Baketball referees, by and large, tend to be very confident people. Confidence is pretty much a prerequisite for survival in the world of sports officiating. Confidence is a good thing, but it can also get you in trouble.

I remember when I first started officiating high school basketball. Like every other referee, I started out at the 9th grade/JV level. At that time, I was in my early 20′s really not a whole lot older than the kids playing. I did a good job, I guess.

After the games, I would often watch the Varsity officials do the following game. I can remember sitting there, thinking to myself, “I can do that, that’s easy. It’s not different from what I’m doing at the JV level.” I only had one season of JV officiating, and I thought I should be doing Varsity tournament games.

There is a progression

Officials don’t go from doing JV and middle school games to doing Varsity tournament games for a good reason. There is a progression that needs to take place. There are skills that need to be learned and honed, techniques that must be learned, adjustments that must be made. The reason why I thought I could be doing much more difficult games was because the officials that I was watching were good at their craft. They made it look easy.

When my turn came to officiate Varsity basketball, I found out that what looked so easy, was actually quite difficult, and it took time to get it right. I had to draw on the experiences that I had gained through all my previous officiating, and put it to work for me. I also had to work at getting better every game.

The same thing happened when I started doing college games. I fully admit that I am but a mere Division III basketball official. The play isn’t stellar, heck, sometimes it isn’t even pretty. But I can tell you one thing, it is very different from what I do at the High School level.

When I watch the guys on TV doing North Carolina vs. Duke, I now have a completely new appreciation for what it takes to get to that level and perform. There is a process that they went through to be able to handle the challenges that officiating a game of that caliber presents.

It ain’t as easy as they make it look. Trust me.

Web 2.0 has made us overconfident

Web 2.0 sounds great, doesn’t it? Heck, it even feels great sometimes. Everything is new, and cool, and special, and neat, and– free. How great is that? We’ve been told that print is dead, and that all we have to do is have a web presence, and customers will flock to us.

Cold-calling? What a waste.
Door-knocking? You must be kidding me.
Print ads? That’s for dinosaurs.
Refrigerator magnets and recipe cards? That stuff is for losers.

But you know what? All of those things still work. There are agents all over the country who are using any or all of those strategies on their way to very successful and rewarding real estate careers. They aren’t on Facebook, they have never heard of Twitter, and they think “blog” is a derogatory term of some kind.

More power to ‘em.

See, one of the things that has been lost in all this talk of the future is perspective in the present. It is the same thing that was missing from me when I sat in the bleachers and thought I should be doing Varsity tournament games. I didn’t realize that I could just jump from one to the other. I needed to hone my skills, learn more, and prepare myself for those tournament games that would come in the future.

And so it is with real estate. With all the talk of Real Estate 2.0 being the future of our profession, we seem to have forgotten that we live in a 1.0 world. We can’t simply wish the future upon everyone and make it happen. It just doesn’t work that way. As much as I would love to be able to eliminate our brokerage’s need for print advertising, it is still a viable strategy. As much as I would love for all of my clients to friend me on Faceook, many of them don’t even use email regularly. I want desperately to practice Real Estate 2.0, I live in a 1.0 world.

Despite the fact that what I want maybe isn’t possible right now, that doesn’t mean that I can’t get there some day. Getting there, however, is going to require effort, learning, and bringing others along the progression with me. Practicing Real Estate 2.0 without any clients won’t do me much good. But since many of them are living 1.0, what am I to do?

Let’s try 1.5 for a little while

How about we meet in the middle. I know where I want to go, I just have to figure out a way of getting people there, with me. Enter, “Real Estate 1.5.” This is exactly what we are going to try to do in our brokerage to bring the two worlds together.

What this means is that we are going to take all of those great tools and philosophies from the 2.0 world, and slowly introduce them to our clients and customers in the 1.0 ways they are familiar with. The hope is that, in doing this, we will be able to take advantage of the tools we have, and so will our clients, but they won’t even really notice it. Everyone wins.

Example #1

The biggest component of our 1.5 practice is going to be our website, but it’s not quite finished yet. More on that, later. In the mean time, we wanted to acclimate our clients and customers to some of the things they can expect. The first of these things is our market reports.

We created a local real estate market report. I’m sure many of you do the same thing. It is pretty extensive, and we wanted to get it into the hands of all of our clients, and as many members of the public as possible. Web 2.0 dictates that we should have posted it on a blog, or on our website, done some fancy SEO, sent out a few emails, and wait for the hits to roll in. 1.0 dictates that we would mail it to our clients with a letter. Neither of these works very well.

Here’s what we did: I created the report in Keynote, and exported it as a PDF. We then set up a special email account: Stats@StrongTeamRealtors.com, and emailed the PDF to all of our current clients. We then posted the report to Scribd. Once it was on Scribd, this allowed us to send out an email to key folks in the community with a link to the report. In the email, we encouraged them to download the report for themselves, or share the link with others. Since Scribd tracks views, we know how many people have looked at the report. The final component was getting the report into the hand of the community at large. The best way to do this was to do a press release.

Really? A press release? In a newspaper?

Yup.

In the press release, we urged people to stop by our office (imagine that), and pick up a copy of the report (a hard copy, imagine that). You know what happened? We gave out a bunch of reports on the first two days. Every person that came into our office was an opportunity to talk with them about the market, and an opportunity to let them know that we were going to do the reports regularly, so they could give us their email if they wanted, and we would just email them the next one.

Overall, we’ve had just over 50 people view the report online, we’ve had more than a dozen people come through our office, and our dozens of clients were thrilled to get all of the information first. I’d say Real Estate 1.5 works pretty well.

Into the future. . .

This was our first crack at real estate 1.5. We’ll keep at it, and once we have our website buil