World of Real Estate
A week away from Vancouver real estate to learn about what's going on in the "world" (literally) of real estate!
Last week I attended the National Association of Realtors conference in Las Vegas. After I recovered from my amazement at the level of environmental damage caused just in the small area of the Vegas strip (neon signs beyond belief and way too much water sucking, pesticide inhaling greenery for a desert), I found that the conference was very useful. Now a lot of people think that those conferences are a lot of eating and drinking and not much work but I can tell you-I was starving almost all day (no time to eat) and I have never learned so much in such a short time in my life. There were approximately 30,000 realtors attending which means the organization could provide a lot of courses. There were even 3 courses on the greening of the real estate industry! The content was easy to absorb but the volume of material in the time period put even my law school years to shame! It was amazing the wide array of speakers on interesting topics on the Canadian, North American, international markets and on how to serve clients better. It was really worthwhile, if exhausting. The trade show was also full of ideas for new and innovative offerings for clients. We plan to put a lot of these ideas into practice over time and I will be attending this conference every year for the foreseeable future! One of the ideas that is apparently the wave of the future is to make listings available to people on their cell phones, rather than requiring access to the computer. This isn't being done in Canada yet as far as I know but we are looking into it. If any of you reading this have any comments on cell listings, please let us know!