So I'm on the way home from Inman Real Estate Connect, a real estate and technology conference I was attending in New York City this week.  Lots of great sessions on, well....I am sure you can guess, the state of the real estate market and how to utilize new technology to improve real estate services and marketing. 

As for the first topic, and you may have heard this, but the real estate market sucks right now (at least in most of the country)!  But there are opportunities in some areas now because of that.  Those were the general thoughts from the group of market experts and economists weighing in on what they see for the economy and housing market for 2009.  Guys like Robert Schiller (of the Case-Schiller Home Price Index), Barry Ritholz (author of the widely read The Big Picture blog on the economy), and Lawrence Yun (National Asso. of Realtors Chief Economist) gave their thoughts and predictions.  I'll have a more detailed post about this in particular in the near future, but basically, with a change of President, different forms of potential stimulus packages, and just general lack of consumer confidence, everything is too uncertain now to make any realistic predictions with a timeline for an economic recovery.

On the technology and marketing side, there were a number of great sessions as well, one was a Q&A Craig Newmark (founder of Craigslist) and another was the keynote address with Gary Vaynerchuk (web "celebrity" wine guru and marketing expert).  Craig's an icon in the web world (obviously) and had plenty of insightful thoughts on the confluence of politics, real estate, and the internet.  He discussed the idea of grassroots efforts from the bottom up to best stimulate the economy and also a potential postion for him as "technology czar" in Obama's White House.  Gary was his typical high energy self, basically bouncing off walls talking about web marketing and effective (read, transparent) communication with consumers.  Really good stuff.

At the end of the day, I met a lot of great, smart people who were sharing and debating ideas on how to do a better job for clients and how to improve the industry in general.  I definitely have a lot of great ideas to implement once I get back to the office - always with the goal of improving our service for clients!

And one last thing - one of the workshops I attended was how to effectively implement web video, so you may see some videos on this blog and on charlesgaterealty.com soon (both to market our listings and for educational content).  I can see Charlesgate TV in the near future!  Ha....Keep an eye out - it could get ugly!