It’s been almost three weeks now since we officially moved-out of our Pleasanton office on Hacienda Drive. Makes me wonder what I’m going to do when the mail stops getting forwarded in another week? It also explains why I haven’t done anything productive in almost six weeks. Moving is a big job.

More than five years ago, when my Dad/Broker/Boss inked the deal on the seven thousand square foot office space in Pleasanton, it seemed a perfectly logical thing to do. But the way the business has changed (driven primarily by the Internet), today such a huge brick-and-mortar investment would strike me as pure foolishness.

Agents just don’t use the office like they used to.

Five years ago we depended on the office for access to our business telephone and messages. We went in for access to the MLS. We found out about new listings through face-to-face communication with co-workers. Company policies and events were promoted through memos and fliers that we would pick-up in our mail slots. The whole thing was just so physical.

Now, most of that communication can be done through email. The MLS is at our fingertips via the Internet. Forms are all electronic. Files are stored on-line. We have user names and passwords to access DRE resources, tax record data and the latest industry-related news. Everything’s on line. If I’ve got an Internet connection, I’m in business.  Read the rest of this entry »

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It’s worth the eleven-minute commitment. Or twenty-two minutes if you’re like me and you need to watch it twice.

Fair warning, it has absolutely nothing to do with real estate, paperless transactions, customer service, markets or investing. But it has everything to do with our success.

And if you tell anyone that I put Oprah on my website…

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Assuming the readers of this website are all my friends, I’m fairly comfortable posting (some of) my New Year’s resolutions in the public domain. Sure it’s a little risky, but there’s that accountability that comes with declaring our goals to people we care about.

A quick side note: My first paragraph of the year has already begged the question, Are you my friend? If so, please do me a couple of favors.

1. Subscribe to this blog, allowing us to stay in contact and providing me with the motivation to keep sharing.

2. Leave comments on your favorite posts. This is supposed to be interactive, back-and-forth, a community and so on. Please participate.

If you’re not a friend of mine yet, give me a call and I’ll buy you a cup of coffee - let’s get to know each other.

Back to the resolutions.

1. Shed those Holiday pounds. This has become an annual thing, as reliable as Mom’s spritz cookies at Christmas, or the homemade Fudge that my sister has now perfected. The good news is that by this point I know how to lose the weight almost as quickly as I put it on. I can usually get within spitting-distance of my goal before a new season of American Idol begins. The trick is maintaining those healthy habits. This year, I’m going to maintain a weight at or under 180lbs.

2. Blog regularly. That means about twice a week, save for any vacation time that I might take. How about 100 posts for 2008? Seems like a reasonable goal. The real purpose of these posts goes back to that friendship piece - what better way to keep you (my friends) up to speed with my life, my family and my business? How about YOU make a resolution to check-in regularly?

3. Create a whole new experience for people buying and selling real estate. We’ve all made quantitative goals around our business, and those are both positive and necessary. But this goal is different. 2008 is the year we go paperless! And it doesn’t end there. I’m talking about embedded video tours, viral internet marketing, constant web-based communication - the whole shootin’ match. I’ve got all the pieces coming together to create a convenient, secure, eco-friendly real estate transaction that takes advantage of today’s technology. Like everything else, better-faster-cheaper. I’m so excited about this one!

4. Be a better Husband, Father, Son, Uncle, Brother and Friend. Real Estate markets will ebb-and-flow, technology will continue to evolve, and some day 49ers may even be good again. But it’s our relationships and the lives we touch that really matter. So I’ll be working on that this year as well.

Go ahead, scroll down a bit, and leave one of your resolutions on my site…

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Much thanks to the staff at Celebrations Christian Preschool in Brentwood for putting on another amazing indoor-carnival last night. I appreciate the work and the patience that goes into the productions that they do on a fairly regular basis. And while the kids bounce around oblivious to the whole thing, it demonstrates to me the commitment of the staff - the energy and the detail that goes into these things is exhausting to me, and I was only there for about an hour!

It was our last Christmas show at Celebrations. (All three of our girls have gone there for preschool, so not only do I feel a part of the family over there, I feel like a shareholder.) Anyhow, Rachel (and C) worked hard on her lines for the past couple of weeks and while I was a little nervous about how she’d handle her first moment in the spotlight, she absolutely nailed it. I was proud to tears, while the other parents oooh-ed and aaaw-ed at Rachel’s animated delivery.

Yep, that’s my kid.

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Sorry I’m late. I was supposed to write a post last night, and the plan was to write about the live real estate auction that I spent sixteen hours participating in on Sunday. But I had a little mishap on my way home and well, I’ve got a new post in mind.

I headed out of the office a little early yesterday. It is after all a holiday week, and I’m already in a holiday mood. We had a really good Monday Sales Meeting I thought - lots of good feedback on the discussions around social networking sites as well as an intense exchange around the auction that took the meeting a half hour past our regular stopping point. It was a small group (holiday week) but a really productive time together.

So I’m sneaking out early to get home to the Broncos on Monday Night Football.It’s dark already at 5:00pm as I head up Vasco Road towards Brentwood. Vasco is famous for deadly head-on crashes, although there have been relatively few in the past three years since I moved out here thanks to road improvements and speed enforcement by the CHP. In fact, just last night officer Joiner of the CHP was telling me that Marsh Creek Road between Clayton and Brentwood is the new hot spot for deadly head-on crashes.

Vasco Road still presents it dangers however, evidenced by the fact that I was having said conversation with Officer Joiner on the shoulder of that very highway last night.

You see, about halfway through the 19 mile stretch from Livermore to Bretwood, some guy who had failed to tie-down his overstuffed armchair was stopping right in the middle of traffic to make an illegal u-turn to retrieve his fallen furniture. (It’s a good thing he did, a Lazy Boy in the southbound lane isn’t a good thing for anyone.) So I, along with the three or four cars between me ant the pick-up truck came to a dead stop, right there in the single northbound lane, in the dark, on Vasco Road.

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