This is a photo I took of a recent brokers and managers meeting the Westchester-Putnam Association of REALTORS held to bring us up on the recent changes to real estate laws and how that affected our responsibilities to our clients. 

The quality of the snapshot isn’t good because I thought it would be a tad obnoxious to use my flash in the session. It was a packed house. When I got into the business in 1996, I was a fly on the wall for manager and owner meetings on a few occasions. Their tone was that of a social gathering; nothing to criticize, but it was not like it is today. What I saw in this meeting was all business about making sure the P’s and Q’s of our conduct were kosher. There was plenty of collegiality, but it seemed to take a backseat to mastering the subject matter and understanding the changes to the law. 

The presenters, including WPAR President Leah Caro, gave an energetic, engaged, and connected multi media presentation and interacted with us to make sure all questions were answered. They stayed after to make sure no one went home without being complete. We have excellent leadership. 

I have to say that the clients of Westchester and Putnam Association brokerages should rightly expect exemplary conduct from our members. More importantly, the brokers and owners expect the same from themselves. The consumer wins. 

David Popoff has written an intriguing post, asking us what our top 10 posts o 2010 were. His metric was clicks, but you could, I suppose also do a list for comments. Comments don’t make me money, so I’ll stick with clicks also. Here are my top 10:

1. The Money You “Lost” in Your Price Reduction Wasn’t Real                   6916 
2. Male Agents are From Mars: Advice for Wives of Agents                       5021
3. Why Tons of Buyers Are Screwing Up                                                    4597
4. 2 Things Listing Agents Should Never Say on Accompanied Showings  3875
5. What Makes a Short Sale Specialist?                                                     2826
6. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Taking Flat Fee Listings                 2536
7. Sellers Should Pay Closing Costs Only When Buyer Needs It                2353
8. Do Me A Teensy Weensy Little Favor                                                     2254
9. Why do Buyers Make Lowball Offers?                                                    2207
10. 10 Day Short Sale Rule                                                                          1833

I’ll begin this post with the plain fact that if it weren’t for Active Rain, my business would be far less than what it is. I am a big believer in the platform, and I am grateful for how it has enriched me. That said, I am the sort of guy who prefers to talk to people whom I think will listen, so I would like to propose a few things to take AR to the next level. And while I know I can get a stand alone website with a “blog” on other platforms, there is no bell or whistle from another company that trumps the community here. So what I want, I would love here.

I want more tools & features. And I’ll tell you why. You can break your ass researching and posting a ton of hyper local community information and get “found,” and those same people can thank you very much for telling them where the fireworks are this July 4 or what the amenities are at a condo complex, then turn around and buy a home with the agent whose on whose site they found a house online. People don’t want an agent. They want a home. Getting found is only a start-if you don’t have everything consumers want on one site, they’ll find it elsewhere.

What I essentially want is this: I want one (1) website for my company that has everything in one place. Right now I have a company website, a separate IDX solution, my Active Rain account, my outside blog from Active Rain (pictured), and several other niche blogs. One stop shopping it ain’t. I want all that here. Our current outside blog sites were cutting edge when they came out. Widgets! But what was new and impressive in 2009 is sort of bland and not what I’d call feature-rich in 2011. Little has changed in 2 years. I want more.  

So…

I want what Jay Thompson has, and I don’t want to pay thousands of dollars to a developer or spend thousands of hours making it. Blog. IDX. Company web page. Bells and whistles that talk to Facebook and Twitter and Mars and Jupiter. One site. I want indexable IDX with a customizable virtual office administrative back end so I can manage prospective clients’ needs. All this stuff is out there, but it isn’t here. And I want it here on Active Rain. 

What would make everything really easy is if there were a means by which I could import my blog content to a self-hosted WordPress site (my apologies if this is too techie- I want to understand this stuff as much as I want to understand how fission works; I just need outcomes) that also allows for the comments to populate instead of the current outside blogs. I have found more than one way to get my content over, which I have not done yet, but my comments won’t go. And, frankly, content without comments is a black cocktail dress without Audrey Hepburn in it. 

There has to be a way for this to be done that doesn’t involve a non-sanctioned Rube Goldberg plugin or massive development at Active Rain headquarters for outside blogs we currently import to. Scrap them. I am willing to pay, guys (actually, a one-stop shop would be a money saver for me). How about it. This is the largest real estate think tank in the world. Let’s have our Active Rain accounts capture the web traffic and keep it for everything, not just our blog content- home search, company pages, social media integration, and whatever else is next. Let’s be cutting edge, and let’s be cutting edge right here at home. 

I never attended a REBarCamp until this past October in Rye at the NYSAR event. I didn’t know what they were all about, but I had a baptism of fire when I was actually conscripted to moderate a session! 

If you have never been to a REBarCamp and you are wondering, don’t fret. All you need to do is register for FREE for the New York event this coming January 11 at the Roger Smith hotel in midtown Manhattan and you can experience a great one for the first time and then play in the Big Apple afterwards. You’ll have a ton of fun, you’ll learn as much as you can absorb and then some, and it is a killer networking opportunity to rub elbows with colleagues from all over the Metropolitan area in our varied industries. 

To get more information, shoot me an email, or, better yet, log onto one of the following sites:

• http://www.rebarcampnewyork.com/
• http://www.facebook.com/REBCNY

Here are some of the particulars:

What: RE BarCamp New York 2011 

When: Tuesday, January 11, 2011 

Time: 9:00am to 5:00-ish PM (registration starts at 8:00 AM-ish) 

Where: The Roger Smith Hotel
501 Lexington Avenue, 
New York, New York 10017, NYC 

Twitter Hashtag: #REBCNY 

Who: Realtors, lenders, title, escrow, appraisers, inspectors, virtual assistants, home stagers and anyone in real estate hoping to improve their business through social media. 

What is REBarCamp? It is a day of free form sessions in the real world addressing real estate in 2011. And it is free, thanks to our numerous sponsors, but the whole thing is coordinated by the Lucky Strikers Social Media Club, of which I am a proud member. 

Come feed your brain and recharge your batteries to start 2011 off right. 

I am going to indulge in a brazen self promotional post since the end of the year is here, mainly to state the facts, since Ann tells me I don’t stress the level of performance I, um, perform. So here are a few facts about how J. Philip did in 2010, both myself personally and the team. 

10– My rank for residential transactions closed out of over 7000 EAMLS member agents. In other words, I sold more homes than 99.86% of my competition. I averaged just under 1 transaction side (.9) per week. I am proud of that, but prouder still of the job done for each individual client, with the great help from Ann and Ronnie, my two administrative goddesses. 

45– My company’s rank for transactions closed out of about 920 member firms of the EAMLS. That put J. Philip in the top 5% of the MLS for sales volume, outselling quite a few larger offices and a slew of national chain offices. Overall we had 81 transaction sides as a team, and I aim to make that number far larger this year as my guys take their individual games to the next level. But that is another post. 

19-The number of licensees now associated with the company, which has grown in spite of the crummy housing market. We have a few more on deck who will be joining the team in early 2011. Half the team didn’t sell a thing under our license in 2010- that is fine by me. Not everyone is full time or with the firm very long, but everyone made a contribution. 

2– The number of branch offices now open since we put down stakes in northern Manhattan in March. 

2– The number of times I have been elected as Vice President of the MLS after being re-elected last month. 

514– The number of blog posts I have authored on this platform, not including my outside niche blogs. I do not think it is a coincidence that I have blogged obsessively and that we’ve performed well in 2010. 

2010 was a superior year to 2008 and much better than last year as well. We’ve had our challenges, and I’ll be blogging about how I did with my 2010 goals soon, but suffice to say I am gratified for the position the firm is in and the caliber of people we have on the team. Real estate agents are notorious for bragging, but I have tried to keep this as close to the banal numbers as possible. The best feedback I can get is that I have walked my talk. 

Now that the holidays are all but past, the “slow season” is officially over. Spring gets busy, but when does Spring start in Westchester real estate? March? After the Super Bowl? In my experience, “Spring” in real estate starts January 2nd. It may sound silly, but motivated buyers have been lurking online for months now, checking out the inventory and bookmarking certain homes that may meet their criteria with the intention of getting out and seeing things as soon as the holiday season is completed.

Time moves quickly, and those folks who want to be in a house by the end of the school year need to be in contract 60 days ahead of time. If school ends June 20th, then late April is when you’d need to be in contract. Seeing how it takes some time to find a home you love, negotiate an offer, do inspections and go to contract, then you’d need to be active well before April- most likely February the latest. Many will start earlier, perhaps not intending to buy in January, but certainly to get the lay of the land. 

Moreover, the “move up” consumer has to sell their own house this year prior to buying another one. They would be very wise to be ready and on the market as soon as the new year begins. If they close on their home by May or June, they still have time to find and prepare their next home. 

Like the great Yogi Berra says, “it gets late early out there.” The early bird does get the real estate worm, and if you wait until April you may lose the best deals out there- by July you could well be looking at leftovers.

Bust a move in January- that’s when the motivated buyers and sellers here in Westchester “spring” into action.  

Believe it or not, New Yorkers are not the rudest people I have run into. Having lived in several different places, including Boston, Philadelphia and New Orleans, I have run into some meanies (few in N.O.). But when I moved back to Westchester in 2001, I was pleasantly reminded how comparatively nice my fellow noo yawkas are. But we still have some pieces of work. And the holiday season doesn’t make a difference with some. 

Most of the time I blow it off. However, today there is a guy walking amongst us that doesn’t know it, but he is fortunate that his head is still attached to his torso. 

Due to the light week, today I took our 6-year old, Gregory out for a short trip with me. We went to White Plains to the Toys R Us that happens to be in the same building as our board of REALTORS, and Gregory kept asking to go upstairs. I finally gave in, because I thought he wanted to ride the escalator, but the little bugger somehow knew there was a McDonald’s one level up. I still don’t know where he saw the sign or how he knew, because he had never been there. 

It was crowded and busy, but the line appeared to be moving, so I took a chance and went in with him. Gregory is on the spectrum for autism and still learning boundaries, so I had to really be on my toes. When we got to the counter and ordered, we waited very briefly and a tray was put in front of us with food, which Gregory instinctively reached for. From right next to me, I hear a guy growl something nasty and snatch his food- my son didn’t know. I grabbed Gregory’s hand before he even took anything, but Big Mouth still had to act like we were fondling his wife.

Now, in this day and age we live in, I would think that everyone who walks on their hind legs has gotten the memo that you don’t mess with someone’s kids in public. You don’t touch them, you don’t yell at them, and if you do address anything you should be as disarming as possible because you don’t know who or what you are dealing with.

I don’t even remember what the guy said, but it was over the top and hostile. And after my reflex to take my son’s hand was over and the schmuck walked off chomping like a self centered troglodyte I felt myself getting angry. Very angry. I wanted to say “you don’t need to be nasty to a 6-year old with autism” but I knew that if I opened my mouth it could escalate- I felt, very viscerally, that I didn’t care what the people around us would think if I made a scene. So I bit my lip out of the sheer intellectual knowledge that it would be bad to indulge my clenched jaw. 

I worked in restaurants for years and know how primal people are when they are hungry. But I never felt that was a valid excuse for nastiness. I know plenty of people are stressed out these days and that money is tight and nothing is easy. But there is no justification to bark at a stranger’s child. Honestly if some kid grabbed my fries I’d spring for the 99 cents and 45 second delay and get more fries if it really skeeved me out. But I’d mind my tongue, and it wouldn’t take nearly as much self control as I exercised today sparing Supersize Asshat some considerable discomfort. Be as big a jerk as you want with me but do not mess with the cubs. 

Reader’s Digest has a huge world headquarters in nearby Chappaqua, New York. I should say HAD a huge headquarters. The company quietly left the campus this past week to smaller digs in Manhattan. This represents the fall of a local giant, and the final exit of a company that was a Westchester institution. To work at Reader’s Digest was special; it was one of the companies that made Westchester County unique. And now it is gone. You can still subscribe to the publication, mind you, but the Reader’s Digest I grew up with is dead. 

You really should read the article to get an appreciation of how Roy and Lila Wallace ran their own privately held firm  from 1922 until they passed away in the 1980’s. It was a special place that took amazing care of the employees and was loyal to an editorial vision that worked incredibly well. And it was hugely profitable. Amazingly profitable. By the time I was born in 1967 the Reader’s Digest Association had a world headquarters that was like a college campus. 

In 1990, after the Wallaces had both died, the company went public. 

And the suits came in and ruined everything. The thing about running any successful business in my experience is that those who truly own the enterprise are not slaves to the quarterly profit. I myself have lost battles in order to win the war. You can’t measure success in quarterly statements. Sometimes that makes you burn the axe handle. But that is just what the MBAs who came in the 1990’s did, and by 2005 the black ink was gone. The company hasn’t made a profit since 2005, and it went from being the sole tenant of their own wholly owned campus to a minor tenant that just got out of their lease with a bankruptcy filing. 

Like I said, read the article- it tells the tale of bad decisions, short sighted moves and strategies antithetical to the core vision of the Wallaces better than I could condense it. That is is ironic, because condensing great stories was what the Digest did. 

The lesson: those that own their own firm take the best care of it. In 2005, after busting my posterior working for others for 16 years, some of whom I adored, others that I abhorred, I opened my own firm. I can tell you firsthand that I have never worked so hard, martialed as much creativity, or been more resourceful than when I held the rudder in my own hands. This company is my baby. Having ownership makes the buck stop at my desk. I am accountable for solutions. I navigate obstacles. I have to plan and execute. And there is no safety net. When what I do succeeds, it is as sweet as it gets. When I fail, I get up again and attack, because it is all me and no one will do it for me. 

Most real estate licensees are 1099 independent contractors, and that is ownership that a w-2 employee seldom grasps. And some of us take the plunge and run our own firms, building our brand and practice on the mere capital of our good name, our good work, and our vision. That is not something to dismiss lightly. Those of us who are succeeding in this environment aren’t doing so because we’re lucky, as much as the fact that we are on to something. If I speak, it might be worth a listen. I am sure the suits at Reader’s Digest would sure love to get a little advice from the Wallaces.