Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

You can’t be successful anywhere unless you feel at ease where you are and doing what you do. It is all right stepping out of the comfort zone in order to achieve some change or some important progress in your life, but you should still be able to find a new comfort zone after the change is accomplished otherwise the results won’t be stable.

This at least has been my experience and also what I have observed of several people around me. When you feel uncomfortable in a particular location or place, you will not accomplish much and you will definitely not build for the future. Everything will have the tendency to be makeshift or temporary and even the people you’ll meet or that you will partner with will not stick with you.
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You will attract the things and people that best suite your attitude, so this will further develop your feeling of not belonging in that place. But there are a few tools that I found helped me a lot in feeling at home even when I arrived here in the US, a totally new place for me. I used the Web to keep in contact with people that still live in my own town and country of origin, while developing local contacts as well and crossing them together. So my US friend have known my Italian friends and viceveras, both online and in person and therefore there a new wider community at play.
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Two years ago I decided I wanted to create my financial and personal independence. I had grown tired of depending on others to determine my future and I felt the desire to create my own job so that I could provide for my family in the way I felt necessary and with all my capabilities.

I had enjoyed for many years the corporate life, climbing high in the management chart and netting a nice monthly salary. Yet I didn’t like what I heard around me almost every day: people complaining on how mean the company was or how bad was their personal situation, and yet were not doing a single thing to change it. And it looked like they didn’t even know what their real situation was.

I feared I might some day hear myself say the same things and become the slave of my own prison by laying on others the responsibility for my condition. Unfortunately some of the people who were moaning were senior to me and they had the mission of developing the company and charting my own future. It didn’t sound encouraging. I looked around in other companies and competitors and the scene wasn’t any better: the publishing industry was bent on its knee by the advent of the Internet and the only way they could think of selling more copies in the newsstands was by adding fancier and crazier gifts on the top cover.

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Few months ago I have taken a course on motorcycle riding here in Florida and now I enjoy riding in the sun. The main thing I got out from that experience is that you always go where your are eyes are focused. If you keep you sight on an obstacle because you fear to hit it or you want to avoid it, then you can be sure you will go right to it. The bike will always go where you look not where you “thinks” it should go.

The same is for your business or personal projects: when you focus your attention on the barriers and the obstacles you will hit them for sure and will probably stay there. When you keep your sight on the destination you will reach it, no matter how many turns or detours you will have to take.

The problem is that, in real life, it could take a while before you actually reach you target and therefore you can become discouraged by the apparent little progress that you are making: there are so many more things you would like to do and so little time to do them, apparently.

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Today I have closed my first real estate deal that has been performed by outsourcing the majority of the work. I cannot say I have been successful in obtaining everything I wanted from each one of the people I involved in the project, but it has been a fantastic learning platform for me and I was able to develop a better system for screening contractors and helpers and manage their work.

It has been quite a ride since it involved coordinating more that 60 people overall: contractors, Realtors, appraisers, bankers, mortgage brokers, financial partners, consultants, family, lawyers and paralegal staff, inspectors, yet I am very proud to have pulled it off successfully and within the time I had set for myself and obtaining a bit better price from the value I had planned at the beginning.

I am a foreigner so it has been a bit of a challenge for me to get familiar with the way houses are built or rehabbed in the US and this was not a small project: a 1900 square feet home that had to be totally renovated with the addition of a bedroom. So I had to carefully plan from the beginning what I thought could have been a correct selling price once all the rehab was done.

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My wife Maria often reminds me that there is a major difference between urgencies and priorities. Under urgencies fall things like: reply to an e-mail, pay the bills on time, file the proper paperwork when it is due, and so on. Under priorities you have all the activities that are essential to the progress of your business or life and to generating income as a result.

Would you rather talk with a customer, or look for a customer who needs your product, or take care of some kind of duty that is urgent but will not bring any income? It is true, if you pay a bill late you might incur into additional fees and other complications. You should definitely try to be organized enough so that you don’t miss on those things, but is it more important make the money with which you will pay the bill or simply pay the bill on time?

Your daily actions should strive to create some possibility that wasn’t there before, taking some risk and forging new paths. You should demand and obtain excellence in what you produce and set yourself ambitious goals otherwise you will never stand out from the crowd and actually bring a business in existence.

You will make mistakes, that’s for sure, and there will be remedies for them. Yet the worst mistake is not to be successful in creating the wherewithal required to keep the business running. As long as you are producing and generating income, you will be able to ask for expert advice or help and get out of urgencies and focus more and more on priorities.

There will be many people, particularly those who don’t produce anything themselves and are out there to stop others, that will try to keep your attention on urgencies. Leave them alone: no matter how important or convincing they sound, close your ears and concentrate on what you think and know that is important.

Roberto Mazzoni