Tap, Tap.......This thing on?

Hi, my name is Bob and I'm new to the community.

(Or at least I've been a very very bad participant for way too long).

Since, like many of you, I'm taking precautions given the recent events happening in our world, I'm locked down in my house (for the most part) given that I live in one of the epicenters of the the coronavirus, Seattle. So what better time to reintroduce myself to this amazing community that has been a part of my life for over 14 years. 

A lot has changed for me since the last time I was active here in the Rain. Some of you are connected to me on Facebook so you'll know I've been happily married for the last 5 years and my wife Erin and I have two adorable (but of course I'm biased) little boys, age 2 and 3. My older son Kelan, who lives with his mom and step dad 8 miles from us, is about to become a teenager, turning 13 in June. Some of you long time Rainers will remember when he was born. We kept a blog for him for a while. He's no longer that little baby you see in those posts........crazy enough, he's starting to grow hair in places men have hair......not quite a man, but well on his way. 

The last 5 years of my professional career have been spent as part of the Ben Kinney organization. For those of you unfamiliar with Ben, he owns ActiveRain. But more than that, he also owns 7 brokerage operations in Western Washington, has a sales team with 30 locations around the country and he also owns a variety of software companies (Brivity, KWKLY, ActiveRain) and other companies that revolve around the real estate industry (Forward Coaching, BrivityVA, BKCO Mortgage). My role inside the company has been vast and varied. Everything from training our expansion teams on how they leverage technology and software to helping our team decide what products and features we want to build in our software business. 

I have been putting my time away from ActiveRain to good use. It feels like I've gotten a real estate MBA in the last five years. Working closely with teams that are out selling (and they sell a ton btw.....decent chance their 3000+ transactions in 2019 is going to make them the #1 or #2 team in the entire United States when RealTrends publishes those numbers soon) real estate every day, and watching how they do it has re-energized me to come back and start sharing some of this with the ActiveRain community.

Should I have done it sooner? I should have. No question. 

Can we start sharing that information today? Well.....let's just get reaquainted and we will start talking shop tomorrow? So how about this.....if you've read this far, and decide to leave a comment, tell me something good. That's something we recently started doing on all of our teams, in all of our brokerages and in our software company. We start each meeting or group session by having everyone in the room tell us something good. I'll start......

Even though I have to limit my interactions with other people right now because it's the responsible thing to do, I have my wife and kids at home with me all day and it's been an awesome chance to form a stronger connection with my family. On our walk last night our oldest son Chase, the 3 year old, insisted on pulling his younger brother in the wagon. I briefly had visions of them being self sufficient......which were quickly interupted once the road starting being uphill.....and it was back to daddy horse pulling the wagon. 

So let's hear it....tell me something good?

Bob Stewart
ActiveRain
408-638-1834

 

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