Playing Real Estate the ‘Old Fashioned Way’.

So, today we launch the official Nyrose & Associates Blog and with it, the trinity of our social media union is complete; facebook, Twitter and blog… yeah, we’re doing it.   I am new at it, so bear with me.

It’s funny how things come around.

I moved to Kelowna just over a year and a half ago with my wife and small children to build my real estate empire (why not go big?) and I am very happy to say that it’s going great… at least it is now.  Having spent a number of years working as VP of Sales for big Lower Mainland developers, I saw a great opportunity in the Okanagan and we made the move in June 2008.  With youth and passion on my side there was nothing that could stop me right?  Wrong.  In September 2008, the real estate market just died- like someone just turned the tap off.   Developers and sellers were panicking- there were no buyers.  And I thought how the hell am I going to make it here?

For five months, I went to the office every day from 8am- 5pm.

I focused on what I know best, multi-family and new home sales.  I called every developer and builder in this city- ALOT.  I got to know them, know their product, heck what else was I going to do?  I attended industry meetings and shook hands and asked questions.  And I realized something… in the hey day of the robust and frenetic real estate market of the past few years, realtors stopped or had no need to do one of the most fundamental functions of our jobs… we stopped selling!

I remember when I launched pre-sales for new communities in 2006 and 2007 at Polygon to a line-up of crazed, frantic buyers.   All released homes would sell out in a matter of days, hours sometimes.   The next phase would launch and we would raise the prices but that still did not thin out demand.  Marketing budgets were fat and indulgent.  It was crazy.  We worked hard.  However we did not have to sell.

But now we do.   Making connections, building rapport and trust, learning about the product (ours and our colleagues) and finally, selling it!  In a meeting in early 2009, Renee Wasylyck , CEO at Troika Developments made a prediction… she said 2009 would be the year of the Salesman.  She is a smart woman, she was absolutely right.  Agents that could actually ‘sell’ it (themselves, their product, others product) made it.

My wife and I often tell my son and his friends that it is time to turn off the TV or the Wii or the Nintendo DS and ‘play the old fashioned way’ which got me thinking about all the ways that we can apply the same principle to our business.   The reckoning has come.  And for so many reasons this is a good thing for buyers, sellers and the industry.  It is time to rebuild that culture of trust in realtors because the unfortunate fall-out from the ‘good years’ is that we’ve lost some ground.

And this is a big part of why I decided to blog and engage in other forms of social media.  Ironically (since this whole form of media is so ‘un’ old-fashioned) and remarkably, facebook, blogs and twitter are great platforms to connect with people, share information/ resources, form networks, kumbayah.  And what is social media if not the modern manifestation of good old fashioned word of mouth (albeit on steroids)?   So this is my attempt to bring a bunch of people with a common interest in real estate together; whether you are looking to buy or sell, build a home, invest in the Okanagan… whatever.  I hope to bring together resources from all facets of the industry.  For the past several months, we have been writing a bi-weekly article in the Kelowna Capital News, interviewing Kelowna builders.  Those articles will live here, a great resource for anyone looking at building their next home- that’s the kind of thing we are looking to do, to facilitate that ‘word of mouth’ referral network that our business is really built upon.

You know, playing real estate the old fashioned way.