Northern CA with years of marketing and public relations experience on both the east and west coasts. With experience at Silicon Valley startups such as ShareThis and Optimost, and corporate giants including Cisco and SAS, Erin brings a variety of skills to the organization. Erin’s function at Realty World will include implementation and training on social media such as Facebook, Twitter and blogging; marketing and development of Design Center and Presentation Builder tools; and working with agents and brokers in the field to make the most of their Realty World franchise. Erin lives in San Francisco and in her spare time enjoys training for the upcoming NYC Marathon, traveling and hanging out with her bulldogs. You can follow Erin on Twitter at @texasgirlerin, on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/erinnrobbins and her new Realty World blog at http://ErinRobbinsBlog.com

Director of Online Education, Ron Dillon, comes to Realty World with an extensive background in software and business development. He works to enable clients with the latest technologies and help them grow their business. In the past, Ron worked at ProSoft Engineering, Inc. with clients that included Sony, Panasonic, Hitachi, and Apple Computers. At Ficus Computer Engineering, Ron helped develop unique RFID implementations, managed offshore development teams, and participated in development projects with HP and TellMe Networks. He will be complete his degree in information systems security and minor in intelligence analysis in 2010. At Realty World, Ron will provide online and in-person training on a variety of products and services, as well as providing training on social media and many other upcoming real estate trends. Ron lives in Mountain House, CA with his wife, dog, and cat, and enjoys day trips to the surrounding wine regions, as well as geeking-out on his collection of computers. You can follow Ron on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/ron.dillon3 or on Twitter at @rondillonrwnc.

Ron and Erin are already hard at work, so look for exciting contributions to come from the teamwork of Erin and Ron along with the existing excellent members of Realty World Northern California’s staff!

James Dwiggins
Chief Strategy Officer
james.dwiggins@rwnc.net

…and the best part is you won’t have to go buy a ticket at the movie theater for this because on August 14th, our annual convention will be taking place in Pleasanton, California and it’s absolutely FREE! This will be an event nobody will want to miss!

Carole Rodoni will discuss how she grew Alain Pinel Realtors from a fresh new company to one of the premier companies in the United States. She’ll also give her perspective on how to enter the luxury market and handle marketing, advertising and branding, as well as touch on how to attract today’s consumers.

Kevin Boer will facilitate a Blogger’s Panel Session that’s certain to create enthusiasm. Four blogging experts will talk about how they turned their blogs into money making machines and share with the audience how they can do it themselves.

Heather Mirjahangir Fernandez will give an introduction to Trulia.com, the free products and services they provide to real estate professionals, and how to use them. She’ll also give an overview of the Realty World blog syndication program to Trulia Voices and explain how it can drive more traffic to real estate websites.

Attorney, Zachary Roberts, will present a thorough and enlightening discussion on risks and opportunities with loan modifications and short sales and how to break into this growing market while watching out for risks.

Finally, triathlete Erica Davis will share her extraordinary account of her accomplishments and how she wound up paralyzed and wheelchair bound. Her touching story and journey toward recovery motivates audiences everywhere about overcoming life’s challenges.

If THAT isn’t enough, the day also provides an opportunity to win spectacular prizes, like one of three cruise vacations, an iPhone, a Garmin GPS System, an e-Pro Registration, and more!

This event is open to all real estate agents and brokers. Of course Realty World members from all over Northern California and Nevada will be in attendance and if you just want to find out more about Realty World or come to listen in on these truly amazing guest speakers, consider yourself invited. Just contact our Member Services Department to secure your seat at 800-460-2288 or via email at MemberService@rwnc.net. Seating is limited so don’t wait!

You’ll be giving the event a “two thumbs up” rating… guaranteed!

James Dwiggins
Chief Strategy Officer
james.dwiggins@rwnc.net

Since last 4th of July to now, there certainly have been a tremendous amount of changes, sacrifices and new challenges in this country, in our businesses and our personal lives. And, there are certainly going to be many more before things turn around. However, on this 4th of July, we must remember to put all of our own personal issues aside and celebrate the accomplishments of all Americans throughout history, and even now, who have helped create this great country. We need to remind ourselves of the 56 men who signed the “Declaration of Independence” and gave us this incredible freedom we have today.  We must commemorate all servicemen and servicewomen who have paid the ultimate sacrifice and continue to so we can sleep at night without fear; so that we can continue to be entrepreneurial and prosper; and more importantly, enjoy the freedoms in making our own decisions in life. Remember this as you celebrate Independence Day with family and friends!
 
I’ll leave you with this quote:  “Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.” – Albert Einstein

Enjoy Your 4th of July Weekend!

James Dwiggins
Chief Strategy Officer
James.Dwiggins@rwnc.net

As many of you know, we recently launched an aggressive move towards online video. Our partnership with 415Video has been amazing to say the least. In less than two weeks, we have already placed 50 listings online with syndication to many of the top video portals including YouTube.

I recently watched a video done by a long time Realty World member, John Pinto – (Realty World – John V. Pinto & Associates). To me, it defines what Realtors offer consumers in the way of marketing, expertise and professionalism… something our industry gets questioned about on a daily basis. All I have to say is John just set the bar at a whole new level. I can’t imagine a consumer in today’s world questioning the kind of marketing and exposure that John now offers all his clients.

Take a look for yourself:

James Dwiggins
Chief Strategy Officer
James.Dwiggins@rwnc.net

I’ve seen most of you over the past several months at different functions that I’ve held. As all of you know, I’m a very candid speaker and I come from a belief structure that anything can be done no matter what obstacles are in front of you. That doesn’t mean it won’t be harder or take twice as much work to do it, but if you truly want to achieve something, you and you alone will end up being the reason for success or failure. For six months now, I have been hammering into everyone’s heads that our online presence is one of the largest provided by any real estate company in the U.S. I have been stating that you should go out in the field and use our new National Listings Distribution Program sheets we provide all of you, and get it in front of every consumer you can. We all know that just about every consumer in the U.S. who owns a house wants their home listed on as many real estate websites they can find. Consumers do a ton more research about real estate then they did even five years ago. If you just show potential sellers how we market properties on the Internet, YOU WILL GET BUSINESS! The question, once again, comes down to: “Are you showing them?”

Let me prove my point. One of our brokers sent me an email a few days ago stating that he farms specific neighborhoods with postcards that he created specifically about National Listings Distribution Program and how, if they list with him, he will give them online exposure that no other real estate company can compete with, thereby providing a greater chance of bringing in more buyers and potentially selling their home much faster. Here is a quote from his email: “I have listed and sold approximately 7 listings in this neighborhood in the last 10 months since I started farming it.” That is a pretty amazing number considering none of them are foreclosures! You see, all he is doing is taking business away from his competition. Instead of seeing more competitor signs in the neighborhood, you just see more Realty World ones! In addition to his success, he forces his agents to actually walk neighborhoods with the same postcards and this is another quote from his email: “So far since we started this a week ago, four of my agents are already working on clients generated from these postcard handouts.”

The moral to the story… the real estate market is only as dead as you make it. If you want to do more business, go figure out a way to take the business away from your competition, or simply use the one we just gave you. If you take on this philosophy, you will have more transactions this year than you know what to do with.

James Dwiggins
Chief Strategy Officer
James.Dwiggins@rwnc.net

Is print finally dead?

For some time now, I have been amazed at how fast video has grown on the Internet. Just about every major website uses video more and more to get information out to the public, faster and more interactively. What has also amazed me is how slow real estate has picked up on using video as a marketing tool for both getting the listing and attracting potential buyers.

I did some research last week about what it would cost to video a home for a “potential seller” and the average cost came out to $250. I’ve been in this business for a long time and know that most realtors might think that’s too expensive and would pass it over. However, I also know that over 90% of sellers select their agent over others when video marketing is offered. Well, let’s put it this way… 90% of Generations X & Y would; a growing demographic who are now over 50% of your customers. You see, with video rapidly becoming the most common thing Internet users are looking for, these generations know that the Internet is the most powerful tool to sell their home. Think about it. If you visit MSNBC, CNN, or FoxNews, video is pretty much all they promote on their websites anymore. They wouldn’t be doing this if it weren’t the direction consumers are moving on the Internet.

Here are some really interesting statistics about YouTube from March of last year that I bet you didn’t know which makes them smaller than what they are now.

So my question to all of you is would you spend $250 on a listing if you could beat out your competition even 50% of the time? Or better yet, what’s stopping us from moving toward video as a marketing tool?

James Dwiggins
Chief Strategy Officer
James.Dwiggins@rwnc.net

I was at the San Francisco Association of REALTORS® installation dinner last night where Barbara Corcoran was the main speaker. If you haven’t had a chance to see her speak, I highly recommend you do so. I would have loved to work for her and learn everything she knows. It’s not everyday that you meet someone like Barbara, who builds a real estate business from nothing to a company that owns the New York real estate market, and then sells it to NRT for some ungodly amount of money. Since then she has written several books on how she grew her company, which I highly recommend you buy and read from cover to cover at least five times. If you’re having trouble finding inspiration or direction in your company, or life for that matter, this is the book to fix it. 

During her speech last night, she posed a question to the audience that caused complete silence. It was this: “When has there been a time in the real estate industry where money is cheap to borrow and prices of homes are also cheap?” She had a really good point… because history shows that usually those two combinations aren’t in line like they are now. She went on to say that Realtors need to be doing a much better job of articulating this to buyers. Use graphs, charts, retrieve past history of records to show it, but do whatever it takes to get buyers off the fence and realize that now is actually the best time to buy real estate. Think about it… buyers waiting on the fence are making a huge mistake because when these two factors are not in line, they will be priced out of the market. Either prices go up, or interest rates go up. And inevitably, one of these two things will occur. Our entire industry has become mute in the world, dominated by mass media and negativity, and we have got to do everything possible to flood the market with knowledge they need to be hearing. The beautiful part is that you don’t have to sell someone; rather, simply educate them. If you do the math, it all makes sense. So, ask yourself this question… What have I done this week to help buyers realize these two factors are not always going to be the same?

James Dwiggins
Chief Strategy Officer
Jamesd@rwnc.net