Overview
During my time at Village Concepts Realty Group during the Summer of 2022, I learned about what it truly means to be a real estate agent. Sure, a lot of the times the agents go face-to-face with their clients but most people don’t get to see the behind the scenes of real estate and I had the privilege of being a part of that side. This gave me a further appreciation of the agents at the office for seeing first hand the amount of work they have on their side with contracts, dealing with agents from other firms, home inspections, and more. Although I observed, that wasn’t my main task. y tasks during my time as an intern were to create social media posts for open houses, new listings, sold houses, and more. One of these posts that I created was the Summer Activities Post which they had never done at the company. The agents and their broker wanted to expand their social media presence and asked me to help them with that task. My suggestion was to create the Summer Activites Post that would get people informed of events happening during the weekend in case they had nothing to do and wanted to go out and have some fun. Uploading transactions and documents of listings to databases was another task the office had me complete. This helped me further my knowledge of contracts and listings of homes because I could see the contract first hand and know where all the moving parts went. Lastly, one of my big tasks was to create new videos for social media of an agent and myself touring different apartment complexes. This was the first thing the company wanted because no one in the office knew how to use Adobe Premiere. They wanted me to create these videos of virtual tours that included an introduction, music, and different images with text.
Apartment Tour Videos
In these apartment tour videos, Baylee Nunnally, an agent at Village Concepts Realty Group, and myself went to different apartment complexes in the Richmond area to tour them. We wanted to conduct this tour and create videos for people that had just sold their home and didn’t have the resources to find another one so soon. These apartments would be temporary living spaces for clients and would help market the apartment complexes due to some of these places not having the best marketing. This not only helped out the people that needed a place to call home while the agents were out looking for their dream home, but this also helped us. We used this time at the apartment complexes to market ourselves and the home Village Concepts team. In one instance, we created a relationship with our tour guide and she took our business cards and started telling people who were staying at their complex temporarily to use Village Concepts if they were looking to buy a house. These videos were a great way for me to show my skills using Adobe Premiere Pro and it gave me some screen time to market myself and show my face to social media as a representative of Village Concepts.
New Listings Posts
For the new listings posts I completed, I used the website known as MLS to gather the information on the homes that the company was selling. I would look for things to market on the social media pages that people were looking for and would leave descriptions of the home for people to get a better understanding of the house in question. For example, if we were to sell a house with a rather large square footage, then I would market that on the picture of the new listing and then elaborate further about the home in the comment section of the post. These posts were all done using Canva and I learned a great deal about Canva from this internship due to the company using it so much. Considering the amount of new listings we had every week, I was constantly adding new listings posts for houses on all our social media platforms. This helped me show my skills in organization with how the posts have a similar feel to them without them all being exactly the same. It also gave me a way to show off my skills with descriptions and being able to cut down the large description of the home into small sentences for social media.
Open House Posts
The open house posts were similar to the new listings posts. I would take some information from MLS about the houses but mainly what I would do was create a new Canva project for every open house we had that day. The picture would have the address for the open house, the date and time the open house would take place, and some of the time a little add on about the home or the land to get people more interested. For example, one of the properties that we had an open house for was newly constructed just a couple weeks ago. A lot of people look for that in a new home so, when it came time to create the open house post for said home, I added that this property was newly constructed. This part of my internship, like the new listings posts, got to show off my skills with social media and organization. The agents at the company wanted the open house posts to be very similar to each other so that people when they saw this format on social media platforms understood that this post without even reading it was an open house post and I accomplished that very well.
Constant Contact
Constant Contact is a website that Village Concepts Realty Group uses to keep in touch with all their past and present clients, agents from other real estate agencies, people that want to be updated about the market and how the company is doing, and more. This website allows for the company to send out an email to a large sum of people. It does this by letting the agents select a group on the website that they personally add. My job with this website during my internship was to send out every Friday an email about our listings that we had for that week. The email could have both new and old listings on it. The email included photos of the listings, prices, the real estate agent attached to the listing with their phone number, and a link to all the listings at the bottom of the email. Another one of my jobs was to create a new group to send the listings email to which had over 4000 people in it. Unfortunately, I had to go in and individually add each of the 4000 email accounts but I still completed the task in less than two days when my supervisor told me it would take me weeks most likely.
Summer Activities Post
The summer activities post was my idea to get people to go onto our social media platforms for a reason other than to look for a new house. This post showed off things to do in the area for families, young couples, friends looking to go out, etc. We wanted to not only bring people to our page but also help out some people in the area who were looking to advertise themselves and what they were doing that specific weekend. I did this by going onto Facebook and searching in their events section. I would look at local events happening that weekend and would find events we thought followers of our page would enjoy. For example, in Powhatan, there’s an outdoor concert called Village Vibe and we wanted to promote that in our post because it was something fun for anyone and it was the last one of the year. We contacted the people in charge of the event and asked if we could promote them on our page and use a picture of their logo as well and they replied with an ecstatic yes. This not only showed off my creative skills to the company with my idea but it also showed my communication skills with reaching out to the different event coordinators.
A Normal Day at the Office with me at the Front Desk
