Today was a monumental day, today was the first meeting of Authors for our Local Association Forum (FAARForum.com) a huge step in the web 2.0 direction.

I think it is funny that growing up in a real estate family I have for a long time needed to be a silent part of my mother’s business - “if your going to answer the house phone make sure you get name and phone number”. I now work actively with her and she has shown me the value of helping the REALTOR community.  To my surprise I found a group of people who wanted to know what I had to say, what the new kid thought of how we should be looking at real estate, how we should be looking at the next generation of agents. Suddenly I found myself in the middle of association activity being the voice of the next generation agent.

I was even more surprised when our Local Association President asked me to co-chair a committee. Who me, newbie with nothing to say? I learned over this past year that the next generation of agent does have a lot to say, we talk about what is going on in the market place and we connect with other agents from across the nation. We take advantage of sites like twitter, activerain, facebook, and an RSS Reader as our own personal newspaper. We are interested in real estate and we need to talk about it. Call it generational if you will, but we can all benefit from conversing about our livelihood.

When we talk about real estate great things happen. We learn new things about our business, we see different perspectives from other professionals, we receive feedback on ways in which we can make our business better. We grow as professionals ever establishing us as THE VOICE OF REAL ESTATE.

So today was an important day, our local association took the steps towards making us all better REALTORS and giving us a platform to discuss real estate in our local market place, grow as professionals learning from each other’s conversations, and doing it in a way that will carry us on the forefront of technology and innovation.  

Bryan Penman
Technology Working Group Co-Chair.