“I got more out of today than a whole year’s worth of ‘classes’ at my brokerage.”

These are the two most memorable quotes I heard from a couple attendees of our first Real Estate Marketing Lab event that took place today.

The event, held at RefugePDX, was a combination conference and “hands on” workshop where attendees gained a real working knowledge of the HOW and WHY of Activity Based Marketing along with the supporting platforms of WordPress, Facebook, and YouTube.

This workshop style event is something a little different than what most Real Estate conferences offer.  It was a hybrid conference/conversation/Q+A session all at once and more than anything, it gave other local agents a glimpse of what we do at M Realty on a daily basis and how they might implement the same strategies in their practices.

We started the day with a discussion around Garron’s “Do-Document-Share-Convert” strategy.  He then showed several examples of this in action, and prepped the group for our mid-day activity of heading out into the real world to put this strategy into action.  We then broke the group up into smaller groups of 4-5 agents, gave them some basic instructions, and sent them on their way.

The groups were instructed to think of something they could go out and “do”, pick a way to “document” this activity, grab some lunch, and then return back to the lab so we could proceed with the “share” portion of the day.

Each group did a great job of picking a task or topic, documenting it with pictures and video, and making their way back within the allotted time.  From there, we worked with the groups on getting the images and videos ready to be used in WordPress.  We showed an easy way to crop, resize and upload the images along with getting the videos setup into a YouTube account.  Once that was all done, we dove into the WordPress section on our practice site The University of M. Check out the “student posts” section to see the results!

Overall, we were pretty impressed with the group and their progress.  We covered A LOT of info today, and everyone was able to keep up and participate in the activity.  In the end, several of the agents expressed comments similar to those in the beginning of the post, which to me means the event was a success.

We plan on doing more of these events, hopefully on a monthly basis, so if you’re interested shoot me an email and I’ll make sure you get the invite for the next one.

Since I started at M Realty late last year, we’ve been focusing pretty much all of our efforts on this type of marketing both as a brokerage and in working with all our agents on their individual marketing efforts. We’ve been using a combination of blogging (with custom designed WordPress blogs), Facebook and Twitter to spread our message out into the world.

The activity set for M Realty as a brokerage is based around technology and innovative marketing ideas that help our agents in their Real Estate practices. We use a combination of photos and videos in our blogs, Twitter and Facebook posts to show the world what we’re up to on a daily basis. Apparently it’s been working. Garron, our Founder, has been asked to speak at numerous National Real Estate conferences and we were recently nominated for the Inman News “Innovator Award” for most innovative brokerage in the country.

The activity set for M Realty agents is totally dependent on the individual agent. Some agents are already very active out in the community, and finding things they find interesting that they can use as “content” to promote themselves is relatively easy. For others, we have to work on creating a plan and layout the steps that they can follow to get to that level. But, we’re good at it, and the agents are able to pick up the concept fairly quickly. Once they do, they’re off and running, doing things they actually like to do and using those activities to cultivate new business relationships.

It really is a beautiful thing.  If you’d like to talk more about how this can work for you, get in touch.

Our founder Garron Selliken, speaks regularly around the Nation at conferences about The Future of Real Estate Brokerages, How to use Technology as Agents, WordPress development, etc.  He has assembled a team that is passionate about improving the Real Estate industry by focusing on one agents practice at at time….yours!

…and of course all M agent sites come with Homequest and our new awesome IDX property search!

Activity is the key ingredient. We assist you in setting up your marketing program to easily document what you’re doing, then publish and share it with your target audience. It is a simple, straightforward approach to marketing that keeps you in the community meeting people, and adds the leverage of reaching a much larger audience through social media and search engines.

Best of all, you will love what you’re doing and creating!

Each agent develops according to their strengths and interests. Some focus on SEO to drive traffic, some focus on blogging and photography, some focus on video, some on neighborhood farming. There are so many ways to be successful in real estate, the key is to find what is right for you.

Some of our classes include:

Basic Classes - Created in partnership with Gahlord Dewald & Thoughtfaucet
Wordpress 101
Social Media 101
SEO 101

Advanced Classes –
Twitter – Advanced tools and techniques
Facebook – Advanced tools and techniques
Facebook – Like pages
SEO – on page
SEO – off page
Wordpress – Compelling posts
WordPress – Landing pages
Wordpress – Video
Wordpress – Images
Google Analytics – understanding your stats
Google Analytics – mining for opportunity
Youtube – Managing your account
iPhone – The apps and how to use them
iPad – The apps and how to use them
Homequest – Build the database, prospecting for more biz.
Homequest – The killer listing presentation using Market analyzer

Ongoing support, with accountability, also plays an important role in gaining real mastery. Building our expertise in Real Estate, technology, social media and communication is a never ending evolution and working together on a regular basis helps bring the right technology and training to the agent at the right time. For example, training on Google Analytics is only truly useful when the agent has significant web traffic and can have a dramatic impact as the agent gains real wisdom and insight over time.

Much of our success comes from consistently seeking, learning, and doing this alongside our agents. This is a cornerstone of M Realty and something we are very proud of.