This was the latest title from the Real Trends monthly newsletter for March.  A few snippets of information that we gathered from this months commentary and research were the following:

The number of agents working for independent firms was increasing at a much more rapid pace than agents working for large national brands.

Hard times allows for opportunities, growth, and innovation if you keep an optimistic mind set. The real estate industry is undergoing major changes in how business is conducted on a brokerage level and agent level.

There were also some great discussions and research conducted on the trends of marketing and how marketing dollars are being spent. One point made was that 86% of agents had their own personal websites or blog site and that 25% of agents were using social media tools to advertise and brand themselves.

Click Here to view the entire article.

Real Innovate Realty will be sponsoring RE Barcamp Los Angeles, Thursday April 2nd at Pasadena Hilton.

RE barcamp is a gathering of the brightest minds and most innovative companies in the real estate industry for a one day meeting on technology, services, solutions, marketing, social media, etc… Its very cutting edge and tech driven. We hope to see you there.

Google applications are all free and they are all very good and very useful. They can serve the basic functions of what you would understand the tools to do plus several advanced functions that allow them to be even more beneficial to you and your business. There are several creative ways to use all of these apps. For the purpose of this post, I will not go into too much detail, but trust me, these apps are worth getting to know.

Gmail – Email program that blows any other free email program away. Offers countless functions and solutions. Its also a must have if you plan on using any of the other apps below.
Google Chat – This app gives you the ability to quickly chat with others. You can also easily add a badge to your website or blog and allow users to quickly chat with you. A great tool to have on your website or blog. The advanced features allow users to actually call   over the Internet for free using your computers microphone and speakers.

Tasks - A basic task manager that has the ability to be used online as well as offline
Calendar – A great calendar application that allows you to have multiple calendars, the ability to share your calendar with others. It also can download and sync to Microsoft outlook or your handheld device.
Google Docs- Performs almost all of the functions as the Microsoft office versions, but its free. Its also stored on the “Internet cloud” so the documents are virtually stored. They can be shared very easily, published as web pages, or used as collabortive documets where groups of peopel can work on the same document in real time on their own computers.
Word - Acts like microsof word document
Spreadsheets – Acts like excel
Forms - Gives the ability to create online forms that load the filled in content into spreadsheet fields. Amazing App!
Presentations - Acts like powerpoint
Google Voice- This application is about to breakground in about two weeks and when it does, make sure to get out there and grab a google voice phone number quick. It will enable a user to give out their google voice number as their phone number. The basic function of google voice, is when someone leaves you a voicemail message, rather than calling in to hear the message, it will be transcribed in text form and be sent via email to you. For example, if you use an iphone or blackberry, then you will easily be able to get all of your voicemail messages by email rather then calling in. Awsome Technology. There will be other customizable functions as well that we all wished we could do now. An example would be to have certain callers only have the option to leave messages. This is an amazing app coming soon. So be on the look out and grab a phone number quick. To keep up to date check out the blog at googleblog.blogspot.com

Real Innovate Realty highly recommends these apps to all of our agents. To find out more about what Real Innovate Realty offers or if you have questions about any of these apps, give us a call to discuss.

You may have seen the popular application Facebook Connect on websites such as CNN.com.What this valuable application does, is allows users of a paticular website the ability to login to the site using their facebook username and password.  While the news is reporting, users have the ability to communicate with their facebook friends on the CNN website. Its as if they were watching the news together in the same room. These discussions and comments will be posted on their facebook page for all of their friends to see when they happen to login and check up on their facebook account.

The power of the application comes in the form of viral marketing. You say something once and its published for all of your friends to see it.

This is greatly beneficial to the owner of the site that is being discussed. Now imagine how this can work for the real estate industry. You have Facebook Connect on your website or blog. A user logs into your site to view properties using your idx solution. That user logs into your site with their facebook username and password. They search your site, look up some properties, find some that the like. They then mark their favorite properties from their search.

Now a couple of very important things just happened for the user and for you. The user has now just shared some of their favorite properties with their facebook friends, who will have the ability to share comments on the properties that were marked.  Your website and yourself as the real estate professional have just been shared with the users facebook community.

Do you see how the power of this application can benefit a real estate website and the power of the marketing potentional? A user searching for properties on your website is common. However, now thier search has the power to become public to that persons 300+ friends and along with that comes indirect marketing for yourself as the real estate professional. The more people that know that you are the real estate professional, the better. This application has the power to do just that.

What does one TRILLION dollars look like?
All this talk about “stimulus packages” and “bailouts”…
A billion dollars…
A hundred billion dollars…
Eight hundred billion dollars…
One TRILLION dollars…
What does that look like? I mean, these various numbers are tossed around like nothing, so I thought I’d take Google Sketchup out for a test drive and try to get a sense of what exactly a trillion dollars looks like.
(And notice those pallets are double stacked.)
So the next time you happen to hear someone toss around the phrase “trillion dollars”…

Let’s start off small..

Believe it or not, this little pile is $1 million dollars (100 packets of $10,000). You could stuff that into a back pack and cruise around with it.

While a measly $1 million looked a little unimpressive, $100 million is a little more respectable. It fits neatly on a standard pallet…

And $1 BILLION dollars… now we’re really getting somewhere…

Next we’ll look at ONE TRILLION dollars. This is that number we’ve been hearing so much about. What is a trillion dollars? Well, it’s a million million. It’s a thousand billion. It’s a one followed by 12 zeros.
You ready for this?
It’s pretty surprising.
Go ahead…
Scroll down…
Ladies and gentlemen… I give you $1 trillion dollars…

~or~

You just happen to come upon 1 Trillion Dollars..

..thanks to this little email you’ll know just How Many PALLETS to order.

Real Innovate Realty has just completed a 3 week free webinar series discussing Technology, Marketing, and Overhead Expenses. We are very pleased with the successful outcome. We have had several very positive comments in regards to the content discussed in these webinars. We will be conducting future webinar series, so please make sure that you are on our email list to learn about the upcoming discussions.

We have made the notes and video recordings of these sessions available to anyone who is interested. Please click on the links below to access these.

Session 1 notes - 10 Ways to Save the Enviornment and Save on Technology

Session 2 notes – 10 Ways to Save the Enviorment and Save on Marketing

Session 3 notes – 10 Ways to Save the Enviorment and Save on Overhead

Session 1 Video Recording

Session 2 Video Recording (Not Available)

Session 3 Video Recording

NO MORE COMMISSION REDUCTIONS FOR FANNIE MAE SHORT SALES http://is.gd/l9Bk

They guys at Domus Consulting Group have been very innovative in their thinking and networking. They have created a very original and new way of creating a large and powerful referral network.

Real Innovate Realty has been working with Domus Consulting Group for the past 4 months now. We have been able to leverage the power of the social media and we are coming up with more innovative ways to help our agents gain exposure and become  more successful with their marketing efforts. We believe that this new system is the future and will help any real estate agent and business professional in their community.

Check out the presentation on The Social Media Referral System Here:

Domus Consulting Group will be conducting free webinar sessions for real estate professionls and anyone  in their professional network whom they believe will benefit from learning social media toosls and this referral system.