Condo Blog - A Non-Corporate Blog From CondoDomain HQ

(Patti, Erica, and Jessica)

The holidays tend to be quite the busy time of year and this year for CondoDomain has been no exception! After a busy and very exciting year we teamed up with our close friends and a few other special people to throw the bash of the year!

With over 500 people who stopped by throughout the evening, a dance floor jamming, mixing, and mingling was taken to its highest level. We would like to thank everyone who attended and hope that you had a fabulous time! We know we did! (Even scoped out some new dance moves for 2009)

Much thanks goes out to Heather Carbone of Kobrand Spirits who helped with the mixology of fabulous drinks from Cafe Boheme, Appleton Run, and Depaz Rhum. Heather, you were a lifesaver! And your drinks were quite tasty!

Thank you Nicky Bandera, your contribution of Right Gin was more than appreciated! It’s not a party if you haven’t been “right ginned”.

We couldn’t have had those kegs of beer without Scott Kriss! Scott- you are fantastic!

With live music performed by Alonzo Harris and rockin beats DJ’d by Brian Lucas and crew, our party guests were able to dance all night looong! We couldn’t have done it without you guys

To our Santa’s helpers, Caitlin, Nicole, Chantal, and Han…you guys rocked! Thank you for helping us serve that bar and run the ice luge! Speaking of ice luge…Brookline Ice & Coal delivered that along with 600lbs of ice. We appreciate it greatly!

We couldn’t have pulled it off without Boston Party Rentals and Bauer Wines on Newbury street for the tables, bars, and of course…liquor and sodas!

The spectacular Ursula Henry from CondoDomain Atlanta flew up for the bash and helped out, you are awesome Ursula!

A big shout out to fellow bloggers Michael Ratty and Bill Wendel for attending! It was great to finally meet you two…

Words cannot even express the amount of gratitude I have for Mr. Bobby Seaport of Bellingham Metal, you were an amazing amount of help for this party planning extravaganza, we pulled it off! Thanks Bobby

(Andrea, Robyn, and Thomas)

And last, but certainly not least, Mrs. Patti Longo…the party would not have gone on without your help! Thank you so much for everything!

All in all, myself and fellow party hosts Tony Longo, Bobby Seaport, Scott Kriss, and a couple other “Santa’s Helpers” would like to thank each and every one of you for any and all contributions that made this party the event of the year! We had a blast and hope you all did too!

(Marianna, Joe & Rick from the FP3 Lofts Development & Marketing Team)

We have already received some really great feedback from our clients & friends and couldn’t be more pleased! Our Recession Christmas Bash was just one the examples of how we do things differently here at CondoDomain. Stay tuned for more fun and excitement to come in 2009.

Happy Holidays! Check out all photos on our Facebook Fan Page

By the way…if you are missing some items (ahem coats, ONE black boot, glove etc.) It’s at the office, so contact us

*** UPDATED - there are still a few coats, hats, ties and 5 shoes still here …. (yes 5 shoes)  if you lost anything! ***

Nobody loves to save you serious cash like CondoDomain….nobody, but a new concept today emerged in the “textbook” vertical and we are loving it.

In my daily seach of ‘whos who’ in technology on one of my favorite blogs EVER, (TechCrunch) I read about a new company called Chegg (awesome name by the way).  Chegg just got $25M of VC funding to roll out their business model which I think is stellar!

About Chegg:

Chegg is a revolutionary new way to get textbooks. Rent ‘em and save up to 80%! Students on over 1,000 campuses have saved millions of dollars on textbooks with Chegg, making us #1 in textbook rentals. And, through our Plant a Tree program, together we’ve funded over 100 acres of trees.

Chegg offers great prices, free return shipping, over one million titles to choose from, flexible rental periods, and no lines! You can order books from home or work, have them delivered to your door, and not have to worry about where to put them or where to sell them when your class is over. We take the risk on whether those books will be worth anything next semester, so you don’t have to!

We also plant a tree for every book you rent. More than 20 million trees a year are destroyed to make books! Renting helps make sure we get the most out of our resources, and by planting a tree for every book that’s rented, together we’re giving a little back to Mother Nature. So far, we’ve funded over 100 acres of trees. That’s 100 football fields or 25 city blocks of worth!

We’re here to make your life easier. Let us know what we can do to make renting with Chegg a great experience from start to finish. We’d love to hear from you!

More on Chegg - check out their BLOG (of course)

And college guys and gals…after your done SAVING on your textbooks…let us show you how to save on your new condo!

TheFrontSteps does it again…vote for the sexiest SF Realtor here or do what I did and buy a Real Estate Sucks t-shirt.

‘PROJECT: Development’ is a new series of BLOG postings and articles that you should expect to see in 2009.  ‘PROJECT: Development’ will drill down and extract the in’s and out’s of all the hot new luxury developments and lofts in downtown Boston.  Forget ‘price per square foot’ and how many bedrooms…you can pull all of that off MLS.  ‘PROJECT: Development’ will give you the MEAT you are looking for!

From sales volume and pricing adjustments to unique units & hidden features, we plan to take you through all the hot and not so hot Boston condo developments.

What should you expect?

Well…we will give you the skinny on what is going on in that development (yes the good, bad and the ugly).  We will also be posting great photography and even VIDEO for our not so shy developers & marketing peers.

Here are two test ‘PROJECT: Development’ articles we did this year:  “Condolicious: Northpoint“  & “Checkin’ out The 1850“

Developers Make Contact With Us ASAP!

Erica is already filling her schedule for ‘PROJECT: Development’.  Make sure you are not left out and you get the ‘transparent’ version of your property EXPOSED via ‘PROJECT: Development’. Contact Erica

How can you find ‘PROJECT: Development’ articles on our site/BLOG?

1.  You can read our blog everyday so you never miss a ‘PROJECT: Development’ .

2.  You can check in on our blog once in a while and visit the CATEGORY - ‘PROJECT: Development’ .

3.  You can sign up to get our blogs right in your inbox via FeedBurner auto-email blog.

Have a project that you want to get the skinny on? Email Erica (erica [at] CondoDomain.com)

CALLING ALL REAL ESTATE BROKERS AND AGENTS !!!

We are currently in recruiting mode to “inject” our business model into all of our pre-existing 33 markets and beyond!  Yes, we have all heard and read about real estate businesses closing up shop or similar companies performing layoffs and cost cutting,  that is not us.  Actually we are Growing, possibly we are onto something here?

As you may know we opened 8 markets since July of this year.  Since then we have tried, tested and tweaked our model and are now super excited to push it out to our remaining markets.  Our plan is to get out to all markets and beyond in 2009 starting with the largest urban metros that we have already existed in since 2005.  See our 8 ‘live’ markets here:  www.CondoDomain.com

Our next 8:

Chicago
Denver
St. Paul/Minneapolis
Miami
San Francisco
LA
St. Louis
Houston

The Gig:

You: An innovative (totally non-traditional) real estate broker or agent who works for an innovative broker.

Us: A web-based buyers brokerage brand focusing on the niche of urban housing and condominium living.  As an Internet driven business, we attract savvy, smart, educated buyers looking to buy a condo in your city and maximize their savings via a commission refund.

The Relationship: You have your own business and keep your own business.  You also have an exclusive partnership with CondoDomain and work with all CondoDomain buyers who come through our website & marketing system.

Skills Needed: High energy, very organized, entrepreneurial drive to become a market leader, knowledge of the downtown marketplace including new construction developments, love people and working with buyers, not fraid of the public spotlight, well spoken with the press, great understanding of the mortgage industry and sharp!

Bonus Skills: (not mandatory) Blogging, Social media friendly (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter), management skills to build a team of buyers brokers around you.

I

More on us right here on YouTube & Our Site:

Corporate Video

FOX25 Special

Meet our Clients

Meet our Team

Today RealEstate.com announces the acquisition of certain assets of Tampa-based New Homes Realty, Inc. New Homes Realty is an online real estate company operating in 11 metro areas across the country and utilizing a network of approximately 200 licensed real estate agents and brokers. In addition, the company developed a family of Web sites, including its flagship NewHomes.com, to provide interested home shoppers a database of thorough real estate information for new and existing homes.

“The acquisition of New Homes Realty assets is a perfect fit with our growing RealEstate.com, REALTORS(R) division,” says Bret Violette, president, RealEstate.com. “The company had a long-standing reputation as being one of the best brokers in the new homes segment and will allow us to quickly add a group of talented and extremely skilled agents to our team who are already in the field working with customers. We are also excited to incorporate the New Homes Realty lead generation assets into our company allowing us to better compete for and service those looking to purchase a new home.”

Do you believe in Smudging like Barbara Corcoran does?  (via Miamism)

Like MANY I have had my iPhone since the day they were introduced and like MOST, I do love it  very much.

However, I find myself loving the iPhone for many different reasons compared to my obsession with my old Blackberry.  The  Blackberry I loved because of the speed, business functions, email (obvious) and durability.  I could skip my Blackberry across the street and NOTHING would happen to it.  It was awesome!

Now as for the iPhone -

The iPhone isn’t nearly as durable (as you can see here) but I find myself loving the iPhone for a few reasons that are kind of unexpected from me.

1.  Email: The email only pulls automatically every 15 minutes (unless manually pulled).  Now they have the new MobileMe application and I have heard it is great, but I spent 40 minutes trying to set it up one day…and it didn’t work…so off to the next thing.  Result - email is inferior, but this is a good thing for me as I get enough of it when I am at my desk!

2.  Web browsing is awesome: Forget text viewed website…I want the real thing and I get it on the iPhone

3.  WiFi: Wifi is the best cellular addition ever.  Where can’t you get wifi!  Awesome.

4.  The camera: I never took pictures my entire life, now I have thousands because I have this thing in my pocket 24/7 and the photo quality is superb!  The camera phone could be the best invention ever.

5.  Text Messaging: Ugh.  I hate text messaging and its a pain in the ass on the iPhone.  Result, I love that I don’t want to text because its a pain in the ass.

6.  Applications: They are awesome and endless.  From Google Maps to Urbanspoon.

Well, that’s it for my iPhone rant this a.m.  Bottom line is that if you are looking for a new phone.  I think you need to look at your “lifestyle” first and not get caught up in the multi-million dollar marketing campaigns.  If you need a super fast phone that you CAN’T break and you are an email freak and don’t care about the other stuff, Blackberry is where you need to be.

If you want to use your phone for a more lifestyle device, actually call some friends and “talk” to them, take some photos and use some cool app’s - go get an iPhone.

Or

If you are like me who needs a great business device but DOES NOT want to use it all the time, but when you do need to use it to send an email or pull a document or spreadsheet, you can.  iPhone all day long!!!

A small collaboration between Erica Farthing our Director of Social Media, a local video editor & myself (Founder, CEO, Broker & now cameraman) we slapped together some pretty neat client testimonial videos.  Check them out and let me know what you think.

We also have a series of them posted on our Main Website & of course on Facebook as well.

Kevin & Karen, Brookline, MA

Sarah Kasper, Back Bay, Boston

Carlos Febres-Mazzei, North End, Boston

With lots of talk on real estate becoming more and more transparent these days (and even blogs focusing on the subject at hand here, here & here), many ask, “Ok how do I do this.”

Here @ CondoDomain we have spent quite a bit of time researching and trying new techniques to tranparent-ize our business & our local industry to our consumers & “followers”. (Twitter play on word)  Facebook was our first true push at it…and here is our stroy.

*** Side Note:  Yes, it has really started to pay off recently, but I am not going to make any claims of a good ROI as of yet. ***

When we first started to ‘Expose” ourselves on the web - both business-minded and personally, we were very conservative.  Not as conservative as a corporate profile to enter the space…but conservative for us as an innovative, edgy company.   We were not sure where the boundaries were between a ‘professional marketed image & brand’ vs. our very outgoing young personalities and opinions.

The best way to really to explain this is to track back to some of the steps we took.

1.  We created a mini “off-site” forum on the social media platform called “Facebook.”  We branded our online-platform forum - Boston Real Estate Exposed.

Result: Some local ‘facebook’ traction and I personally received many  “friend requests” as the group organizer.  Most requests were industry peers as I really was not an on the street broker, but I “felt” the traction.

2.  We opened Dallas, Charlotte & Atlanta and added the “Real Estate Exposed” groups for those cities as well on Facebook.  Now some groups have had more traction in their city compared to others…but I am getting to my point here as now I was approaching 2,000 friend requests from again - industry peers.

3.  The next step was to add some advertisement on our blogs to let our blog readers know we also have a Facebook group, after all they were all web 2.0′ers.  This immediately boosted our Facebook status and we started to see a more comfortable and open social group now communicating with us on FB and off FB through email.

Result:  Awesome move….lets keep this going and get all of our team involved.

4.  We told the team here in Boston what was going on and asked them to explore taking their personal Facebook page to the next level and join in to these groups so now users could actually speak with our real agents & team members.  This was funny as I researched companies using Facebook and it seemed like corporate america was banning the site and here we are telling eveyrone to get on it.  Awesome!

This meant letting in individuals who we don’t necessarily know so they can learn about all of us, who we are and gain the trust & transparency they all want.  (We wanted to ‘keep it real’ BUT for some of us, we did have to remove some of the college keg-stand photos…well, not those, but you know what I am talking about!

So…we all opened up our Facebook profiles in Boston - Jessica, Tommy, Erica, BL and myself - totally exposed!

Result: The social experiment - a success.  Friends of friends reading up on the Exposed groups and getting an introduction to Jessica or Thomas who are our Boston agents & now daily Facebook users.

CondoDomain is now open in 8 cities nationally and we have asked all of our agent/brokers to crack open their Facebook profiles and let these users in.  We are still balancing between the Web 1.0′er and the Web 2.0′er.  Meaning, our Facebook groups are still only promoted on our blogs and really have not been pushed across our main site where all of our visitors land.

I mean, we aren’t ready to horrify our ‘Empty nester” buyer who is moving in from the suburbs looking to buy a $5M brownstone in the city and who may have not heard of Facebook yet…but I do think the time is coming and coming soon.

So what are our next steps:

Well, Erica Farthing who is now leading our Social Media marketing and has jumped in to other Social networks like Twitter & other community builders AND has tapped our client database of all of our 2008 clients.   She is currently in the process of interviewing our clients and showing them our new tools & networks to see if they would have reserached our firm or used our forums & groups to help them in their search for real estate or a real estate agent.  Once we compile the data we will certainly post it and let you know our next steps.

My assumptions is that we will somehow integrate our social media efforts into our main website & search pages.  I don’t think it will a forum like TruliaVoices, but more of just a 3rd party intergration of our members & past clients.

Find Us On Facebook

CondoDomain Fan Page (Corporate Fan Page)

CondoDomain Wants You (Agent Recruiting page)

Individual CondoDomain Agent/Broker Links - Here

Our “Real Estate Exposed” Pages:

Atlanta | Baltimore | Boston | Charlotte | Dallas | Philadelphia | San Diego | Washington D.C.

Other posts we have written on Facebook

So the past few weeks we have been looking into some re-branding for CondoDomain.  Our websites and business model have been great to us thus far, but in interviewing many of our clients the past few weeks, we have found some MAJOR LEAGUE gaps in our BRANDED EFFORTS & MARKETING SCHEMA and need to resolved them immediately.

Link to our Boston website is - http://Boston.CondoDomain.com

Some constructive feedback from our clients include:

1.  They were unclear what we were at first:  Ad website?  Referral Site?  Actual Agent/Broker?

2.  Many did NOT know that we gave a cash refunds back to our clients until AFTER they purchased?  (Oh my god…talk about bad design on my part!).  These clients bought a condo with us and were not expecting anything and then we showed up with a huge cash check and they flipped out.  Crazzzzy!

3.  Another group of people found out about the refund after being on the website for more than 3 days.  This is something I feel that should be conveyed  within the first 3 seconds!

4.  Most said once they found about the refund they did not understand it?  Did not get buyers brokerage or that commissions were paid by the seller.  We need to educate better on how traditional brokerage works!

5.  Almost everyone said that we have the best product (website) & service (people) available and they did not know it until after the fact.  All mentioned that we need to do more advertising and make it known our business proposition as its “one of a kind”.

So what to change/modify/implement?:

1.  Branding & Logo: Maybe the “.com” at the end of our logo makes people think we are more of a website rather than a real live, local, “people on the ground” company.  Remove the “.com”?

2.  Messaging: Obviously a more clear “educated” message to our audience / buyers. (a)  We are local brokers.  (b)  We are a niche specialist working with buyers only in major cities.  (c)  You get cash back when you buy with us.  (d)  Its not only free to use a buyers broker, but, actually using CondoDomain will save you additional thousands by letting them help you.

3.  Website (1.0): Crisp’en up the site to a more Web 2.0 template that conveys all of these messages.

Marketing Guru’s,  Brand & Identity Specialist, Web 2.0′ers -  We would love your advice & feedback.  Feel free to leave a comment or email me directly!

Thank you!!!

DOJ says NO MORE OPT-OUT !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This mean now that all of the ignorant real estate brokers whom cheated their clients in the past - can not do this anymore!!!  Imagine listing your home for sale with a broker who “Opt’ed Out” of having your listing pushed all over the Internet via other real estate broker’s websites…crazy and pathetic for any brokers whom cheated their high-paying clients whom which they hired you to market their home!

via Inman News…

The Department of Justice and the National Association of Realtors have agreed to minor modifications to their proposed settlement of the government’s antitrust lawsuit against the Realtors’ association, paving the way for a final judgment in the three-year-old case.

The government says the settlement, announced in May, will give consumers access to multiple listing service data on homes for sale similar to that enjoyed by Realtors. After wrapping up its review of public comments submitted during a 60-day window, the DOJ proposed leaving the settlement virtually unchanged.

But in its response to comments received from the industry, the DOJ shed some light on how it expects the agreement to be enforced: by NAR. The government also left the door open for future antitrust action concerning NAR’s Internet Data Exchange, or IDX, policy.

In its September 2005 lawsuit, the DOJ alleged that NAR’s policy on “virtual office Web sites,” or VOWs, violated antitrust laws. The policy alleged suppressed competition from real estate brokers who gave consumers access to multiple listing service data on a par with that enjoyed by Realtors through password-protected sites.

By allowing brokers to withhold their sellers’ listings from VOWs, NAR restrained VOW brokers in their ability to compete with traditional brokers, who often provide information on MLS listings by hand, mail, fax or e-mail, DOJ lawyers said.

By blocking VOW brokers from allowing their customers to review the same set of MLS listings that traditional brokers can provide to their customers, NAR’s rules “restrained VOW brokers from competing in a way that is efficient and desired by many customers,” the DOJ claimed.

The proposed settlement requires NAR to modify its challenged VOW policy, making it clear that brokers can operate VOWs “without interference from their rivals,” and that traditional brokers cannot withold sellers’ listings from display on VOWs.

The proposed settlement would also allow brokers to operate referral VOWs, which allow prospective buyers to search for homes online, but directs them to other brokers or agents when they are ready to see a home in person, negotiate a price, enter into a contract, and close the deal.

Existing referral VOWs have established relationships with Internet companies and developed “significant numbers of potential buyer leads,” the DOJ says, and the proposed settlement prohibits MLSs from standing in the way of VOW brokers referring customers to other brokers for compensation.

Continued @ Inman News