Today Beth Morrison and Pam Myatt with Old Colony held a brokers open house. They had a nice cookout and a lot of agents stopped in to see the house. This is a good way to get marketing suggestions if you’re having trouble selling a home, and it’s a quick, effective way to get feedback from other professionals.

It also doesn’t hurt to have a lot of busy agents see the good points in a home. Feed a bunch of real estate agents, help them have a good time in a home and guess what — they’re going to remember it when they talk to clients. It’s not magic, but I bet it does help sell a house.

While I was there, looking at the pretty house and scarfing down a burger, I realized that the best way to make sure people would want to come to the next brokers open house was to show them what a good time they missed at this one.

So of course, I thought of making a Real Estate Show. Why? Because it takes no time at all to create!

The next time Pam and Beth are planning a brokers open house, they can email an invitation along with the Real Estate Show from this one. People will want to join in the party. If you’re a real estate agent, chances are that you have your camera nearby all the time.

Don’t miss these opportunities!

Can I assume that by now you’ve seen all the nifty new updates Real Estate Shows has recently unveiled? How cool is THAT?!

I’ll let Jeff and the techy people tell you all about it. I think this is the time for me to point out what a HUGE help Real Estate Shows can be to a new agent.

If you are a new agent yourself or if you have one in your office, pay attention to what I’m about to say.

The annual subscription to Real Estate Shows is only $125. That is for as many Shows as you care to make, so the more you use it, the less you are actually paying per Show. (Some programs will have you paying a fee each time you use them, or limit the number of “live” tours you can have!) If you’re a thrifty person (and what person setting up a new business isn’t?) then you will realize that using your Real Estate Shows more gives you a better return on your investment. Period.

Then a funny thing happens. You start to look for reasons to make new Shows. You’re a real estate agent, you already have your camera with you most of the time, and you discover that you can take just a few pictures of anything in your area, whip up a Show and within minutes – you have become a local expert!!

Isn’t this what each and every real estate agent is striving to become?

As a new agent, Real Estate Shows will help you establish an online presence. You’ll be able to demonstrate your ability to effectively market a property. You can even make a Show as a kind of presentation as to why someone should choose you as their agent.

Real Estate Shows was one of the first investments I made as a new agent, and I think it helped give me the foundation I needed to be successful. If you’re a new agent, I recommend you try the Real Estate Shows free trial. Use it, and you’ll be doing yourself a favor.

Less than an hour after we “soft launched” our new features, I got an email from one of our long time clients, Doug Scott. Doug is an avid supporter of RealEstateShows.com, but his email was less than flattering. He was unhappy. Specifically, he was unhappy with the social bookmarking links that now came up at the end of his Shows and was concerned about people leaving his site.

Doug was only one of two people that first day that had this reaction. Of those who took the time to comment, most were excited to see these options for social sharing presented in this way. Doug didn’t say the following, but what we heard in Doug’s comments was this…. “Don’t force things on me. You shouldn’t decide for me what new technologies I should buy into. That’s for me to decide.”

Of course, I made an effort to “educate” Doug on the potential value of these links. But ultimately, Doug knows his clients and his market better than I’m ever going to know them. And he should be the one to decide how he wants to work with them. Not us.

It doesn’t take a thousand voices to deliver the truth. One will do.

So, we went back to the drawing board and rethought how this should work. What we came up with has already been implemented. Here’s how it works now: The “Get Link” and “Get HTML” icons, as well as the Social Bookmarking Icons will be OFF by default. They are now turned on at the Show level. This is done in the “Edit Buttons” area.

Here is a short video to show you how.

Doug, thank you for helping us make our product better for everyone.

The publishing/distributiom options available as a result of the new Flyers feature required that we find a better way to group the various distribution methods. This has caused a little bit of confusion, so I thought I’d put together a quick tour of the new “Publish” page so you know where to find the links you’ve come to rely on.

There are some bright guys over at 1000 Watt Consulting.

If you’ve never visited their blog, I highly recommend you do. Brian Boero and Marc Davison are thinkers, and creative thinkers at that. So I listen when they speak. And now they’ve decided to speak about Real Estate Web 2.0.

We included only companies focused on the U.S. housing market. There are plenty of great property sites in Europe, but, again, we wanted to present something that lists the most relevant companies, not the most.

With posts like Social Media Haiku thrown in between commentary on the credit mess and the need for MLS systems to get social…. you’re not going to get bored. But you’re definitely going to learn something.