REI 360’s Story: The Ultimate Blend
REI 360 emerged a few years after HMB as a natural extension of services we were already offering. We had been creating and distributing video trainings and educational materials for other industry professionals. We were also offering real estate investing software and analyzing tools developed and used internally within our own business.
Along with educational materials and tools, we were distributing high quality industry content through our blog, highlighting HMB’s activities, trends in the market, and projects on which our clients were working. We made it a point to blog regularly in order to build our website’s online presence.
In the spirit of content marketing, we knew that if we put quality material out into the world, it would attract professionals in our industry to us.
We did this extremely well and early—before other companies in the real estate lending sector were engaging in these kinds of endeavors. These efforts paid off—HMB’s high search rankings and social media presence attracted a tremendous amount of traffic to our website.
This was exciting, but frustrating. We were thrilled with the number of online visitors we were getting, but frustrated over our inability to do business with a large portion of them due to the geo-specific nature of hard money lending.
So we brainstormed methods to bridge this gap. At heart, we’re web guys. We wanted to have an Internet-centric business counterpart to HMB that reflected what we knew and loved. We thought, why not make the distribution of our educational materials and tools more formal by placing them on a membership website? This was the brainchild that became REI 360.
Our vision for REI 360 is that it will pave the way for technology’s growing relationship with the real estate investing industry. We’re presently evolving REI 360 by developing an offline component to the venture’s online presence. Real estate professionals may now attend onsite REI 360 training seminars held at our offices. These seminars offer real estate professionals opportunities to network while expanding their knowledge of the industry. In keeping with the spirit of REI 360, these seminars are also broadcast live to online audiences, so any professional in any location may attend via live stream.
HMB and REI 360 are two synergistic business models that embody the online/offline blend. Creating an online venture to complement our offline lending company has allowed us to expand, connect, and influence the industry on a large scale. The blend has also enabled us to remain on the cutting edge of advancement and evolution in our field. It’s an integral part of our vision for the future of HMB and REI 360, as well as our vision for the real estate lending industry as a whole.
This article is an excerpt from the book “The Whiteboard: Go from Blank Canvas to a Productive, Leveraged, & Highly-Profitable Business” by Chris Haddon and Jason Balin. Please click here to see more.
