My Projects
Ipad development
I am out previewing homes with Alicia today really getting a handle on how Homequest works with the iPad. The primary task today is to preview homes for two clients and relate what we find back using Looking Glass.
- I posted this from my iPhone and my eyes are not so good. If it’s all jacked up that’s why.
Location:SE 82nd Ave,Portland,United States
Thank you cards - Traditional & Tech
We are always working on systems to enhance our effectiveness. I meet so many people and generally followed friend and it has helped me cultivate more relationships. I recently had a conversation with a great agent I know who was intrigued by the SM follow up but has been writing handwritten notes to her friends and especially new people she meets. Our discussion led to ideas about how to layer new technology with this tried and true high impact activity.
Lead generation - BuzzRE Orange County
I am Speaking at a great event on April 29th in Orange County CA - BuzzRE OC
Question…what is “Lead Conversion”? I like to bring everything into the real world experience of being an agent. In my mind lead conversion occurs the moment I set an appointment with a new buyer or seller. We will be talking about conversion from IDX registrations and sphere interaction.
There’s a great lineup of smart speakers including Dustin Luther, Linsey Planeta, Stacey Harmon, Robert Luna, Gahlord Dewald, Loren Nason, Dale Chumbley, and John Lansner
Hope you can make it…register here
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.
Explore tech for fun!
I got an awesome longboard for christmas this year and decided it would be fun to throw the gopro cam on the nose. Plus I recently washed my 2g iphone and got me a new 3GS. Vid from phone right to youtube. Easy and fun video publishing to blogs is here!
10 things I think I learned this year
1. The future of real estate will be shaped by the brokerages that create an environment to assist agents in gaining market share. Not trying to gain market/mind share with the brokerage brand.
2. Above a certain competency level we as agents are the same in our ability to facilitate a transaction. However “how great” we are is a function of how well we “fit” with our clients communication style and temperament.
3. All other things being equal, people will chose to work with people they like.
4. Social networks are nothing more than a way to “talk” to people. My Iphone now gives me 5 main ways to communicate with people. Phone call, Email, text, twitter, Facebook. As I go through the day I use all of them. All have appropriate uses and understanding them unlocks leverage previously not available.
5. Placing information on what you think, know, believe, and do, in a publicly accessible site is good. Using the information to facilitate conversations and connections is better.
6. Do stuff everyday that builds your knowledge and connects you with others like you.
7. Instead of extensive planning of what you are going to do. Do then build a plan to match what you actually do.
8. The value proposition you are convinced is “it” might just be marketing BS. Focus on identifying when real value occurs, study the moment, understand it, then build your business from there.
9. Understand who you are and especially what you are naturally driven towards..build you business around your drive.
10 If you don’t have strong interests, drive and ability to connect with others you are already screwed..but you are SUPER screwed in the future. Becuase you are competeing with those who do and everything is becoming visable at the individual level.
11. bonus item. bad grammar, spelling, and run on sentences shouldn’t stop you from putting your ideas out into the world
Be in love
If we can find this we win!!
An Unconventional invitation (pg-13)
Wednesday October 7th 4:00-6:00
Come visit with us, learn how we use social media, blogging & tech.
Please RSVP - haley@m-homes.net
We work very hard everyday to build strong real estate practices and a brokerage environment that will contribute to our agents success. Blogging, social media, Homequest and technology are part of our daily lives. It has created an environment that is both informal and very focused on success. We are opening up our office to agents to experience what we do and how we approach Real Estate. Please beware the vid below contains two BAD WORDS. But we think it represents us pretty well.
Invite to M Realty (pg-13) from M Realty on Vimeo.