I had the exceptional pleasure of attending my first Coldwell Banker Global Management Summit last week, held in sunny Jacksonville Florida.

Susan & I decided to make a trip of it since my folks live only 65 miles away near Daytona Beach. We drove down and stayed with them while I “commuted” in to Jax for the convention events. Since we’re a new Coldwell Banker affiliate we were warmly received by all, and the presentations & fellowship really were a treat. I had the pleasure of sitting under such luminaries as Dirk Zeller, Rick DeLuca and Matthew Ferrara reviewing the absolute cutting edge of real estate marketing and management.

I was particularly impressed with several things:

• Whatever network advantages I enjoyed at my previous firm, I now enjoy a hundredfold with Coldwell Banker’s WORLDWIDE family of agents. I know – I met them.
• The Coldwell Banker brand is alive & well with dedicated experts at the helm. Their new Marketing Vice President (Michael Fisher) is particularly impressive and has incredible depth of talent in his stable. They are pumping out innovation after innovation.
• There are enough new & emerging marketing tools to keep me, my team and my company busy for months to come. I was finally motivated after the marketing seminar to set up a LinkedIn account – check me out.

At the end of the day my managers and I walked away with a full slate of initiatives to implement and gobs of new friends from the four corners of the hemisphere. Exciting stuff! In particular, I thought I would mention a few memorable names:

Bryan Sheppard – Coldwell Banker Select (awesome name) Tulsa OK

Drake Bratton – Coldwell Banker Willis Smith, New Bern NC

Heather Goodman – Coldwell Banker Islands, Turks & Caicos (yeah!)

Martha Barrick – Coldwell Banker Penn One Real Estate, Lewisburg PA

Dan Barnett – Vice President of NRT, Parsippany NJ

Jairo Avila – Coldwell Banker Afilliates of Latin America (covering all of south and central america!).

At the same time that we were in Florida, Jim Gillespie and our amazing senior staff were moving from news station to news station answering the media’s questions about Coldwell Banker’s groundbreaking “10-Day Sale” held October 10-19 nationwide. We had over 30,000 homes commit to reducing their prices in order to stimulate some buyer action. Locally in Lancaster PA real estate, we had 80 participating homes and sold 10% of them! We were very happy with the results.

Thanks to everyone from Coldwell Banker. Lancaster PA is Grateful for your diligent preparation and the event was a huge success!