Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

If you too far away from your car and the remote doesn’t lock ro unlock your doors, try to stick it under your chin and will reach much further. This simple trick can make the difference between having to walk back to your car or stay comfortably where you are. Also, if you are in dark paring lot and you are looking for your car, by placing the remote just under your chin you’ll have a wider radius of action and you’ll find it more easily.

A nice tip that was given me by an investor lady who owns a rental property just next to the one of the houses I am rehabbing. I was passing by yesterday to check on the tile work that is being done in this particular property and I noticed a dumpster being deposited just across the street. I thought that more rehabbing work just next to my house was going to be beneficial and went on doing my business.

On the way back to my car a lady called me from the neighboring house and she introduced herself. She explained they had this rental property that she and her husband bought just before the market started going down, but they had it for a decent price so they still managed to break even on the mortgage payments with the rental, or almost even.

She was keen in showing me the work they had done and so I followed her forgetting to lock my car. Once inside I didn’t want to go back but tried to lock it from a distance and it wouldn’t respond so she gave me the tip above and it worked right there. I got some very good additional information about the rental market in the area and then we moved across the street and I showed the property I am working on.

She had some really interesting history about it (she knew the previous owner before it went in foreclosure) and again I got some very valuable feedback on my rehab projects. And she even pointed out to me that an external faucet was leaking so that I can save on the water bill (quite expensive in Florida).

She has naturally Italian origins and I have made a friend, I have got some valuable information about the rental market in that specific road and I know I can count on some help in case I need it. And she can count on me too.

In Italy they say that even a queen needs a good neighbor. So I need it too.

Roberto Mazzoni

North America is the land of marketing, nowhere else you find so much creativeness and emphasis on making products easier to sell or more acceptable. It is also the land of customer service, to a great degree: people are got accustomed to fast replies and to a special attention given to attract new customers. Everywhere you go, even in convenience stores, you can put yourself at ease and enjoy the shopping experience.

The needed rest during shopping.

Yesterday I went with my family to the local Big Lots, where you can find retail products at wholesaling prices. Something caught my eye: a huge beer bottle full of pop corn and a small plastic guitar with the picture of Elvis on top of it also full of pop corn. They literally stood out on the shelves of the very crowded place and I felt “forced” to get closer and look at them.

It's not beer, it's pop corn!

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday morning I woke up very early. I had a coaching call scheduled for 8:30 am and I wanted to be fully prepared for it. This was a very special call because I was the one doing the coaching and I wanted it to be exceptionally good also because the person on the other line was himself a coach and a very experienced business man.

There is a lot of preparation that goes into a live call, particularly when it is the start of a whole project and you want to be sure that it will start on the right pace. Alex Mendossian, one of the leading teleseminar marketers, who has made an art out of training other people at a distance, says that you should do a presentation 5 times before delivering it as a paid service. So it does take some preparation.

I was pounding away at my keyboard when I noticed a sudden flash in the back yard. There was a sound similar to a match getting lighted on a piece of sand paper and then a shower of sparkles. I immediately thought a bird or some flying object had touched the electric mains outside the house; but the computer went on working and my light staid on so I forgot about it and went ahead in preparing the call.

It was a success and despite me hearing the constant clicking of the surge protector that feeds the mains my computer, everything went fine. Rain was pouring outside, but I was fully concentrated in delivering the best possible content to the person on the other side of the line, who was almost two thousand miles away: the power of the Internet and the power of decision.

The day was crammed with activities so I left the house to go and meet a Realtor at a house we are about to finish and that we’ll soon put on the market. I got there a bit early and took the chance of taking a video of the work in progress, as I usually do. This time I had to take pictures of the new roof and I was walking around looking up at the complex wooden structure, admiring all the work done and commenting into my camera, when I felt something prickly under my right foot.

As soon as I watched down to my right foot I heard a voice saying “Watch out this is a construction site”. It had a teasing tone and it didn’t sound like Paul, my main contractor, so I looked up after removing the roofing nail that had stuck under my rubber sole and there her was Dan, another investor who has just returned from a pleasure trip to Italy. He was mockingly looking at me from inside the master bedroom and he was amazed by the surprise he had pulled off.
Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday was my second Columbus day in America. It creates always a peculiar feeling being Italian and participating in a holiday where such a great number of people celebrate another Italian for having discovered such a great continent. I also have the intention of bringing something new and important in this country and therefore I have decided to set October the 12^th as a benchmark date for my activities in the future.

Yesterday it was indeed a very important one because I have brought to the next stage a relationship that I have been cultivating since February of this year and that has required lot of patience and nurturing to foster and to bring to its current strength, but that has tremendous potential for the future. They say that the bamboo tree takes 2, 3, 4 years to fully develop its roots: it only grows a few inches, but then it can shoot up 47 inches in just one day, and they develop to their full height (up to 250 feet) in just 3 months.

It all began with an event about Internet Marketing and how to build a joint venture here in Tampa. I had been in the US for approximately six months and I had already met several types of gurus and investors, but no real match for me.

Me and Mark on stage at his latest event in Atlanta, September 2009.

I had a clear idea on how my business was going to develop, but nobody I had found was patient enough to wait for it to unfold fully and to find common activities to share in the meantime. They all wanted the bamboo now, without waiting for it to grow. Everybody was kind of looking for business opportunities right here, for the low hanging fruit. No commitment, no depth of relationships.

The event was organized by Dan Stojadinovic another European from Serbia who has built a very strong presence in Internet Marketing and real estate investing. Dan always invites several speakers to his events and makes sure that they deliver solid content. He is also a very strong promoter of the idea of joint venture so I was sure that I was going to meet somebody special at this particular event, and I did.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I went to a meeting of real estate investors. It was a while since I had been there and I was somewhat surprised to find many people I didn’t know, that had never been there before and in hearing the presentations given: most of the people talking where pitching rehabbing or staging services for real estate investors and there was not much talk about properties and deals as it would usually happen in such a venue. That alerted me on the fact that something has changed in the market and that I will have to better understand it.

My friend Harry Dean was there conducting the meeting and he gave some eye opening research information on how you raffle a house. Do you know that it is illegal to do it in the state of Florida unless you are a non profit corporation? I bet you have a similar rule also in other states.

Maria. my wife and my personal life coach.

But during the meeting Harry asked me to deliver an impromptu presentation about how I use social media and the Internet in my business and life. My wife Maria was with me, it was the first time she was participating to this type of meeting, and therefore I thought it was an excellent chance to have her look at my “performance” and give me later her feedback. She is great at this since she have very acute power of observation and she has been delivering training presentations in from of audiences with tens of thousands of people.

I delivered around 15 or 20 minutes of presentation and there were several questions from the audience that kept me going, so it was obvious that the subject was of interest. And indeed it was quite revelatory. At the end of the meeting we came home and although we had planned to go to be eraly for a change, we staid up until 1 am discussing what she had observed during the meeting.
Read the rest of this entry »