A few weeks ago I wrote a post titled Where are the real estate young guns? that highlighted a few very successful (and one might add “tenured”) bloggers, agents, and marketing mavericks in the real estate industry. Their stories are inspirational and serve as a benchmark for anyone looking to make an impact in the real estate spaces. If you don’t follow “The Guard” yet – you should. But this is a new era and like Emilio Estevez says in the movie “we’re gonna show these guys they’ve finally met their match”.

Surprisingly, I didn’t hear much back from the real estate community about who to feature in this article. But, it doesn’t matter – the Young Guns have already infiltrated the marketplace (like a wild west ninja brigade!) and they won’t be slowing down anytime soon. In fact, it was harder to narrow this list down than it was to create it.

The Young Guns

These 3 talented individuals each have several years of real estate related experience (which means they must have all started their careers as teenagers) and I suggest you explore what they are up to.

Kendall Schiffler

Kendall promotes the Dallas Design District through LowerOakLawn.com. She also serves as President for the Social Media Club of Dallas, and builds custom websites in her “spare time”. The story of LowerOakLawn.com was recently highlighted in a must read article by Brian Clark. Kendall started blogging about a relatively undeveloped area in Dallas where her employer, Pegasus Ablon, planned to develop over 1000 multi-family units, and dozens of retail spaces. Ultimately, her efforts helped turn what was once a sparse warehouse district into a vibrant urban setting chock full of antique dealers, furniture showrooms, art galleries, and restaurants. The Lower Oak Lawn story is a prime example of how to build an audience, listen to what they want, and deliver it. Look, Jay Thompson is an incredible real estate blogger, but Phoenix existed when he started writing about it. Kendall started blogging about Lower Oak Lawn before it was even considered a real community!

Dominic Morrocco

Dominic brings a solid background in real estate technology to his current role as a partner at M Squared Real Estate – a successful and budding DC real estate brokerage. Dominic started a loft and condo search site, Urbanspan, in 2000 and has already served as Chief Technology Officer at two major real estate firms. Regular readers of this blog are no stranger to M Squared’s digital mastery. Their website is a robust, organized, and powerful resource for Washington DC real estate. Dominic’s value proposition to the company is huge; by taking the technology, graphic design and marketing burden off its agents, M Squared’s agents can focus primarily on selling real estate and delivering quality insight to their valuable client relationships. M Squared provides their agents with websites that put most brokers sites to shame. I would bet that you will see something new and exciting from this company in the coming months.

Jimmy Mackin

Co-founder and Chief Frugylist at Frugyl, Jimmy tours the country as a speaker for Agent Reboot, and is an all-around Facebook guru. He is probably best known for his creation of several popular Facebook groups for real estate agents. What most don’t know is why he does it. In his own words Jimmy explains “I’ve always been drawn to building communities and solving problems for real estate agents”. Sounds pretty powerful to me. Jimmy’s latest venture, Frugyl, provides crowd sourced recommendations on real estate productivity tools and is a place to share in unfiltered feedback from peers about different products and services. Jimmy is working hard to “provide simple, practical technology training” to real estate agents. I have a feeling one day he will end up on this list too.

These 3 have set the bar quite high.

The Young Guns of Real Estate

It really was difficult to narrow down this list (which is a good thing) so I wanted to be sure to mention a few more Young Guns who are worth checking out. For incredible use of video check out Minneapolis agent Danny Dietl (and please start by watching this). There must be something in the water in the Upper Midwest because Greg Dallaire is also making great use of video and has established an excellent hyper-local presence at Green Bay Greg. Chris Smith demanded he be included in this article so please tell him you saw his name here (which is kind of like including Dr. Dre on a list of up and coming rappers). In the tech world you should absolutely check out Andrew Machado who developed Open Home Pro (interview w 1000Watt). I think it would be wrong to forget mentioning the curator, antagonizer, wordsmith, and mastermind behind Geek Estate – Mr. Drew Meyers. Drew is the straightest shooter out of anyone I know. He simply loves real estate technology/marketing and enjoys thought provoking discussions about it. Drew has detailed hundreds of strategies for real estate agents to use in growing their businesses – because he likes to. Very cool my friend. Thanks for hosting us.

Challenge

I’m challenging The Young Guns and The Guard to continue driving innovation in the real estate industry. We can do more. I’m also challenging every reader of this blog to light a match, throw a brick, or just write a nice blog post – but please…go do something! Start (or join!) a real estate blog or Facebook group, improve your technology offerings, or think of new ways to provide our services to the public. Just don’t complain about not knowing where to start – Drew has created a great resource right here at Geek Estate! Let us know who else should be included on this list and why in the comments below.