We rarely find occasion to need to share what is happening in our world, and I have to say, the past 7 months have been incredible and we’ve been working harder than ever to implement tools, technology and knowledge to better serve our clients and to be the obvious go-to in the Portland Metro & Vancouver area! Plus a little blurb about the pups in our life. Here’s a little peek!We have survived our unexpected transition to Keller Williams after M Realty merged with them in November. Brokerage changes are no easy thing but we are settled in and raring to go! Frankly, KW was the direction we were headed eventually, we just didn’t expect it to happen when it did. We are very excited to be where we are!
We got to get Guide Dog puppy #2, Fizzy (or as we call her ‘The Fizz’), in November and what a snuggle bug she was and still is. We raised her from 8 weeks to 4 months old and handed her off to two new puppy raisers who are doing a phenomenal job with her! We can’t wait until fall this year to do it again and get another pup. Mark and I have decided that we love the puppy-breath/house-breaking phase the best. The morning snuggles can’t be beat and they are learning everything so fast. It allows us to play a key part in their raising and then hand them off to raisers who don’t like that part. Works for us! Kona-girl didn’t make the cut for big puppy school, but she did line up perfectly for Guide-Dogs for the Blind’s k9Buddy program. Which matches career change dogs like Kona with sight impaired kids which then exposes them to the blessings of a guide dog and these kids have a much higher chance of choosing to have a guide dog when they are older. It’s an incredible program and Kona is now in Northern California with a wonderful family and enjoys being a super-pet every day with her person Andrew. See the photo below from our co-raiser of Kona and puppy Fizzy at Christmas!
I finished my Certified Residential Specialist (CRS) designation which took 10 years, a certain amount of sales and classwork to achieve. This doesn’t mean anything to you except that I’ve worked hard to make sure I am constantly learning and growing my skills! 🙂
Yahoo! In February of this year I hit a second long-term goal and milestone when I passed my Principal Broker exam. Now Mark and I can work on building out a small team to better serve our awesome buyers and sellers! Truly, everything happens at once right??
Because nothing else was going on (insert eye roll right?) we decided to do an 18 week marriage class at our church Grace Chapel. It started in February and we’re almost done. We figured that doing business together well would necessitate and that we deserve the extra attention to focus on our marriage and good communication. If you ever have a chance to do Love After Marriage (LAM), we highly recommend it!
We have launched our client rewards program called The Perks! When you send someone in your world our way and once we meet with them, you’ll receive a turquoise envelope with additional details. We send you $10 Amazon gift cards each month for 6 months & get to spoil you a bit with small quarterly events. May 19th we are at Comedy Sportz for an evening of fun improv! It’s just our way to make sure you are properly and promptly thanked for entrusting us with your friends and family. I was not doing a very good job of following up on this aspect of our business and this is going to help us show our appreciation much more consistently!! YAY PERKS!
Nicole Brown started working with us in April!! Yippppeee!! She is our full time licensed Client Care Coordinator and her main job is to support our clients and get/keep things off my plate that prevent me from spending more time with you all. Nicole is part tornado, part human and we are grateful for her administrative gifts that will help us get caught up and put systems in place! When you are a solo agent like I have been the past 10 years, there’s just stuff that doesn’t get done. We are soooo grateful to have her onboard!
The next big thing for us has been several months in process….branding. So excited for this next step!!! Logos, color palettes, themes, a cool stamp or two… this is the whip cream!!
After branding is all figured out then we’ll wrap up a beautiful new website—cannot wait for it! It’s been 7 years since I did an overhaul. 🙂
On the back-end we have incorporated a new CRM so we’ll be working on gathering accurate info from you over the next several months so it’s all correct! If you have changed phone numbers or emails—please let us know!
We are very excited to start the launch of our new home search over the next 30 days! Property Minder is a fanastic new tool that will let us really drill down even to the specific streets, zip codes and schools for our buyer searches! Soooo good to get this technology upgraded. More to come as we launch!
Lastly—and we’ll have more of an update on this in July…we are hiring two full time buyer agents! I am so excited! The hope is that they’ll start towards the end of June! If you know of someone who is a great fit for our client focused, service driven culture—please reach out and let me know! We have a very detailed job description that I can send out. Mark and I are very excited about this next step as we grow our team of exceptional talent!
