Thursday, September 2, 2010

Full-time real estate agents

In my last post, I mentioned some pretty funny real estate videos I saw at a recent RE/MAX conference.

I may need to track down the director of those videos and buy him a drink. Because here’s another one of his savvy creations that I just discovered:



Did I mention that we have four agents in our office – and that all of us practice real estate full time? No? Hmm. Maybe next post.

Saturday, August 14, 2010

RE/MAX at the movies

I spent the first couple days of this week out in Denver, attending the 2010 RE/MAX Broker Owner Conference. (My dad is the owner of our office, but because he was tied up doing deals, he allowed me to fill in for him and make the trip.)

As you might expect, a lot of the conference focused on rah-rah stuff: why RE/MAX is a powerful brand name, how its agents tend to sell quite a few more houses than agents affiliated with other franchises, etc. It was good to hear that, but I consider myself a pretty tough audience. Though no Debbie Downer, I have little stomach for saccharine-flavored messages that consist only of hype.

So I was encouraged when the RE/MAX corporate staff showed us a couple videos that had some wit, humor, and -- best of all -- a point. The first one was about how some non-RE/MAX franchises set up their agents in a pyramid structure:



Not bad, eh? Not quite up there with the legendary Alec Baldwin scene in Glengarry Glen Ross (the grand champion of movies about real estate, in the opinion of this modest Realtor talking in the third person), but definitely better than I was expecting.

The other video they showed us was about how consumers see the RE/MAX name everywhere these days:



After this second video ended, they brought the director up on stage. Turns out he's a real estate agent who's always loved filmmaking, so he just shot what he knows. I think that's why these videos work.

Monday, January 25, 2010

New Little Swan Lake page on our website

If you're interested in Little Swan Lake -- a 250-acre lake located five miles west of Avon, Illinois -- you'll definitely want to check out this brand-new page of our office website, macombland.com:

http://www.remax-unified-macomb-il.com/display.php?cat=12

The page, which we launched yesterday, includes

* All of our current Little Swan Lake listings.

* A basic description of the lake and what it offers.

* A Little Swan Lake map, linked up to Google Maps.

* A downloadable PDF with current Little Swan Lake rules and regulations.

* A link to littleswanlake.net, which features news, community activities, photos, and the history of Little Swan Lake.

We're pretty excited about the page and hope visitors find the information useful. Feel free to drop me a line if you have any feedback (positive or negative).