jonwashburn: November 2007

Get ready for this years premier event at NAR's National Convention in Vegas! 

Initially we were planning on sponsoring a booth at the Realtor expo, but in true Rainer style I decided to spend the booth sponsorship money on throwing a party instead. 

The cocktail party will be hosted in my suite, pictured above, at the Palms Hotel. 

The room can accommodate up to 75 people at a time, and I am hoping that every Rainer that wants to come will be able to fit. But in the event the interest in this party is greater than expected we will be offering up batches of invites in various blog posts leading up to the event.

This post being the first opportunity for an invite has only one condition; invites will go to the first 15 Rainer's to RSVP in the comments below. 

It looks like we will be okay for room, so I removed the restriction on number of invites in this post for now. Just leave a comment below if you would like to come! 

Details:

Party is by invite only. Each invitation will allow for the invited Rainer plus one guest.

Date: Wednesday November 14th

Time: 7pm or 8pm till late

Place: My suite at the Palms Hotel. "The Crib" is the name of the suite.

This post will become RSVP central, and I will be posting pictures of all confirmed attendees below.

On the surface, it is often much easier to give into a customers demands and "make it all better", than it is to stand up to them and tell them the truth.

But what do we lose, as professionals, by doing this?

Respect.

The era of where the customer wants to be right is in the past. People are tired of being sucked up to. They want to do business with people who are genuine, and interact genuinely. That means honesty about the good and the bad.

I am officially declaring that Dixie Chicks music is a blog killer. It is technically impossible to write cohesive thoughts while listening to the Dixie Chicks.

My favorite artists for good blog writing are:

Imogen Heap

Feist

Regina Spektor

Snow Patrol

Chris Tomlin

Dido

and some songs from Switchfoot

Courtesy of Rentvine Blog. Check it out!

Please read this post on hugh macleod's blog, gapingvoid.com. Don't let the cartoon on the top throw you. It has nothing to do with the post.

 Excerpt:

"If your company wants to succeed, it needs to have a social object marketing plan.

I don't know about you, but when somebody walks by with an iPhone, I notice. If I see a kid stroll by me in some limited edition Nikes, that registers with me too.

But I can already hear your inner MBA saying, "Yeah, but what if you don't work for Nike or Apple? What if your product is boring home loans, auto insurance or... [the list of boring products is pretty long].

My standard answer to that is, "Social Gestures beget Social Objects."

Which is another way of saying, maybe the way you relate to somebody as a human being plays a part in all this. Maybe describing your product "boring" is just one more bullshit lie we tell ourselves in order to make the world seem less complicated and scary." Continue reading.

No, that image to the left is not my office. It is just a close approximation of the image in my head of the office I think I should have as a web entrepreneur.

I am always surprised when I see the workspace of a successful blogger, real estate agent, or web based business person. Typically I have this grandiose vision of an inspirational sitcom like loft office, with majestic views of the ocean, city, or mountains.

In reality it often turns out to be more along the lines of the Craigslist world headquarters. (pictured to the right) Or the headquarters of one of the worlds leading web based dating site, plentyoffish.com. Who's founder Markus Frind operates out of his spare bedroom in his Vancouver condo. (NBC video link) But operating out of his modest spare bedroom doesn't stop him from bringing home almost $30k a day from his website!

To the left is a picture of my workspace. Like Markus, I also work out of a spare bedroom in my home. In fact most of the people working at AR do. (Please forgive the lame quality of the picture. I took it with my iPhone.)

I am curious what the workspaces of my fellow Rainers look like.

*To help move this post along I am offering 300 bonus points to anyone who uploads a picture of their personal office in the comments of this post in the next 24 hours.

You hear it all the time, "ActiveRain really doesn't have a lot of consumer traffic.".  Well at least I hear it all the time. Usually I don't offer too much of a rebuttal, I just shrug and offer a little crooked smirk. However, in celebration of hitting over 1 Million visits to the ActiveRain.com domain name for the first time last month, I think it is time to write a short post and set the record straight.

Although I can't definitely state exactly how many of those 1 million + visits were non real estate professionals, I believe I can deduct a pretty good estimate.

1. Search engine visitors are generally first time visitors to AR and represent mostly consumers.

The graph to the right shows that over 75% of the traffic on AR originated from search engines.

2. The most used search engine keywords to find AR are: real, estate, in, for, county, of, home, sale, to, homes, mortgage, realty, florida, house, new 

To me those look like words consumers would use in searching for real estate related information.   

Of course everyone is free to make their own conclusions, but I would bet that over 1/2 a million non-real estate professionals visited AR last month.