A 'Boojer' is a Good Thing

Unless you are part of The Enterprise Network, you may not know what a "boojer" is. I was invited to speak at their conference this week and it is great to be here, in Denver at the Ritz Carleton.

For my work, I travel a lot and attend many conferences. If I were giving the conference a rating, I would give it 5 stars – 5 star for location, 5 star for content, 5 star for content presentation, 5 star for food (just had an amazing lunch), and 5 star for audience. The only conference I attend that is equal to it is the Leading Real Estate Companies of the World conference. Not ironically, there is a lot of cross-over between The Enterprise Network and Leading RE.

Booj (the company that powers the Enterprise Network) has some great real estate firms in their network – Ebby, Baird and Warner, Danberry, McGuire, NP Dodge, Gardner, Lyon, and many others. They call it a network because they think that way. Somewhere along the way they built some customer selection principles into their business. In truth, they look for customer partnerships that are unique and enduring. They only partner with one company in a marketplace. They only partner with independent firms.

In the modern world of real estate, few brokerages have their own technology departments that are responsible for their website, agent websites, CRM, and other tools. Firms use vendors – and sometimes quite a number of vendors. When you decide to outsource something so material to the operation of a business, you lose a lot. For example, you do not control the product roadmap. You cannot influence service levels. You eat what your vendor feeds you rather than foraging with peers.

Booj is like owning a technology company with your peers.

With booj, the network of firms on their platform decide the product roadmap. Each firm gets what they want from booj as long as other firms in the network agree. The good news is that brokers are like-minded thinkers – so the result is that everyone gets everything they want just like they owned the company, but they don't own it.

The combination of smart people from many of the nation's leading brokerages collaborating with booj and injecting some of the top minds in the world as consultants on SEO, lead generation, lead cultivation, etc. equals magic.

I have two consulting roles with brokers that seem to recur again and again. First, brokers ask us to work though business strategy – long term, short term, acquisitions, etc. Secondly, I am often hired as a fixer. I am hired to fix broken technology strategies or data management. I have worked with a lot of booj customers on business strategy, but never on broken technology. They have a good thing going.

First to market at booj: Non-expiring Property URLs!

As for new customers, they are sold out for 2015. The company only takes on a handful of new firms each year.

To learn more about booj, visit IndependentRE.com.