I consider myself very fortunate to have been invited to attend the Spring Retreat for LuxuryRealEstate.com. If you have not heard of this group they have the most popular luxury real estate website in the world. They members are literally the Who's Who of Luxury Real Estate.
Executive Summary: This organization is made up of many of the Top Luxury Brokerages across the country. They were there to share ideas on how to continue to grow their businesses and were willing to share from the wealth of experience that they brought to the table. I have never been to any form of Real Estate event where there were so many proven real estate professionals at. If you ever have the chance to attend one of these conferences -- by all means attend!
After flying out to San Diego to the conference our first night out created a chance for me to start meeting the great team at LRE and also a number of other members of the Board of Regents.
John Brian Losh is the Publisher of Who'w Who in Luxury Real Estate & Luxury Real Estate Magazine.
It was great to meet Brokers and Agents from many of the top brokerages across the country. Most of these agents are use to dealing with transactions in the millions and to hear several discuss creating a way to recognize individual lifetime production in excess of one billion dollars set the stage for the conference. It was time to listen and learn what I could from these individuals!
The next morning was the Board of Regents meeting where amongst other things the topic of discussion centered on what is going on in each market and how are these top brokerages responding to it? My guess is that well over 70% of the participants were in the process of cutting back on their traditional print advertising and increasing their Internet marketing initiatives. They held the elections selecting the directors of this leadership group and Rob Thomson, Co-Owner and Admirals Cove specialist for Waterfront Properties was elected again. Congrats Rob...
It was good the hear from representitives in Texas, Canada and several other markets that are not goning through the market shift that we have in Florida. I happend to be sitting beside John Daugherty of John Daugherty Realtors in Houston as he shared about how the market for Texas had gone through similiar times years ago in Texas. Mr. Daugherty was recoginized later by LRE for Lifetime Achievement in Real Estate!
As the conference went on it was great to have the change to meet and listen to some of the ideas and techniques from top brokerages across the country. I will create a second post with some of these ideas when I am at the office with my notes from the meeting.
Prior to the conference I had read the topics for their Technology Roundtable session before the whole group. Not wanting to suprise anyone with my questions - I had posted my thoughts as responses on the LuxuryRealEstate.com blog. As it turned out one of the Technology speakers was unable to attend and I was invited to be part of their panel.
More later,
David Abernathy
Waterfront Properties & Club Communities
Palm Beach County Real Estate
561.628.0128
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David, I didn't see this post when it first came out, but I'm glad I found it this evening!
The San Diego event sounds much like the one in Key Biscayne last year. One of the great things about Spring Retreat is the opportunity to meet some of the big names in our industry and hear their views.
I attended a "breakout" session last year where I wound up sitting next to the head of the largest brokerage in Cleveland and also next to one of the most respected brokers in Manhattan. Both were talking about slashing their newspaper advertising budgets.