Irvine Real Estate Blogger

I considered a name change–oh no, not my “real” name, but my on screen real estate name. Robin4Homes just doesn’t reveal who I really am. Okay, okay, so yes, my real name is Robin, and yes, I do sell homes (ala real estate); but nowadays, one’s on screen personality can really sizzle with a dynamic screen name; I mean would people have viewed Archie Leach in the same light as they did the suave, debonair, sophisticated Cary Grant? I think not. And what about Madonna? Would she have had the same fame had she remained Louise Veronica Ciccone? Questionable, at best.

So I tossed around a few names to see what transformation might occur with a new name. The first one was Rockin’ Red Robin; certainly, sizzly–but maybe a little too sizzly; I wanted to be noticed on screen, but maybe not in that sort of way. So out went Rockin’ Red Robin, and in came Robin’s Nest–too cutsy; later it was on to Robinzhoods; I thought this one was a winner; but my partner nixed it; he thought it sounded too gansta rappy; and Round Robin too portly.

Then to complicate matters, I started a blog and had to come up with an on screen persona for the new blog; I was told not to obsess about it–to give it ten minutes max and be done with it. So I wound up with Irvine Real Estate Blogger (boooring!). But I guess it defined a certain aspect of me (I live in Irvine; I am in Real Estate, and I am a would-be real estate blogger); Still it did not define the real me, definitively, and in a way with which I was satisfied.

Fast forward to the RE Barcamp in San Francisco, the day before the Inman Connect 2008 Conference, where the superstars of the blogosphere gather to discuss blogging about real estate and the newest technologies in a free-wheeling, brainstorming sort of way. Some brilliant, creative minds thought up a great way to meet and greet other bloggers; namely, calling cards with code names that defined a superpower within each of us. Too cool! Thus we were introduced to The Striped Crusader whose superpower “emits powerful rays of inspiration,” The Legal Eagle whose superpower is “making the industry better one degree at a time,” and The Mortgage Man whose superpower is “keeping consumers safe from high interest rates,” and so on. And then my name was called out: Robin Fenchel (Real Name), dubbed “The Diva of Orange,” whose superpower is raising a UC Berkeley and Harvard tandem.” Poof! I was transformed, aloft and afloat without warning, from Robin4Homes into the Diva of Orange for a single, cloud computing moment in time. And what a time it was.

As a veteran real estate agent, the message reverberated loud and clear: “Innovate or Disintegrate,” as Jessica Swesey writes in her fairwell article as a columnist for the Inman News.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my years as editor of Inman News, it’s that companies that do not innovate die–or worse, become irrelevant, which is much like being buried alive.

I hope that those in the real estate industry see the changing market as their opportunity to innovate. The Internet, open source, social media, the sub- prime disaster and housing downturn have changed consumers forever. Real estate needs to adapt to these changes.

Those who do not innovate will become irrelevant to these changing needs.

Indeed, real estate agents must embrace the new medium of the Web 2.0 by creating a voice through a network of interactive communication and participation, and by going beyond the static page of a Web 1.0 presence to deliver rich original content and information to the home buying and selling public.

In the 1960’s, Marshall McCluhan, a media analyst, wrote a book from which the title became the common vernacular for the transformative power and influence of the medium of television, still in its infancy: namely, The Medium is the Message.

Every generation has their medium and those who succeed in embracing the medium connect with the people with whom they communicate. In the realm of politics, President Franklin Roosevelt used radio–the medium of the day to connect with the depression-era populace by way of the intimate Fireside chats.

President John F. Kennedy used the new medium of the time, television, to connect with an unprecedented seventy-seven million Americans (over 60% of the adult population,) to win the Kennedy/Nixon Debates in the eyes of the public and ultimately win the Presidency. At the time, CBS news correspondent, Charles Kuralt, declared that “Kennedy’s skill with the medium helped to make television the nation’s ‘new front porch’.”

Fast forward almost half a century, and the political pundits are now attempting to deconstruct Barack Obama’s below the radar successful candidacy for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency.

In Frank Rich’s Op-Ed article entitled, One Historic Night, Two Americas, he points out that “the Obama forces out-organized the most ruthless machine in Democratic politics because the medium of their campaign mirrored its inclusive message.” In other words, they empowered the ordinary citizen rather than relying on the typical top-down hierarchical structure of the past.

“Such viral organization and fund-raising is a seamless fit with bottom-up democracy as it is increasingly practiced in the Facebook-YouTube era, not merely by Americans and not merely by the young.”

Out with the old ways of doing business; in with the new social media.

He goes on to point out the similarities between Hillary Clinton’s and John McCain’s strategies in their respective “cultural tone-deafness” and “stodgy generic web site(s) ” in which their “blogs, video and social networking are static and sparse,” and how both Clinton and McCain repeatedly invoke “I,” in their respective speeches, while Obama’s message invokes the inclusiveness of the “Yes, we can” mantra: speaking to a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-generational inclusiveness–a post boomer, post-partisan inclusiveness that jettisons the baggage of the Me-Generation and embraces the You-Tube, MySpace, Facebook generation. “His [Obama's] vocabulary is so different from that of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain that they often find it as baffling as a foreign language.”

In Rich’s opinion Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain see change as “nothing more than a marketing gimmick,” while Obama uses the message of change as a sea-change of all inclusiveness and optimism. “On one side stands Mr. Obama’s resolutely cheerful embrace of the future… On the other is John McCain’s promise of a wise warrior’s vigilant conservation of the past.”

Parallels may be drawn in the real estate industry as real estate agents continue to cling to old ways of the “I’s” instead of focusing on the all inclusive “we” or “you.” Indeed, there are the veteran real estate agents who remain comfortable with the methodologies of the past–reluctant to embrace the new technologies–even the most basic ones in the face of the public’s desire to have a free flow of information available to them when they want it and on their terms.

Others of us are empowered, energized, and willing to embrace the kind of change necessary to educate ourselves as we move toward understanding the new message of inter-connectivity and seek to immerse ourselves in this new medium, resolving to deliver the information that the buyers and sellers desire in an interactive Web 2.0 way.

The real estate agent who seeks to remain vital in this rapidly changing industry needs to evolve and embrace the new message of total transparency with the free flow of real estate information, including real-time market trends and statistics, accurate and available “sold” data, access to real-time mortgage rates, original hyper-local community information, instant chat and instant messaging. We need to embrace and disseminate the information through the new medium of Web 2.0 real estate whether it be in the form of an interactive web site, blog, and other social media, such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, LinkedIn, and the newest micro-blogging phenomenon, Twitter.

For those real estate agents who wish to experience the new Medium and Message first-hand from the internet gurus, such as Pat Kitano of TransparentRE, Kevin Boar of 3OceansRealEstate, and Dustin Luther of 4Realz, check out the Real Estate Connect Conference in San Francisco from July 23rd – July 25th. You will be inspired to find your own voice and re-construct your business for the new Web 2.0 real estate community.

When I decided to take up blogging, thanks to an inspiring web 2.0 seminar held by two great instructors/coaches and self-described geeks or propeller heads, Kevin Boar of 3OceansRealEstate.com and Pat Kitano of TransparentRE.com, I promised myself that I was going to do this blogging thing the right way. I would not be a once-in-awhile, maybe-I’ll-get-around-to it-tomorrow sort of blogger. No, not me. I wasn’t going to be just a middling blogger. I was going to throw myself into this new medium and do it the right way–blog frequently and provide useful, if not inspiring, real estate content. As a newbie blogger, I would blog consistently and with gusto.

Like everything else I pursue, I threw myself into this new blogging thing, and was having a great time honing my imperfect writing skills and overcoming my initial write fright, when the business of real estate hit me square in the center of my blogging life.

While all those would-be buyers and sellers were waiting for the market to plummet or soar (depending on their respective perspectives), I was blogging away, and having a great time doing so. Then all of a sudden, out of the sunny, southern California blue skies came a bolt of buyers, who actually wanted to buy the houses they had looked at, and sellers who actually wanted to price their homes and condos realistically to sell. Taken by surprise, I found myself awash in paperwork (albeit digital paperwork, but nevertheless,paperwork–the stuff of purchase contracts, disclosures, and inspections sort of paperwork) and no time to blog!

Now my days (and nights) are filled with doing the business of real estate, i.e., showing properties, arranging for photo shoots and virtual tours, inputing listings/homes for sale, writing contracts, scheduling property inspections–in short, I am engaged in the practice of buying and selling real estate which is what, after all, I am supposed to do. But now the guilt has set in. I feel like a binge-eater after abandoning a healthy diet and exercise program. Blogging is like exercise, you need a frequent dose of it to lead a healthier, happier, more productive interactive, social-networking life.

And so this blogger is back…and so is the business of buying and selling real estate in Irvine, CA. And I can attest to that.