Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

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.

I was good enough to actually price the house exactly at the value that two different appraisers confirmed, and you know that the appraisals today are much tighter than in the past (and these where FHA appraisers). But my greatest satisfaction was that I was able to complete the project despite all the odds I faced while doing it.

It is the best Christmas present ever because it official completes the startup phase of my company. Now I know I can repeat the same cycle in outsourcing over an over, by getting better results leveraging what I have learned so far.

By putting into actions all the information I was able to collect from previous courses and from the interaction with all the people that worked with me (or against me I have now a very solid experience that would not have been possible without getting my hands dirty.

I have never been coordinating such a vast number of people on a single project, not even when I was working for major publishing corporations in Italy. This opportunity of meeting so many different type of individuals is empowering me with the best gift of all: the ability to select the best.

Roberto Mazzoni