Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

You can’t win unless you play on both sides. This is what the Internet has taught us in the recent years. Those companies that have totally neglected the Web as a production and promotion tool have lost lot of ground or have disappeared completely. Many companies that were just active online have disappeared as well. Internet by itself is not enough, it has to be combined with some traditional (offline) product, place or channel, then it can become very powerful.

Me and the legendary Lou Brown during the event in Atlanta.

Today I have been full time listening to the various presentations at the bootcamp on bank owned properties organized in Atlanta by Sam Bell and Mark Jackson. Lot of very technical stuff, which is very relevant if you want to achieve a good level of promotion on Google, but that would be useless if one didn’t have knowledge about traditional real estate evaluation and contracts. So I appreciated the fact that the presentations of today followed a whole series of lessons that yesterday were delivered on property evaluation (Mark Jackson), on closing procedures (Michelle Spalding) and on creating the most advanced type of real estate contract (Lou Brown): the land trust (which is used both to hide the owners of a property and for transferring interest in a property without a formal deed).

Dutch Mendenhall "bringing me to new heights"

Real estate is a field where you can observe the effective merge of the old culture of negotiation, evaluation and paperwork writing, with the newest Internet Marketing techniques that can bring you new buyers and sellers with less effort and more effectiveness. Yet you still see many investors fumbling with technology and shying away from it, or you see some young nerd who knows everything about setting up a blog and getting it ranked on Google, but knows nothing about buying and selling houses and yet wants to become a full time investor.

Knowing everything is challenging and one cannot be a jack of all trades, but a balance is definitely required now between online and offline knowledge for a business to be able to survive. It is true that you can outsource many tasks, particularly the most technical aspects of Internet Marketing, but at the same time you should know enough about them to be able to direct the work of your assistants or outsourcing agents. If you will waste money and time.

I have learned a lot in these days and I have also contributed. Today I was flattered by two attendees that have publicly stated that my presentation of yesterday was very inspirational for them, despite the Italian accent and everything.

It is a constant learning process and I realize more and more that delegation has become of the essence in any modern activity, no matter how small. You can’t keep up with everything you need to know and do to be competitive and much less be profitable. Hiring assistants is a necessity for every real estate investor and probably for many other types of entrepreneurs as well. If you don’t delegate, you will slow your progress dramatically and you will reach profitability much later if ever. When in doubt, the first thing to delegate, as I learned during the event, is marketing activities. They pay for themselves and any additional expense for outsourcing or delegating them to an assistant will be recovered many times with the increased revenue that comes from them.

Alan Brymer, an investor who has built a whole course on how to recruit and manage assistants, has given a very interesting presentation showing how, in real life, the cost of a part time assistant has been paid more than ten times by the additional deals that she has been able to procure. An advice I will follow for sure.

Roberto Mazzoni