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.