Everyone remembers where they were when the 9/11 terrorist attacks hit. It’s easy in fact for most of us to remember exactly where we were and what we were doing. I am no different. Except the environment that I was in was rather unique. I was sitting at a rifle range in Ft Leonard Wood, MO – a newly minted recruit of the U.S. Army. I had just entered my Army basic training in late August 2001. When you are in basic training you are not allowed contact with the outside world. There is no television, newspapers or internet. A few weeks into training, it was late morning and we were sitting around waiting to receive instructions from our Drill Sergeants. All of a sudden one of the senior officers approached our platoon and asked us, “who here is from New York City”… the rest is history.
I completed my Army basic training and advanced individual training (AIT), and in 2003 was sent to the middle east for deployment. After I got home in 2004, I came to the decision that I did not want to continue to work for the government and I was going to go to work for myself. I remember reading that many individuals on the Forbes list made their fortunes through real estate. So, I decided to get my real estate license. I went all in at 24 years old and within 2 years I had earned my broker’s license and by 26 I owned my own real estate brokerage.
I have been licensed as a real estate broker for over 15 years now. I hold two broker licenses’ in two states and have been involved in the leasing and management of hundreds and hundreds of units. I have managed luxury waterfront homes that rent for thousands of dollars per month and I have rented to affordable housing programs where the tenant pays zero. Not to mention everything else in between. Each property type will require different sets of knowledge and skills. I hope to be able to share with you some of the lessons that I have learned along the way, and also to share with you what I know about my two great professional passions; real estate and internet marketing. I had entered the field of real estate with direct intention, but it was the marketing side of things that was brought to me by a twist of fate.
Real Estate & Marketing
I had been working on my new business for about a year when I met a man who would not only become a good friend, but a mentor as well. After we met, I later came to find out that he had been one of the first people to get involved in the internet marketing business in the early 2000’s. His business knowledge and skills were unmatched. I was intrigued. In 2007 when I had the opportunity to work for him, I jumped at the idea of being able to learn from his knowledge.
With my friends guidance, and my own passion and interest in learning about internet marketing, I quickly became well versed on the particulars of how search marketing worked. I read and studied all I could and put into use what I was learning. I was soon ranking my websites at the top of the search engines, I was getting a ton of leads and things were cooking.
… We were off to a great start and the future looked bright… or so I thought…
Just 2 years later, we found ourselves in the midst of the Great Recession, and as everyone knows, real estate was hit the hardest. With not enough business experience and not enough capital to keep things going, I ended up closing the brokerage by 2009 and moving out of state to take a job. But it was through my failure that I discovered a lot of valuable business lessons. I learned from my mistakes and was able to start again with a more fresh perspective. Now I have been able to grow my management business by leaps and bounds using the internet marketing knowledge I acquired in the early days. It is something that I have kept up with and continue to study all the time. It is a rapidly changing industry that requires you to keep a constant eye on the developments that could help your business grow. But if you do, you will be rewarded.
