I got my internship while looking for a summer job toward the end of the spring semester of my sophomore year. The insurance company I worked at last summer didn't need extra help this year so I needed somewhere new to work. I've always been interested in the real estate industry and have even toyed with the idea of maybe becoming a Realtor. Thus, I thought it would be a good idea to look for some summer work in the industry to gain some experience. I sent out about 15 letters of interest to different agencies in my area and got a call back from two places. I interviewed with RE/MAX 440/Central and they told me that they were interested in having a young person come in who was familiar with social networks to set them up on various sites. Finally all my hours wasted on facebook came in handy...and I was able to explain to them my experience with different social networking sites and even show them my jewelry business fan page .
They hired me for the summer and we set it up as an intern position. I started work the week after I got home from school by training how to do reception work, which I did when I was in between projects or when they needed someone to fill in. I was trained on how to answer the phone, schedule showings and inspections, do work for the agents, etc. I also learned all about RE/MAX 440/Central which started off as one office in Quakertown, PA. Tom Skiffington was an agent in the office and went to the owner with an expansion plan. Tom expanded the business to 9 more offices in nearby cities, and the business now has over 200 agents, as well as a full staff of receptionists, bookkeepers, a title and mortgage company, and more. The success of RE/MAX 440/Central was inspiring to me as an entrepreneurship major to see how Tom could take one small office and turn it into the RE/MAX agency that brings in the most revenue in all of Pennsylvania and Delaware!
The work I did at RE/MAX varied. I was given free-reign to set up facebook and twitter accounts for the company to my liking, and was assigned various other projects from Tom throughout the summer. I did it all: copied paperwork, scanned files, researched software, liaisoned between new companies we did business deals with, and more. I
will outline the most import projects I worked on in the next few paragraphs.
My biggest project was creating and updating a facebook page for RE/MAX. We currently have 107 fans and a steady stream of interaction from the fans. I've posted a variety of different items: open house schedules, articles, helpful videos, pictures of our offices, interviews and pictures with agents, magazine articles our owner Tom was in, community events RE/MAX participated in, interesting statistics about RE/MAX, and more. I've also just started an advertising campaign on facebook as well. I made this ad to target first time home buyers and set it up to only show on people's pages who live in a 25 mile radius of our Quakertown office and who are between the ages of 22-39, common ages to be buying your first home. We are only charged when someone clicks on the ad. So far it has shown up on 17,375 pages and has been clicked 3 times.
I've also set up a twitter account for RE/MAX. I've posted mostly articles and information about RE/MAX here, as well as new listings. We've been trying to find a program that will automatically tweet our new listings as they come into our MLS provider, and are currently working on getting that to happen through our partnership with RISMedia.
Speaking of RISMedia...as I mentioned in previous posts RE/MAX recently partnered a deal with RISMedia and Tom didn't have a lot of time to devote to getting the new partnership set up. Thus Tom had me come in and work on getting everything set up including sending in company profiles, agreement documents, and starting to utilize the new benefits of the agreement: daily newsletters for our agents, customized press releases I sent out to the press, articles and videos I posted to our sites, and more. Through this partnership with RISMedia we also partnered with Mobile Real Estate ID, a company that is giving us the ability to attach sign riders to our listings where interested home buyers can text in a specific code for a house and immediately be texted back info and pictures on the house, all the while recording the person's number so the agent can use it as a new lead. I've also been helping to set this deal up, liasoning between Tom and Mobile Real Estate, and assigning codes to listings, and getting the signs ready to go out.
From all of the reception work, side projects, and social network projects I have worked on I've learned a lot. I've learned about the real estate industry; how fast paced it is and how agents must constantly be available to their clients. If you can acquire and sell a lot of listings you will earn a nice chunk of change with each commission, but if you are not selling any houses you don't have any normal paychecks coming it. I've also learned how to work for a difficult boss...Tom normally likes things a very specific way and can be blunt and particular about how everything is done, so I've gained experience working with that type of person and accepting fault for things that were not my fault to keep all parties happy... I've also expanded on my work ethic because when I wasn't doing reception work I had pretty much free-reign to work on my projects as I wished. There was no outline a things for me to do so I used my own knowledge and creativity to produce results instead of taking instructions from someone else.
While I've gained a lot of work experience and knowledge...I've also gained something else...a job! RE/MAX decided to keep me on to update our social networking pages and work on a few other projects (such as a youtube page we just started working on this week) from a far. And I really will be far away because I'll be studying abroad in France! But, all I need is an internet connection which I will have at the house I am staying so I'm going to dedicate about 5 hours a week for RE/MAX work. This eliminates the problem of me having to train someone else to take over what I have been doing, and also gives me some spending money for while I'm abroad!
Overall I think my internship has been successful. I've gained a great item to put on my resume with some great new references, learned a lot from a real life entrepreneur, and now have a continuous job I can keep doing even when I am away from school.
No comments:
Post a Comment