GRI classes - even better that we had imagined!

Lilly and I took our first GRI classes in August of this year.  We started with the 200 series.  Our classes were at the O'Henry in Greensboro August 18-21st.  We'd love to hear from anyone else who was also in this class!  This location was perfect for us because we live in the Gibsonville area so it was about a 20 minute drive to our class each morning.  Plus the O'Henry is beautiful and surrounded by really good places to eat!

We have always loved any kind of classes or training but we have signed up for courses in the past that had a lot of information that wasn't immediately applicable to our business in real estate.  So we were a little unsure of what to expect when we signed up for GRI.  But, I am happy to report that we were pleasantly surprised!  Not only was the information very applicable to daily business in real estate,but our four instructors were fantastic presenters as well.  There wasn't a dull moment, our attention was kept focused all day each day - which, as you know, is hard to do when you have a bunch of restless Realtors in a room from 8-5 four days in a row! 

The 200 series covered 1 - Residential Construction, 2 - Tax Planning for the Real Estate Professional, 3 - Legal Issues in Real Estate, and 4- Real Estate Trends.  So we covered a wide range of great topics.  We learned important information about the process home builders go through,  what can or can't be written off on our taxes, how to potentially buy real estate using 401k money as a tool, what is most likely to get us in trouble (or sued!) and how to avoid it, what new innovative marketing and webtools to be looking out for and investigating, and so much more!  It would be impossible to even touch on all of the great information in one short blog so we will probably blog about this again in more detail.  But, we did want to encourage any agent who has thought about getting more education and really expanding their knowledge base.  GRI is a great place to do just that while meeting some other successful Realtors and enjoying some really great instructors.   We have already signed up to take the 300 series at Grandover in Greensboro in late January.  We really feel strongly that this is a time and money investment that will make us better agents and better able to serve our clients and ourselves!  We have a lot of respect for all of the agents out there who have their GRI designation and we look forward to joining those ranks as soon as we can!