LINK Internship
My Resume:
Final Project:
After I completed my initial research on the four main sites, I looked into additional sites as well as competition evaluation. Then I compiled site improvements and implemented all of the changes I suggested. Lastly, the further improvements are for moving forward into the future and what The Durango Team should do now.
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Mentor Interview:
On the last day of my second week interning with Wells Group, I interviewed Mr. Ricedorff and asked him questions about the work he does and questions surrounding that. It was an eye-opening 20 minute conversation that I was very honored to be a part of...
- How did you arrive at your current position?
- “We were going through some major changes in our life. I was in a great career position as the executive at a multinational company with opportunities ahead of me. But I was traveling all of the time and away from the family. We were looking at it saying, ‘Life is short. Life is precious.’ And the view of that was, what is important in life? Our answer was that what we are called to be is for our spiritual life to be first, second thing is our family, and third is our work. When we were in the last position, it was absolutely opposite of that. Work was first, family was second, and spiritual life was kinda the third part of it. So we were looking at making a transition. Frankly, so that I could see the family grow up since I was gone and traveling. In the big companies we used to say, and I’m sure it is still done, is that we all feel regretful. We would say that it is not the quantity of time but the quality of time. That would mean we could be gone Monday through Friday and come home on Saturday. But only as long as we spend some time with our kids and take them to the zoo or something like that would it make up for the week of their lives lost. In reality, it doesn’t. So that is what led us here. We were looking for a transition in life. I grew up in this area and loving this area. So that is what led us here and to real estate.”
- How would you summarize your job responsibilities?
- “From a cliche standpoint, I’m a jack of all trades and a master of none. Meaning that in real estate I think we have to be generalists. We have to be pretty good at all pieces of it. There are lots of things that impact home ownership including everything from negotiation to advertising, marketing, social media, and on and on and on. That is along with all of the issues we get into about mold and radon, etc. We need to know a lot of stuff and do most of it fairly well. Then we need to surround ourselves with people that have specialty gifts that can do something at a higher level than we can. So I look at myself as a generalist and some might say as the general manager. I’m somebody who does a lot of different things at a fairly high level.”
- What challenges have you faced professionally, and how have you handled them?
- “The toughest challenge was in The Great Recession. Candidly, we had two years where we sold more real estate than any other person or team in La Plata County. We had some income coming in but our expenses for those two years were higher than the money that was coming in. You still have all your personal responsibilities so it’s like being terminated from a position, maybe a job being eliminated. Imagine that it is like being without a job for two years and there is no actual income coming in while you were surviving on that. In fact, we were putting money in the business for two years. It was a difficult time and affected our whole country. As hard as it was on real estate brokers, The Great Recession was devastating to builders, developers, and others. So it was hard on us and almost impossible for others. Anyway, what do you do? You get up and go to work everyday while doing the best you can. In our case, we wanted to continue being able to deliver the advertising, the marketing, and the service we had in the past. Basically, we tried to pretend that the recession wasn't happening with the hopes that the recession would end before all of the money ran out. We tried to keep a high level of professionalism. A lot of real estate brokers kind of just dropped spending any money so if they marketed properties, they didn't advertise them. We continued to do the things we could and wanted to honor our clients. That was the philosophy: honor our clients, do the best we can, and hope that we can stand long enough.”
- What do you love about your work? If you could change anything, what would it be?
- “What I love about my work is the variety probably more than anything. Just a few minutes ago, I had 5 or 6 phone calls. In only 15 minutes, I’m on a variety of different subjects depending on whether it is talking to a closing company, discussing a mold issue, somebody who is interested in a property, or whatever it may be. The reality of real estate is that it’s a personal business. We connect with the people that we work with. We’re connected to them in a personal way more so than insurance agents, attorneys, and others. We’re really in a people oriented business and I love that part. I love the variety because not every day is exactly the same.”
- Would you mind telling me about your biggest professional accomplishment?
- “We kind of look individually at each time we list a property, sell a property, work with a buyer. There are some that earn more commission or have larger deals. But the satisfaction in that isn’t any greater than doing something with somebody who is a first time homebuyer. They’re excited about their new home and stuff so it is hard to say professionally. From an education standpoint, in real estate there is a CCIM designation which is a commercial designation that is very difficult to get. I think I’m the only one in the Four Corners that has it. It’s challenging to get it and that was a commitment I had to work towards over a period of time.”
- What training, education, or life experience has been most valuable to you professionally?
- “That one is pretty easy because it’s on the life experience side. It’s the relationship that I have with my wife, Jan, and what she allows me to do. In our case, especially with our kids grown up, we really have no other responsibilities at home. She does everything in my life to allow me to do real estate early in the morning to late in the evening if I need to and some on the weekends. I still need to honor that relationship with her but it’s that ability that I have an opportunity that other people don’t. As an example, if you’re a single dad or single mom as a real estate broker, you’re gonna be torn between responsibilities. I’m allowed a lot of freedom to be able to do what I do.”
- Do you have a specific time when you knew the job was right for you?
- “That’s an interesting question because again, I was at a very high level professionally in my previous position. I had opportunities to be vice president of sales, national sales managers in several big divisions. But what I learned about myself was that I was an abnormal executive. I really enjoyed spending time in my previous position out working with people. And thinking strategically was a piece of it. But when I looked at real estate, I knew it was the right thing when I looked at the variety and balance that it has. I’m not in the office every single day and I’m not in there all day. I’m out on appointments and for someone with my personality, that needs a lot of variety, real estate really works well. So coming to a small community and not feeling the loss of the big corporation with the opportunities that I had, real estate fit really well.”
- What might you do differently if you could relive the last 5-10 years of your life?
- “There isn’t much, not professionally at least. Personally, you always wish you spent more time with your kids and wife. There are times that the stress of what we do doesn’t keep us as emotionally positively strong as we’d like to see it. I look over the last 5-10 years and what I’m learning in my ‘advanced’ years is that time is very precious. The time is precious with our families, our kids, our wives, our relationships, our friends, our churches, and those kinds of things. As driven as I am professionally, I would probably give a different percentage to that if I could.”
- What advice would you give to someone interested in your professional field?
- “Consider it! I think it’s a great field. There are some opportunities real estate offers that other things don’t. You can go anywhere and do it, anywhere in the United States at least. The flexibility and the freedom where we are is in a very fast paced age. We are in an era where people don’t live where they grew up. They tend to move and tend to move again after a few years to some place else. They’ve got to have transferrable skills. I think real estate offers that and you have to get licensing in the states but it’s transferrable skills. If you’re successful at the sales side, negotiation, and work ethic, and all of the other pieces that it takes to be successful, you take those skills with you. You don’t leave them behind and for that reason, if no other. I couldn’t do what I did in my previous position in Durango. To be at the level that I was, I would’ve had to be in Chicago, California, New York, Atlanta, and only a few areas where those opportunities exist. Real estate offers you the choice to live where you want to.”
- What changes have you seen in your field? Are they positive or negative? And has the progression of technology played a major role in this?
- “Let me go from the back end of that to the forward end. Technology is playing a huge part in real estate. Going back to are they positive or negative, it’s neither because it is change. Another thing you will learn with life is that change is constant. I remember times from my life where you strive to control something and get it to a certain level so then you think you can take it a little easier. Well change never allows you to do that. Change is constant. It is constantly happening. It’s a commitment as a professional if you wanna be good at what you do. It’s a life-long commitment. So the work that you’ve done on this internship, is helping us be better at what we do with real estate syndication and that stuff. Again, I don’t have to know everything about it but I have to be a generalist and I gotta know enough to understand how it works and so forth. But I’ve gotta be willing to continue that progress or you stagnate. As you soon as you start to stagnate, you’re on the way out. If you wanna be the best at what you do, you commit that change is going to happen, that you’re going to keep your education alive, and that you’re gonna keep changing as the times change. You have to moderate your behavior to it because it isn’t gonna moderate its behavior to you.”
- If you weren’t in this job position, what do you imagine that you would be doing instead?
- “I would be doing something completely different. It wouldn’t be going back to a big corporation or something, those days are behind me and those opportunities probably wouldn’t exist either. It would maybe be doing something that looks at what the most important things in life are. A nice general question is, ‘How can you help somebody here or outside of here?” So I think of ministry. I think I would be doing something more in ministry and trying to find where the fit would be with my skills, commitment that I was willing to make, and then what that would look like. Professionally, I’m happy with what I do. I don’t see any reason for a change.”
- What are your professional goals for the next 5-10 years and how do you hope to accomplish them?
- “I already answered that by saying I wanna be the best that I can be. I wanna be the best real estate consultant in Southwest Colorado. But answering it another way and more so than that, I wanna be as good as anybody in the state or anybody nationally. I don’t know whether I can be or not but that’s my desire. I wanna be at a world class level throughout my career and clear up to the end of it. I wanna continue to study, continue to work, continue to be educated, and continue to serve my clients at the best level that I can. If I can do that, I do believe I can leave with the satisfaction of saying I spent my career continuing to adapt to change and living at the best that I can be.”
Project Proposal:
I will be completing an internship as a junior where I expect to expand my knowledge of the real estate world including the business and technology aspects of it. For my LINK internship I will be working in Durango, Colorado with Don Ricedorff and his team at Wells Group. Don is one of the top realtors in the Durango area being part of Durango Real Property and Wells Group. I am excited to learn more about the different areas he is an expertise in as well as what the distinctions are between Wells Group and Durango Real Property.
One of my main goals in life is to better communicate with people in an effective way. This LINK experience will not only force me to find connections online but also will expose me to people in the community. I think it is a fantastic skill to know how to communicate effectively with people my own age and those older than me. Through going on-site to different homes and or properties with Don Ricedorff and his team, I know that my skills will be broadened.
The project I will be completing for Wells Group has five main parts:
A. Research the available real estate search engine sites and investigate how each could/should be used to the best advantage of The Durango Team. Identify sites that they may not be currently using and recommend to them whether or how they should add additional search engine sites to their composite.
B. After initial research, determine how The Durango Team is currently using each site and also how we should coordinate among the sites to their best advantage.
C. Evaluate how their competition is using these sites and how they should improve their use, if applicable, to match or exceed their competition.
D. Implement with the Team the agreed upon strategies for each search engine.
E. Recommend to the Team on-going monitoring for the Team to do after the internship project is complete.
By completing this project, I hope to gain a better understanding of the business side of real estate and how different realtors “up their game” by staying connected and updated because of technology. This will be very useful to the business I will be working with for many reasons. One being because they will be able to better evaluate competition in the Durango area. Two being because they will be able to expand their knowledge of real estate search engines including how to utilize each site efficiently. Lastly, they will hopefully have an easier time managing the websites through coordinating the information. The resources I will need to complete this project will mostly by the people on The Durango Team. They already have an extensive amount of knowledge in the field of what they do. Therefore, by utilizing them in any way I can I feel that my project will be better. For exhibition, I plan to create a packet of work that acknowledges and shows all of the different tactics I used in order to complete the project. This writing will include a lot of the knowledge I will have gained about not only this project, but the business and technology world of real estate. The skills I will need to gain in order to complete my LINK project will be to navigate real estate search engines and websites as well as continuing to work on organizing data and information.
I have faced a lot of obstacles in setting up my internship. To start off, I basically have no clue what career I would eventually like to pursue. This makes it especially challenging when thinking about majors and minors in my upcoming college years. With my internship, I really struggled to find something I was excited and actually interested in doing. I explored different fields but none of them felt right and the timing seemed to be off for most. When time seemed to be running out, I realized that my initial desire to work with Wells Group would be the best fit for me at this point. Through personal connections and perfect timing, The Durango Team decided to take me on as their intern for three weeks! In this whole process so far, I have learned that it is important to not give up. There are going to be times when things do not go your way but you have to persevere. I am feeling a bit nervous about my internship because I do not want to let anyone down with the work I will be doing. However, I am also happy and grateful for this fantastic opportunity ahead of me!
One of my main goals in life is to better communicate with people in an effective way. This LINK experience will not only force me to find connections online but also will expose me to people in the community. I think it is a fantastic skill to know how to communicate effectively with people my own age and those older than me. Through going on-site to different homes and or properties with Don Ricedorff and his team, I know that my skills will be broadened.
The project I will be completing for Wells Group has five main parts:
A. Research the available real estate search engine sites and investigate how each could/should be used to the best advantage of The Durango Team. Identify sites that they may not be currently using and recommend to them whether or how they should add additional search engine sites to their composite.
B. After initial research, determine how The Durango Team is currently using each site and also how we should coordinate among the sites to their best advantage.
C. Evaluate how their competition is using these sites and how they should improve their use, if applicable, to match or exceed their competition.
D. Implement with the Team the agreed upon strategies for each search engine.
E. Recommend to the Team on-going monitoring for the Team to do after the internship project is complete.
By completing this project, I hope to gain a better understanding of the business side of real estate and how different realtors “up their game” by staying connected and updated because of technology. This will be very useful to the business I will be working with for many reasons. One being because they will be able to better evaluate competition in the Durango area. Two being because they will be able to expand their knowledge of real estate search engines including how to utilize each site efficiently. Lastly, they will hopefully have an easier time managing the websites through coordinating the information. The resources I will need to complete this project will mostly by the people on The Durango Team. They already have an extensive amount of knowledge in the field of what they do. Therefore, by utilizing them in any way I can I feel that my project will be better. For exhibition, I plan to create a packet of work that acknowledges and shows all of the different tactics I used in order to complete the project. This writing will include a lot of the knowledge I will have gained about not only this project, but the business and technology world of real estate. The skills I will need to gain in order to complete my LINK project will be to navigate real estate search engines and websites as well as continuing to work on organizing data and information.
I have faced a lot of obstacles in setting up my internship. To start off, I basically have no clue what career I would eventually like to pursue. This makes it especially challenging when thinking about majors and minors in my upcoming college years. With my internship, I really struggled to find something I was excited and actually interested in doing. I explored different fields but none of them felt right and the timing seemed to be off for most. When time seemed to be running out, I realized that my initial desire to work with Wells Group would be the best fit for me at this point. Through personal connections and perfect timing, The Durango Team decided to take me on as their intern for three weeks! In this whole process so far, I have learned that it is important to not give up. There are going to be times when things do not go your way but you have to persevere. I am feeling a bit nervous about my internship because I do not want to let anyone down with the work I will be doing. However, I am also happy and grateful for this fantastic opportunity ahead of me!