Get new eyes to get new ideas…

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” (Marcel Proust) from my favorite Blog – Jack’s Winning Words. I thought of a recent long discussion string about Open Houses, in which I participated in the LinkedIn.com National Association of Realtors blog. There were many good ideas and comments there; a few from people who may have looked at Open Houses with new eyes.

I have opined before (maybe whined before would be more accurate) about the people who jumped on the foreclosed homes bandwagon early and thus left many of us “regular Realtors” behind. They saw the crisis that we are in with new eyes, before the rest of us could see anything but a hassle in working with the banks. Now they are the ones making most of the money in real estate, while the rest of us struggle. Of course that too will end, so we must keep our eyes open for the new opportunities that will eventually result.

I am hopeful that the trend that is also underway for buyers to shift their emphasis to the Web will eventually pay off for me, since I have invested heavily in that medium. Certainly what is happening across the country to newspapers seems to portend a dramatic shift in where people get their news and other information from these days. One can only hope that this applies to the real estate business, too. I think it does.

If that is true, then other aspects of the Internet world, like Social Networks will become all the more important. There are certainly increasing references in the media about the “blogosphere”, the huge on-line pool of blogs which provides information and opinions about everything and everyone these days. These days, when one Googles (see how ubiquitous the Internet world has become – now the search engine Google is a verb, too) a topic these days, one is likely to get a whole bunch of Blog sites as part of the search results. For fun, Google your own name and see what comes back.

So, I’m trying out several pairs of new eyes – Facebook, LinkedIn, ActiveRain, Twitter and my own MilfordRealEstate.Blogspot.com site, as well as my Web sites – to see if I can see things differently, and maybe better this time. Are you trying to look through “new eyes” too? What are you seeing with your new eyes?