Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

In every major travel you encounter people that lead you along the way and that walk the path with you guiding your steps on your new course. Sometimes they are perfect strangers that yet become your friends right away because they share your same immediate goal and destination. These are the type of people that can change the course of your life, because they are unexpected and yet they can steer your course on a safer track, letting you cross the new territory using their eyes as a guidance.

The first important and major friend I met after arriving in the United States is named Chris Krimitsos (you can find more about him at commanderblue.com). Chris is by far the best promoter I have ever met. He is just natural at it. He has the knack of interacting with people in an informal and yet powerful fashion and he is a kid by election, having chosen a teddy bear as his brand image and buddy.

Roberto and Chris during an interview on a TV station

Anybody opens up when confronted with Chris, and yet is one of the sharpest video producers and interviewers in the nation. He knows how to bring out the best or the worst of anybody and he always does it with elegance and with the candid smile and open face that have become his hallmark.

I first “encountered” Chris on a webinar recording. I was traveling around in Milan while listening to a real estate webinar series by one of the leading investor coaches in the US and I plugged into my MP3 player the recording of an interview with him. I was struck by the fact that he was one of the few (then) real estate investors that had developed a whole system for selling houses with the auction method. You basically invite many people to your home during the week end and ask for bids, and then you ask for higher bids on the phone once the real life auction is over.

I was amazed by the detail with which he explained the whole system and I can still remember most of his words and I am setting up an auction for the next week end suing his very system. But the thing that really got to me, then, was that the interview was actually about a mastermind group that he had setup (little I knew then, but I was slanted to become part of it pretty soon). So he had been giving away most of his auction system for free during a webinar that was actually on another subject! And then he discussed extensively how to build a mastermind group too.

As soon as I arrived in Tampa, in summer 2008, I enrolled in the local investor group and what do you know: Chris was right there the first evening I joined and he was pitching his course on how to do auctions! At that point I could connect a real face and a real person to the recording I had listened in Milan and I found out that the guy even lived in Tampa! Just 20 miles away from where I lived.

Before he went away I introduced myself to him and said: “I will follow you in whatever you will do in the future”. There was no real reason to tell it, I wasn’t even buying his course, but I felt that was the right thing to say, for whatever reason.

Two months afterward I had the chance of doing so: Chris organized his first Internet Marketing Seminar. He fired an e-mail the day before Christmas promoting it and I was the first one to join. That was the very stuff I was looking for.

In my background as a computer journalist I have been involved in the Web and Web related projects for almost a decade before coming to the US, but I felt like Chris could show me a new approach to really leverage what I already knew. The seminar was great and since then I have helped Chris in helping others getting more competent in this field and I have learned a lot about people and Amricans in particular. This knowledge, that once again I gained by doing and by doing for free, is paramount now that my life and business are getting more and more intertwined with the Web and with a multinational approach. Chris has been a great friend. A friend that has has opened me all the doors he could open without me even noticing it.

But most of all he has proven to me that also the United States you can win and win big by first giving and then asking. In Italy that is the way in which you build your network of relationships and it was so refreshing to find out that it could be done also here. And Chris is very successful at his business and he even is the best friend of his top competitors. As we often agreed while talking late at night after some meeting we had done together: the Web has opened an era of “cooperative competition”. You are just as successful as you can help other be successful.

As long as he will hang out with his teddy bear Commander Blue I know I will be safe with Chris, because a man is just as alive as his dreams and because Commander Blue is a close friend of my own teddy bear: Commodore Black!

Roberto Mazzoni