This year at infiniteROI we started an internship program. We’ve been blessed to have a very smart and curious intern named Kyle Chezum (a senior business management major from Biola University). Kyle accompanied me on the trip to San Jose and he had a different take on the California Realtors Expo. I asked him to write down his thoughts and decided to share it with you.
Two weeks ago I accompanied Paul Mobley, CEO of Infinite ROI, Inc., to San Jose for the annual California Association of Realtors Expo. Seven hours in the car each way with Paul was time enough well spent, but the ensuing two days of seminars, expo booths, and networking opportunities were equally valuable. I say networking opportunities because I didn’t actually do much networking. I felt somewhat out of place at the convention almost immediately when I discovered that no, the name is not misleading—nearly everyone in attendance was a Realtor, and, more specifically, a real estate agent. As the intern-assistant to an out-of-town broker, I was afraid I wouldn’t be taken seriously. This never became a problem, however. Everyone seemed eager to talk, and through numerous interactions on the expo floor and a few surprisingly meatless seminars I had the chance to develop some first impressions of the industry. It was not what I expected.
I concluded from this initial exposure that the real estate agency industry was an arena full of older men and women who were unfamiliar with new media and technology and were not interested, or at least not aware that they ought to be interested, in becoming proactive, transformational leaders in the business. I attended several technology-related conference sessions and was surprised to find speakers presenting Internet tools such as Facebook and LinkedIn as novel outlets for social interaction and marketing. Many of the sessions focused on how agents could use Facebook to garner a presence within a community and develop clients and buyers from that presence. I had assumed such tactics were intuitive. I guess I was wrong. In this and other ways, I learned that the real estate industry has, at least on a broad level, not fully acclimated to the information age.
The CalREDD demonstrations offered a glimpse into a brighter future. California’s local MLS systems, I learned, vary widely from region to region with regard to their structure, user interface, and capabilities. CalREDD’s product, a statewide MLS that takes real estate information systems to a whole new wondrously adaptive level, began its gradual takeover just a handful of months back. From the short demonstration I saw of it, CalREDD is real estate’s answer to new media and the changing face of the global marketplace. It’s a few years late, in my opinion, but it’s encouraging.
All of the above notwithstanding, I came away from the conference with more respect rather than less for the real estate agents who ply their trade across this vast state day after day. My intensive two-day plunge into the guts of real estate provided me a view of the business I hadn’t seen before. It gave me a view of the heart. Selling real estate—at least in the single-family-home arena—is, I think, less about hawking a product and more about meeting the life needs of families and individuals. It’s about caring for people who need advice and aid as they transition from one chapter of life to another. It’s about creating and strengthening communities. I had never seen real estate sales in that light before. It gave me something to think about. What can I bring to this business? An intuitive sense of how to use technology for marketing and leverage? Passion rather than dread for coming changes such as CalREDD and whatever else may lie on the new media horizon? This and more, I think. I’m glad the expo opened my eyes to it.
