Wednesday, August 24, 2011

The Most Influential People Online


I’ve paid special attention over the last few weeks to the web presence of the people Duke Long ranked his top ten most influential commercial real estate people online.

Being influential offline makes you pretty influential online. For some people simply creating a Twitter account can generate a huge web presence. I’m not qualified to evaluate the online influence of anyone, but I wanted to check out successful blogs in the commercial real estate sphere. Some were too specific to local U.S. real estate markets to hold my attention (I have a barely passing interest in retail rates in California for example). And not the entire list had blogs. I drifted into Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook… 

Here are my notables,

  • Coy Davidson’s blog, The Tenant Advisor covers U.S. economic news that’s directly impacting the commercial real estate industry and includes specific market cases I find interesting in spite of my geography.
  • A Student of the Real Estate Game is a blog by exactly that. Joe Stampone is a student so perhaps that's why he's yet to become consumed with market statistics and sales figures. He writes about real estate from the perspective of someone passionate about the product and not just the profits attached to it.
  • The Source has guest bloggers with strong industry credibility sharing analysis across topics. The alternating perspectives and styles kept me coming back each week.
Worth mentioning is Bob Schecter - who while he does not have his own blog, is doing a few things that are of value to me as a blogger. He's using other social media tools to create portals to online commercial real estate discussion. And he’s educating the industry on social media best practices along the way. If you're in commercial real estate you'll want to take a look at what he's doing.