Attention Real Estate Junkies: You Need This Boot to Kick You In The A***

Inman’s Agent ReBoot is coming to Dallas AGAIN this month, Wednesday, February 29, all day long at the Renaissance Richardson. Soon you’ll have a cute ad over there on the side to click on so you can sign up. It’s all of $49.  

What, you may ask, is Agent ReBoot and why should you be there?

ReBoot is a mini Inman Real Estate Connect for brokers, agents, investors, anyone real-estate obsessed or interested in the latest real estate technology news. In one day, you’ll hear experts from across the country show you how to use technology more effectively to “reboot” your business, retool yourself with the latest real estate hotties to get properties sold.

Inman News is a major on-line real estate news, information, advice, research, opinion and commentary, always reported with a tech overtone. Geared for industry professionals and real estate consumers, it’s the place where you learn what’s going on in real estate before anyone else does.  I attended my first Inman Connect in San Francisco, by accident, about four summers ago and thought I had entered, if not another world, a part of California where English was not the primary language. I heard about this thing called Twitter and Blue Skies and The Cloud when the concepts were so new, so foreign, I thought perhaps this was Cali tongue after too many drugs. My meeting is what inspired me to start DallasDirt over at D Magazine. I met a guy named Gary Vaynerchuk who I had a drink with and still email. I soon learned that Inman was a place that didn’t focus on what real estate is doing NOW (and wring hands, bitch and moan about it), it focused on tomorrow and how technology was shaping the future, how that tech could be used to re-tool agents, to survive. You know who’s a scary guy? Craig Newman, founder of Craig’s List. He’s scary to agents because his site lists homes for sale without agents. Craig spoke at my first Connect and was grilled by the agents. I saw Spencer Rascoff, co-founder or some executive of Zillow (because we just love Zillow’s Zestimates, especially here in Texas NOT!) getting not just grilled but skewered by agents and national experts. Three years ago Inman brought Bob Shiller of the famously gloomy Case Shiller report to NYC Connect to a packed audience of agents so terrified of the cratering market every pharmacy near the Times Square Marriott had a run on anti-depressants.

Now here’s a shocker: some Dallas agents are still having trouble turning on a computer. I love the agents who call what I do “blobbing.” (Hell, call it whatever your heart desires!) They want to FaceBook, not sure how. Video? Oh my. Only .8% of agents across the country use video in their listings even though it helps promote your listings and sell homes. Write a blog? I actually disagree with the Inman experts on this one: with more than 150,000 blogs out there in North Texas, I actually think this can be a huge waste of Realtor’s time. In fact, I syndicate my content to Realtors ALL THE TIME. All a blog does is help with your SEO 

My what? SEO? No, it is not a venereal disease!

I told you, you need this course! Especially if you are getting tired of spending big bucks on print advertising. In fact, the sub-head for this event may well be: How To Save Your (Thousands) of Dollars on Print and Start Using Internet Tools to Market your listings.

And when you go talk to a homeowner about what you will do differently to market that home, what will set you apart from your competition, just rattle off some of the tricks you’ll pick up at ReBoot and watch them sign on the dotted!