Obviously the name of the game is to leave the realization in the mind of the consumer that our real estate brokers and agents are the ultimate specialists in their market. Increasingly, almost exponentially, you’ll note the trends of this experience happening in the online world. Welcome to the new pasture.

This is the subject of a many real estate blogs these days, however by a limited number of contributors. Although growing and I suppose I’m now one of them; I’d like to put emphasis on the shift from marketing a product or service to buying a product or service.

This is important in real estate today and really deserves much more focus. Especially since branding and marketing are essentially the same thing. This becomes increasingly important as the trends from “selling” are declining. Because of culture, technology and the myriad of distractions in day to day life; most products and services are bought by the consumer nowadays and not sold to them.

The trends began when you got your first computer and entered young grasses of the Internet. Just think about the increase in online purchases you have experienced throughout the past ten Holidays without physically being in the store with a salesperson.

Now you see why we have to reposition brand. It must be online and it can’t be just a logo. Consumers are being attracted to a knowledge base and the brand makes ratification to the purchaser the product or service is that of quality.

The most successful businesses in the internet are interactive and full of recent reviews, information, pictures and video. The experience is rich. You can talk back to it, follow it, share it and have access to from a cell phone these days. And this is the territory we are rebranding.

So how is this happening? It centers on our associates understanding that personal promotion is now done online. Secondly, it is not the personal promotion the industry pundits have sold you over the past 15 years. Simply, it is solely about promoting your knowledge base of your market, not by saying you are good, but by actually showing and delivering content and information through our technology. That is the experience, which is part and parcel, to the rebrand.

We are enthusiastically creating and updating these systems for our customer, the Realty World Northern California and Nevada franchisees and their associates. If you’re not using these systems today, we invite you to come with us and discover the tall grass!

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that a couple of the older kids were interested in retirement and saving money. Wow, these are teenagers! I was excited to talk to them about saving and the benefits that grow from starting the practice early. I told them (true story); I bought my first home before my 21st birthday from savings I had tucked away. I have to thanks my parents for making me save ten percent of my lawn mowing, stable shoveling and bus boy jobs. Admittedly, I really didn’t understand how important it was when I was a young teen, so I was fortunate.

Anyway, if you have kids or grandkids, yesterday is the best time to start instilling the discipline of saving and teaching the power of compounding. Every kid should have a Roth individual retirement account (IRA). Don’t question the wisdom of starting to early as your kids might. The earlier the better. To open one, a child must have some type of earned income however. The annual contribution to is limited to the amount they earn during the year or $5,000.00 in 2009 (whichever is less).

Children of real estate brokers and agents can have good jobs too! My daughter helps her mother with mailers, wrapping client gifts, gathering information, filing, and the like. As she became a little older, she answers the phone and makes appointments and even helps out at open houses.

As graduation season closes and summer job season opens; now is certainly the best time to give and teach these valuable life lessons.

Since the topic of the meeting was centered on new services for real estate brokerage operations, a litany of needs soon began to flow quickly as the session progressed.  Technology seemed to be the dominate centerpiece.  During the meeting I found myself having to bite my tongue as I listened to what so many wanted in their tech tool box. 

I was so excited to learn that we have and continue to enhance our technology based tools that accomplish the goals our competition is seeking and some are not sure what is over the horizon at all.  By lunch (with little reading between the lines), I became more confident about our franchisees positioning for success in this new market and information and consumer driven age.  Our technology investment directly supports the real estate business enterprise model of this time.  

Don’t read this the wrong way either; these companies are very well established and run by broker/owners that have years of experience and several of them have invested millions into their operations and they work smart.  Seemed like all had heavy brick and mortar expenses and technology that resembled patchwork at best or off-the-shelf basic online tools that run as separate applications, and a few that might integrate with high levels of technical knowhow.  

The bottom line here is that our integrated systems for brokers and associates provide outstanding efficiencies in terms of operational, marketing and advertising procedures at less cost while simultaneously creating an increasing amount of new listings and sales through growing amount of online channels and consumer oriented propositions.  

Lunch was served in the conference room and we continued to talk and enjoy a good spread.  I sat and thought to myself about the true value of our programs and our franchisees success.  Now more than any other, I knew that if they use our systems to compete they wouldn’t be eaten for lunch.   I’m not sure the others felt that way.