Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

The success of a business or a project can be measured by the reach of the effects it can create. When you can establish relationships and cause effects at a very great distance, then you know that you are on the right track and you have a role to play. During the next weekend, in Rome, there will be a major event on Social Network Marketing that has begun from an idea me, my wife Maria, my business associate Daniele Bogiatto and his wife Jenny talked about one night, last summer, under a palm tree on Ana Maria Island.

Maria has an extensive high level background on Network Marketing and Daniele is a genius in Web promotion, and I have been studying the merging of network marketing technique, e-commerce and Internet Marketing by meeting and talking with some of the highest people in the field to date. By the merging of our experiences and ideas, and with the superb development of the project by Daniele after he returned in Italy, we now have the first world wide convention on Social Network Marketing in Rome, next week end.

Many big companies, also in the US, have tried to merge network marketing and social media and have failed so far or have achieved limited results. This project, that will follow closely the culture and the etiquette of the Net, will probably bring together two of the most powerful promotional channels of the last hundred years: Web 2.0 and network marketing.

While this is going on, Mark Jackson, an experienced North American real estate investor is in Italy and is meeting all the people connected to this huge project and other connected projects to explain them why and how to invest in real estate in the US.

This all started with my arrival in the US 15 months ago and with the selection of the right people to network with and the development of such a network. It is a result I am very proud of and I can’t wait to see the evolutions it will have in the near future.

Roberto Mazzoni

Yesterday I spent some time with my family at a carnival in the parking lot of the biggest local mall. Our attention was captured by the game where you drop a coin hoping that the scooping movement of a sliding mirror will make many more coins and gadgets fall on the table in front of you. We spent some time the all four of us dropping quarters and winning quarters and then dropping some more. We knew that by the very fact that the lady running the game was in business, the odds were against us. Statistically the must be more coins that stay inside the box than those that fall out.

The game where you drop a coin into a slot and hope to win the jackpot.

But there were so many coins just on the verge of falling and sometimes one little coin would produce a whole waterfall of coins for us to gather, that the game continued long enough to keep us entertained without spending too much money, but we did lose most of the coins that we put in despite, the many wins we had in the meantime. We walked away putting our last win in our pocket and we felt we had won anyway since the game turned out exactly as we expected. The odds were all against us, but it was fun to try.

In life you often find similar situations: get rich quick systems that are being offered you where you just have to throw that extra coin to gain all the previous money that has been amassed by the people that came before you. And sometimes the system seems credible enough and the guy selling it sound really convincing.

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Today I had a very interesting experience with my family. We wanted to take a day off and we had the simple plan of going fishing on a dock not far from where we live. My kids love fishing and we just made a short detour because me and my wife had been looking for a motorcycle to ride in the Florida sun and there was a good deal on Craigslist that we wanted to check out.

Yesterday I had found a post advertising a bike sold by a dealer, the price seemed very attractive as compared to other “used vehicles” and the picture was not too bad. So I called the seller, a mid-forty gentleman named David, he sent me more pictures of the bike via e-mail and told me all about it. But before the conversation was over, he also invited me to his virtual shop on eBay which had more inventory.

The black "Vulcan" in front of David's garage as shown 'on his eBay store (6dancin_bear9).

And there I found this beautiful black Vulcan Kawasaki in mint condition. He gave me a discounted price over the phone, if I bought it directly, and today we went to look at the bike in his location. We discovered it was a private house, a big single family home with a huge garage on a cul de sac. An elderly lady greeted our arrival, David was not there and neither was the black Vulcan, but four other bikes were nicely displayed in the garage.
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We live in a very fast paced culture. Everything happens in minutes or seconds, and the speed of implementation is everything. But sometimes our actions start to lose contact with reality, maybe we made some mistake and continue doing it because we don’t know better or simply we don’t want to admit to it. The end result is that our direction of travel gets gradually off the correct target and we start doing other things that have nothing to do with our real business or we need to keep correcting things that seem to go wrong all the time.

Sometimes the best way forward is to step back and reorganize your actions.

Action can become frantic at this point and the faster we proceed the further away we get from our intended destination. I believe everyone of us has had this experience in greater or lesser degree and when we try to take a shortcut to solve the situation or we use some new “idea” to get it all fixed up we end up into more trouble. It doesn’t need to be a huge thing, even a minor deviation is going to affect our performance and well being.

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Until 2006, anybody in the US who could breathe could get a loan for buying a house. Many people took advantage of the situation and created the foreclosure mess that is still affecting the overall national economy as well as producing international repercussions. The deregulation that consented to bring the real estate exchanges to level nobody ever dreamed possibly, was not correctly policed, they say, and therefore a confusion resulted that will have consequences still for a long time.

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The people who made dishonest or incompetent deals then have mostly disappeared so now it is up to the State to regulate the situation and bring it back under control, but every time you introduce a “solution” to a problem that comes from people that are not directly familiar with the problem you end up having a bigger problem, and this is what is apparently going to happen with residential loans starting as of January 2010.
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