Earlier this week while I was taking a continuing education class I was reminded of a blog post that I wrote several months ago called "Raising the Bar in Albuquerque Real Estate." That post was something I wrote in response to a post in the Facebook Group "Raising the Bar in Real Estate."
Raising the bar is a great group, one of two or three I've found there that have valuable conversations about current issues in the real estate industry.
Can you think of any other sites where those kind of conversations happen? Duh! ActiveRain still has many of the great conversations, sometimes here in the comments section, but sometimes offsite in emails or phone calls among agents behind the scenes. There have been some great conversations on Google+ too.
Back to my story...
While I was taking this continuing education class 
I was blown away with how basic and how outdated some of the information was that was being presented. It was a class on Green Building, and we were spending time talking about compact flourescents, blown-in insulation and what is a HERS score. Hardly cutting-edge technologies in 2012.
The instructor of this course was very well versed in the subject of green building, and is an experienced Realtor herself, so I felt bad for her as she taught this class because I knew she was catering her presentation to a room of some of the most under informed Realtors you'll see.
As I sat there in class, I was reminded of a comment that an older, real estate agent had left on one of my posts here on ActiveRain the day before where he chastised social media as a waste of time. And I'd have to agree with him if social media only consisted of people posting funny cartoons and taking pictures of their food in restaurants. This is not what I'm talking about at all.
I'm talking about how, if you follow the right people and businesses through social media, that you can use sites like Facebook, but even more so Twitter and Google+ to read and learn about an incredibly wide variety of topics relevant to real estate. Great articles are being written by industry experts on every topic imaginable and then some, but they are so niche-specific that they would never make the CBS Evening News. There are spread instead through social media. If you're not watching you're missing out on a ton of great info.
I feel so strongly in the importance of social media that I think in many cases it has become my continuing education. But instead of a special class I have to sign up for every few months, I'm being educated every day and this gives agents like me an unfair advantage.
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Read more about Experience versus Technology in my blog post Raising the Bar in Albuquerque Real Estate, or read my featured post "Was that old-fashioned networking event a total waste of time or what.
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