Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

It’s time to look at things from the opposite angle as we have always done since the usual “solutions” work less and less and people are longing for someone or something that will carry them into a future that so far has been evading them, and the same people are getting definitely tired of old clichés.

This is the concept that comes to our minds as me and my friend and partner Daniele meet with our families for a farewell dinner before they leave back for Italy. It’s been ten weeks since they first arrived in Florida for a long vacation that opened up many unexpected business opportunities, but that most of all this time frame has consolidated and expanded a friendship that had begun “by chance” in Florence during an event on Internet Marketing in 2007 and that now is the backbone on which we are planning major changes that will affect both the personal lives of our families and the future of our businesses.

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We need to go back to July 2007 and shift all the way to Treviso, a splendid Italian town pretty close to Venice. Me and my wife, Maria, were traveling on a business trip. She had a small marketing company with a partner and I had taken a day off from my regular job as the editor in chief of a computer magazine owned by a very major Italian publisher.

The center of Treviso - courtesy of redbubble.com

Maria had been selling on me the idea that it was time for me to quit the journalistic profession I had been doing successfully for over 30 years and build my own company. And she is great at sales.

On our way back to Milan, we had stopped in Treviso to look at the beauty of it and to have some time together, and while I was kissing her on top of a romantic wooden bridge right in the center of the town, she voiced the wild idea: why don’t we move to the US?

My twins Stefano and Alex shortly after arriving in Florida. Getting both ready for a party

The following 12 months were an escalation of activity and a challenge that we all met as a team: me, Maria and our two twin boys, Alex and Stefano. We decided that our destination was going to be Clearwater in Florida, both Maria and I had been there and I started to make my plans to gradually leave my job and we began to sell everything: our houses (we had two of them on Milan), our cars, or records and books. Everything went and we were all on a plane on July 9, 2008 headed toward the United States with the project of starting a business in real estate by using the knowledge I had accumulated in the months before my departure and by investing the capital we had put together in a lifetime of work.

The dream was to have a business that could provide us an increasing revenue stream without us always working on it. I was going to use the financial formula I had learned for Robert Kiyosaki and several others. It has been an incredible ride so far and I sure it will still be. This blog starts today with the objective of telling a bit of the past, present and future of my family and my business so that you too can follow some of your dreams.

Roberto Mazzoni