Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

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.

And finally it clicked on me. I had been thinking about it for days without finding a solution and yet it was right in front of me. There are some concepts I use in what I do online and offline that come from my culture and from the way you establish relationships and promote yourself in Europe. These things work also in the US, but when I express them directly, I see that people tend to glaze over. They try to follow but are not taking any notes: meaning it is not really getting to them.

I have been a journalist for a very long time and I have always been taught that when people don’t follow or don’t understand it’s not their fault. It is my precise responsibility to make myself understandable by the particular audience I have in front of me. It is not just a matter of respect, it is one of the laws of communication: when you talk about something you must start with something people can agree with.

I was also told, in my writing career, that sometimes you have to take an article and turn it all around: putting at the beginning what you initially said at the end. And this is exactly what I need to do. Maria pointed out very clearly to me that people became suddenly more attentive and whipped out their notepads and pens at the end of my presentation, when I started listing the five key tools for starting your presence online (which are facebook.com, twitter.com, skype.com, linkedin.com and gizapage.com) and when I explained briefly what each was for.

People in the US have one basic motivation: making money and they want systems to do it. It is apparent. So they need a system that will bring them to understand new concepts while putting them into practice first. So yesterday I believe I was the one to learn the most from my presentation and this was possible because I had Maria looking at me while in action and using all of her acumen and intuition to pick out was happening. You can’t improve yourself if you don’t have somebody looking at you from a different perspective. She is my personal life coach and I am very happy to have her with me. You should also have one.

Roberto Mazzoni