Google Roulette: Community Blogging Helps Home Buyers and Home Sellers

Several times a week, my team of real estate professionals and I get together to exchange ideas on how best to serve our local real estate markets. These discussions are serious, but we try to laugh, too, and have fun along the way:

~ sometimes we talk about contracts and how to understand their protections intricately

~ sometimes we talk about the inventory itself, matching the right seller’s house with the right buyer

~ sometimes we share negotiation techniques and how to serve the best interests of our clients in an complex transaction

~ and sometimes we play “Google Roulette!”

Google Roulette is a game where we try to ascertain how available our community expertise is to our neighbors, by seeing where our Associates rank in the Google search results.

Does the Associate “own” the first page of results?

Is the Associate presented strongly above-the-fold (an internet term that means the top-half of a webpage that a viewer first sees on their browser, before scrolling down)?

We have a projector that shines the webpage on the wall of our bullpen — larger than life — and we randomly pick Associates’ names, pairing them with the communities in which they live or work, and… see what comes up!

An Associate “wins” at Google Roulette when one of their scintillating blog posts about the Los Angeles lifestyle appear on our wall. This week, our winners were:

~   David Findley, lover of all things Malibu, for his feature on Early Mornings at the Malibu Pier;

~   Philippe Rodrigue, for his Pacific Palisades video on what happens behind the walls of the Riviera Country Club;

~   Wheeler Coberly, for his news story about the historic Sears building in Santa Monica giving way to the new Light Rail Station;

~   Tanaz Akhlaghi , our community expert for the flats of Beverly Hills, for her field-reporting on the Beverly Hills Art Show, “Affaire in the Gardens;”

~   Mike King, who knows Culver City like the back of his hand, with his audio podcast on the actual, single, primary reason that most people move to Culver City;

~  and our President, Nick Segal, for his memoiresque, bite-sized feature on the allure of an early evening drive through the community of Bel Air.

Would you like to play Google Roulette?  It’s fun!  Just pick the name of one of our talented real estate advisors, drop it into a Google search field box, click enter… and let the games begin!

Meanwhile, here’s a brief, inside peek at one of our get-togethers, in which I share a field-reporting mistake I made last year!

Dane Findley is Marketing Director at Partners Trust. You can follow him at Twitter, via @danenow.

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