In March 2005, I stumbled into blogging as a way to generate business for my wife’s real estate practice… and my timing couldn’t have been better. Blogging for business was still an unheard of concept, so we were able to break some substantial ground with Rain City Guide…
My favoriate part of the early days of blogging was connecting with so many interesting people… and those connections started pretty quickly once I built the first home search tool that displayed MLS listings on Google Maps. (I called it gHomes). Through gHomes, I was able to connect with some of the early online mapping leaders like Paul Rademacher, Chris Smoak, and Pete Flint (back before Trulia had launched and it was still known as Real Wide).
Through Rain City Guide, I was also able to quickly connect with real estate people from all over the country, including more than a few people who’ve stuck around and become quite influential in areas like mortgage blogging (Todd Carpenter), appraisal blogging (Jonathan Miller) and local real estate (Jim Duncan.
At the same time, I was super fortunate that so many great contributors decided to join Rain City Guide fairly early on… People like Russ Cofano, Ardell DellaLoggia, Craig Blackmon, Rhonda Porter, Jillayne Schlicke, Galen Ward, not only provided an excellent foundation for RCG, but combined, they’ve made one hell of an impact on the industry!
Russ Cofano had a particularly huge impact on me as he not only taught me a tremendous amount about real estate, but we also teamed up to create the first blogging seminars, or Bloginars, as we called them! I still remember walking out of the first presentation on such a high that I knew my time as a transportation engineer was limited (the first year of running Rain City Guide I was still a practicing transportation engineer!).
The Move
And then the job interviews started! Pretty quickly, executives from many of the major online real estate companies reached out to me, and in about one year after I started Rain City Guide, I moved with my family to Southern California to start work at Move, Inc, where I was the Director of Innovation and able to work with the Realtor.com, Move Rentals and Top Producer teams.
I only stayed at Move for 2 years, but that time I spent there had a huge impact on me. Not only did I make invaluable connections with many industry leaders, but I was able to play a key role in some interesting product releases including some advanced mapping products, a major blog platform for realtors, and a celebrity database (never made public for obvious reasons) that helped us identify “celebrity” listings as they came on the market and drove crazy pageviews. In addition to developing products, I also gave numerous presentations around the country including a series with the Top Producer team that focused on educating REALTORS on how to use blogs to drive business.
On My Own
After leaving Move, I formed 4realz Consulting so I could focus on three of my passions:
- Educating real estate professionals around internet marketing,
- Working with companies to develop effective internet marketing campaigns, and
- Developing innovative online tools.
The result is that I often surprise myself when I think just how fortunate I’ve been to be connected with so many interesting people and projects.
In terms of educating and speaking, I’ve been fortunate to work have been asked to regularly speak before some of the largest audiences in real estate…. In additional to be a regular at both Real Estate Connect and NAR’s Annual event, I’ve been a featured speaker at numerous international events, such as RealtorQuest in Toronto, and large brokerage conferences, such as Keller Williams’ Mega Tech Camp and the Leading Real Estate Companies of the World’s Annual Event. In addition, I’ve been fortunate to help organize numerous educational events, including the wildly successful BuzzRE Internet Marketing Seminars in Portland and Orange County. (Look out for more on this front in the near future!)
In terms of consulting on internet marketing strategy, I’ve been fortunate to work on many interesting projects. I’m super-excited about a mapping tool we just completed with NAR’s Center for REALTOR Technology that gave me the opportunity to help build a (completely open-sourced) mapping tool that builds ridiculously accurate neighborhood maps by crowd-sourcing much of the data (ping me if you’d like more info on this project!).
To give you an idea of the variety of partners I’ve been fortunate to work with, just a few of my clients over the past few years have include Funk Ventures, where I worked directly with the founder on social media strategy, Ventura County Star, where I worked with the marketing and web development team to develop and implement a social media strategy, Hilton Hotels, where I managed the development of social media tools for their design team, Cyber-Rain, where I helped develop and implement a online marketing strategy, Relocation.com, where I developed an SEO & social media strategy, affiliate programs, and managed the development of site features, and Selliken Systems, where I worked closely with the founder to develop a strategy that would help recruit and empower agents to their brokerage as well as build a roadmap for future improvements to their CRM/IDX solution.
In addition, one of the more interesting (and visible!) projects involved building a Facebook marketing strategy for The Stoning of Soraya M that was so effective, I turned the idea into a product and ran similar video promotions for other movies (The Cove, Food Inc, Humpday, Broken Hill, and more), authors (such as Ann Cooper & Michael Pollan), events (Real Estate Connect & MOTM), causes (Slave Hunter & 30 Hour Day), and *I’m-really-not-sure-how-to-label-this-but-they-sure-were-popular* (The Great Porn Debates).
The Future
If I’m lucky, there’s be lots more of the same interesting and innovate projects going forward! If you think I can help your company out, don’t hesitate to reach out!
