This is the 18th issue of The View from the Street.

On June 18^th I switched my com­pany affil­i­a­tion
from Cold­well Banker Bain to RSVP Real Estate.

I made this change to improve the ser­vices to my clients.  My lower oper­at­ing costs will allow me to allo­cate finan­cial resources with greater flex­i­bil­ity.  After all, no trans­ac­tion is the same as another and no seller and no buyer are alike.

Bet­ter tech­nol­ogy is the sec­ond rea­son for this change.  Some real estate com­pa­nies with long his­to­ries have found it dif­fi­cult to rein­vent them­selves grad­u­ally. Urg­ing bro­kers (for­merly called agents) to blog and twit­ter doesn’t auto­mat­i­cally close the gap between yes­ter­day and today.

RSVP Real Estate car­ries none of the legacy bag­gage. While started only in 2004, the founders of the com­pany com­bine decades of indus­try expe­ri­ence. The father and son team brought to bear wis­dom and cre­ativ­ity to estab­lish the real estate com­pany of the here and now.

“Green” may be pop­u­lar because a paper­less process saves trees.  Green in real estate results in bet­ter ser­vice, greater speed and accu­racy and in doc­u­mented com­pli­ance with laws and reg­u­la­tions.  Green in this and many other busi­nesses trans­lates into a bet­ter prod­uct at a lower cost.

In mar­ket­ing, RSVP Real Estate turns the tra­di­tional rela­tion­ship between com­pany and bro­ker on its head.  In that rela­tion­ship, they put me, the bro­ker, first so I, in turn, can put the cus­tomer first. RSVP plays the role of the endors­ing brand. After 10 years in the busi­ness peo­ple chose me as their bro­ker because of the rep­u­ta­tion I have built. (Accord­ing to the National Asso­ci­a­tion of Real­tors® only three per­cent of all peo­ple chose an agent because of the affil­i­ated company.)

Today, I pro­cure my busi­ness from three sources in almost equal pro­por­tions:  repeat busi­ness, refer­rals, and via my own web­sites.  Now that syn­di­ca­tion of real estate list­ings is run­ning amok on the web, it is even more impor­tant to stand out with orig­i­nal con­tent and design. My sell­ing clients get highly cus­tomized mar­ket­ing solu­tions. All my clients ben­e­fit from decades of nego­ti­at­ing experience.

Recently, RSVP Real Estate was named the sec­ond fastest grow­ing pri­vate busi­ness in Wash­ing­ton State by the Puget Sound Busi­ness Jour­nal.  I joined them as their 318^th bro­ker.  As I move for­ward, I want to thank my exist­ing clients for their trust.  My level of ser­vice to you and new clients will remain the same:  always try­ing to exceed expec­ta­tions and shar­ing a laugh once in a while.