Tag Archives: birthday

4 Years Later, RCG is still Rock’n the Real Estate World

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Today is Rain City Guide’s 4th Birthday!

When I hit submit on our Hello World post 4 years ago, I had no idea what I was embarking on… but what a fun journey it’s been. You’ll have given me so many chance to test out different tools, meet so many interesting people and take part in so many fabulous discussions. Thank you!

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By the time we were 1 year old, I was savvy enough in the ways of linking to get the site ranked for having the sexiest real estate agents. Since then, I’ve tried to remain thankful to the RCG community and my family…

This year, I want to continue the tradition by saying thanks to all of you that make RCG possible! You’all rock! 😉

And just to give you an idea of how RCG continues to rock the real estate world, I’ll end this post with a chart showing RCG’s growth since Feb ’06 (when I first started using Google Analytics). While the growth is no longer “exponential”, I don’t feel like I’m going out on a limb when I say there is no other local blog written by real estate professionals that generates nearly this much traffic! Interesting, traffic to the site continues to grow and last month we broke the broke the 100K PV benchmark for the first time! Obviously, none of this would be possible without so many awesome contributors and such an active real estate community in Seattle!

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Thank you all!

A Special Tribute for RCG's 3rd Birthday!

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When I told my wife that RCG turned three years old today, she looked at me in disbelief…
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Not because the site has been around so long, but because it seems impossible that RCG has brought so many (wonderful) changes to our life in only three years.

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While RCG started out as an experiment to cheaply market my wife’s new real estate business, it turned into an epic personal journey that has allowed me to foster a fabulously healthy real estate community, learn a tremendous amount about building and marketing real estate websites, and make a living educating real estate professionals on how to improve their online marketing.

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No part of this journey could have been expected or predicted, and yet, my wife, Anna, has been more than up to the challenge every time I choose to pursue another wild idea (such as spending hours each day writing posts on RCG back when we had no readers, moving to Southern California to pursue a new profession, leaving a well-paying executive position to start my own business, etc.) with my usual caffeinated gusto.

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And while I normally try to take every opportunity to thank the RCG community for making everything possible (I am truly appreciative!), I want to take this special opportunity to give thanks to Anna for giving me so much support as I continue to chase my passions.

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The ride has just begun!

Happy Birthday to…

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It’s Jillayne’s birthday!  I was just checking out my Facebook profile and noticed that one of our very own is celebrating a birthday today.  I have known Jillayne for more years than we probably care to admit!   We once worked together for a large title insurance company…in our youts, as Vinnie would say.   If my memory serves, she was a title rep for Snohomish County and I was for King County.

Jillayne, I hope you have a wonderful birthday and many more to come.   As it is your special day, I won’t super-impose your head onto anything.  🙂   All my best to you!

Lots More than Just the Sexiest Real Estate Agents

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It’s been a while since I had a real “ramble” post, but considering the occasion, hopefully people will forgive me for trying to cover a lot of ground in one post.

Happy Birthday to Rain City Guide!!!
It’s been one year since I wrote my first post (Hello World, of course) on Rain City Guide. I probably would have taken down the first post since it was just a test except we got a comment right off the bat and I’ve never been very good at deleting comments…

I have no (clear) idea where RCG will go over the next year, but considering the real estate industry is clearly in a pivotal position and I’m extremely excited to have front row seats.

New Broker For Anna
LTD Real EstateWe’re excited to announce that, as of today, Anna has officially switched her broker to LTD Real Estate. This major change for Anna began when I struck up a conversation with a broker at LTD, Jon Ribary, after noticing that we were both developing tools to map Seattle listings this past summer (who wasn’t???). Just like my gHomes tool, his search tool hasn’t kept up with some of the amazing tools that have been released recently (including ours!). However, our similar interests led to many conversations and ultimately a much stronger bond between Rain City Guide and LTD. Anna and I look forward to working closer with Jon and his staff in the days, weeks, months and years to come. If you’re wondering, don’t expect much to change here at Rain City Guide based on Anna’s move to LTD (besides the logo on our sidepanel!). Anna’s move is really related to the fact that she was searching out a broker who understands that the real power of marketing on the internet is when you use the tools to communicate with potential clients as oppose to talking at them. About the only thing you can expect to change is that Jon and I have some ideas for side-projects that will allow RCG to continue innovating so that we can achieve our mission of being the best resource for real estate information in Seattle.

Ride Home from the MIT Forum
The MIT forum is tonight and it is sold out in a major way. I definitely plan to attend, but I have a minor issue in that we’re a one-car family and Anna has something else that she must attend. Getting between my work in Downtown Seattle and Downtown Bellevue tomorrow afternoon without a car will be easy. The part of the trip that I’m not sure I can handle is the trip to my home in Crown Hill this evening. Is there someone attending who wouldn’t mind giving me a lift home after the forum is over? Found a ride home! Feel free to email me directly.

Sexiest Real Estate Agents
I was checking my log files earlier today when I noticed that someone came to Rain City Guide based on the Google Search: [sexiest+real+estate+agents]. I was deeply saddened to find out that we are ranked a dismal #2 on this all-important search. So, if you are a blogger interested in helping us celebrate our birthday in a zany way, consider linking to this post with the phrase “sexiest real estate agents”. I’ll bet it won’t even take a full week for us to be rated #1! Okay, it is obviously getting late, so I’m going to go to bed and try to sleep off the celebratory Champaign that Anna and I cracked open tonight!