My Projects
RETSO preview – Empowering agents 2.0
I am Speaking on Thursday March 25th at RE Tech South to brokers about how to empower agents to better use technology. Obviously a topic I care about and think about everyday at M and HQ. I put together a vid on my thoughts as I am building the presentation today.
Operations, bug killing, and growth
We have been expanding over the last year as a company. New products, HQ IDX plugin, custom website design, expanding M Realty to Seattle and Orange County CA, etc. One of the biggest challenges has become balancing new development, maintaining existing product and scaling.
We have come up with a simple model for evaluating our organization and its components.
The first priority is to establish stable operation of whats working and generating revenue. The components are placed into the “Operational Mode” section. Thankfully we have very good operations people.
After operations we focus on New ideas, Bugs and Scaling.
Ideas – New ideas and enhancements. We have no lack of ideas. we work to collect them and spend a fair amount of time playing and brainstorming. The good ones hopefully end up getting focused effort on our whiteboards and then some turned into tasks that become new features and/or product.
Bugs – Identification and killing of bugs. Must kill the bugs and make sure the number of bugs are stable or decreasing over time. Bugs are not limited to software, they are everywhere. For example, our cool metal M Realty signs keep breaking zip ties and the metal s hooks don’t work when it gets windy. We have a bug in our signs that needs killing. Who is responsible for killing it? Done!
Scale – The most difficult piece especially if it is personnel related. For example we are scaling the design portion of our company to increase the number of custom agent website we can deliver per month. We have a baseline for our current output. The medium term goal is to increase this 5X.
So in conclusion, our current best guess at how to run a company =
Weekly Review of what’s working. Cultivate ideas with a path to operations, identify bugs and how to kill each one, identify opportunities to scale and work on the bottlenecks. Repeat each week with talented team that give a shit.
That is our plan and we are sticking to it…for now
Geographical farming
Part One – Initial site construction
Is high tech farming the next big use for Websites and tech in RE? Our websites has been focused on SEO/SEM conversion for the last few years and done well but there is only so much room at the top of Google for “Portland Real Estate“. As M realty expands and we focus on helping agents build their practice it has become obvious that many agents have expertise is specific geographies often down to the neighborhood level. We are now focusing on building hyper local sites that will become the hub for agents geographical farming activity.
A good example is NWportlandblog.com that focuses on NW Portland Real Estate . We planned our basic page structure focusing on three neighborhoods. Westover, Nob Hill, Willamette Heights and built landing pages. Each landing page follows a format of Main picture, picture gallery, Text blurb, and List of all active listings. The site and initial page content took approximately 30 hrs of work from wp install, planning, page building, Photo/video shoot, widget and supportive graphics creation, etc. Homequest charges $150 plus $80/month for A Thesis theme configured with IDX plugin. and $60/hr. To duplicate the NWPortland.com site would cost approximately $1,950 with $80/mo for the HQ lead management back end and hosting.
The site launched on a new domain on 03/01/10 and within 3 days was getting organic google traffic from indexed listings on the Neighborhood landing pages. The search traffic is nice but we feel the larger value will come from going out into the community, actively viewing the inventory, blogging about market activity/conditions, engaging homeowners directly, traditional marketing, Highlighting local business community, etc.
The site is up, the basic structure is complete…now is it time to go into the community. More to come on what we learn…stay tuned.