Double-dip recession! Recovery! Fiscal cliff! That old joke about how economists were invented to make weather forecasters look good gains traction as market reports become more contradictory. Add to that the constant 
assertion that “real estate is changing,” backed up only with vague sketches that don’t tell you how and when, and you might be looking for a comprehensive guide to the future of your career. That or a retirement plan.
Thankfully, a collaboration between renowned real estate consultant Christopher Lee and NAR’s Institute of Real Estate Management (IREM) has arrived to fill in the gaps. The book, Transformational Leadership in the New Age of Real Estate (IREM 2012) is part career road map, part motivational tome, and part crystal ball. Continue reading »
By Erica Christoffer, Multimedia Web Producer, REALTOR® Magazine
A few months ago, Dan Burrus was sitting in a café in Istanbul making a call to his wife in Barcelona using Apple’s iPhone-to-iPhone FaceTime video chat. He was able to see her in high definition and hear her as clearly as if she were sitting next to him, even though he was in the Middle East and she was in Europe.
This example of technology provides us a small glimpse into our future, says Burrus, a futurist and author of Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and do the Impossible (HarperCollins, 2011).
Are you interested in predicting the future? Try this:
How much do you know about the iPhone 6? No one’s talking about it because we don’t even have an iPhone 5 yet. So you might say, “I don’t know anything about it.” But in actuality, you know a lot, says Burrus. Will it have a faster processor than the iPhones that came before it? Of course it will. Will be have more memory? You already know. Will it offer more cloud computing options? You bet. Might we be able to tap into a “Watson” computer in the cloud, giving us a supercomputer in the palm of our hand? The possibility is very likely.
There has never been more opportunity than there is today because technology is leveling the playing field, Burrus says. He predicts that in the next five years, you’re going to see a continued technological transforming in how we sell, market, communicate, train, innovate, and collaborate.
“One of the reasons I did not call the book ‘Flash Hindsight,’ is because we’re already good at saying we should have done this or that,” says Burrus. “The beautiful thing about foresight is you can take actions today to shape that future.”
The Flash Foresight methodology can also be used as a crystal ball to reveal what’s in store for the real estate industry. Continue reading »
By Erica Christoffer, Contributing Editor, REALTOR® Magazine
- By next year, Generation Y will outnumber Baby Bombers. And 96 percent of Gen Y has joined a social network.
- If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth largest in the world.
- YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world and has 100 million videos.
- Approximately 25 percent of search results for the world’s top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content.
Erik Qualman uncovered these startling statistics and more, which he lays out in his new book Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business (Wiley, 2009). Social media has created a fundamental shift in how people communicate, Qualman says. One only needs to look as far as Qualman’s Socialnomics YouTube video that went viral just weeks after its release, topping out at nearly 1 million views. He believes that soon people will not have to search for news, products, and services — but rather news, products, and services will find them via social media. Thus, in order to be successful in business today and in the future, the social interaction with potential clients must be embraced.
What was your first social media experience and what were your thoughts at that time?
Erik Qualman
QUALMAN: I joined MySpace, like a lot of people, in 2005. An 18-year-old introduced it to me and it was like she was addicted to crack. She’d always have to check her MySpace to see if she had more friends or to see in anyone commented. It was obvious to me that it was something big, especially for someone to be so ingratiated with it. I hopped on and it made sense to me right away. It wasn’t a surprise once Facebook opened up their platform to go beyond just college students that Facebook became so popular. Then the world was turned on its head when they opened up their application program interface to allow anybody to write applications for Facebook. That decision was so far reaching that it actually caused Apple, which has typically been a very closed environment, to open up and allow others the ability to code applications for the iPhone. That was really the game changer. Continue reading »
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