It will probably surprise you as much as it did me when you learn that real estate professionals are the number one user of social media for finding business resources (www.business.com/info/business-social-media-benchmark-study). So what are real estate professionals using social media for and which sites are they using most. The study linked above will tell you that the most common social media use is attending webinars and watching podcasts. A bit more research shows that there are thousands of real estate professionals on the major social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and even Twitter. While these tools are useful for finding out a little about a person and for providing contact information, other real estate professionals are setting themselves apart by creating Blogs and other web resources to provide industry information that many will benefit from. For example The Tenant Advisor: http://www.coydavidson.com/ is a good example of how a single house can use social media to provide information about their market while promoting themselves. The writer also recently provided “scores” for the effectiveness of social media for his business.

There are also real estate specific online networking sites. For example CREOPoint and Realcorner are online resource for broker networking and CREPig is a place for real estate investors to network.

So what is the value of social media and more specifically a blog like this? Should it be a tool to talk about how wonderful your products are, how much your customers love your products or a way to market your value? While Blogs that contain nothing but shameless plugs would make my board of directors happy, they would not likely return any new business nor add any value to the online real estate industry. So, the focus of the Lucernex Real Estate Blog will be to educate. We will provide articles and topics by thought leaders and an opportunity to respond and correspond with those thought leaders.

On our staff we have the “grandfather” of real estate lease accounting software in Ken Brown, founder of National Facilities Group and designer of SLIM, one of the most widely used lease administration packages ever sold. Also on our staff is Jim Duport, a teacher of real estate analytics and the founder and developer of LseMod, the leading cash flow analysis software package for commercial real estate. I will also Blog as the President of Lucernex with over 17 years experience in Commercial Real Estate Software and services and as the designer of our IWMS solution. Even our Chairman will blog here and provide experience gained having been founder, President or Chief Development Officer of several name brands. We will offer topics for discussion regularly and hope that readers ask questions of our experts.