Posted by Erion Shehaj in Business, Featured Articles on January 2, 2009 | No Comments

Paperless in 2009...

I had been thinking about it for quite sometime and I just kept clinging to those yellow manila folders as a backup to my digital files on my computer. But who was I kidding? It would be easier for me to recreate a document from scratch rather than find it in that mountainous file terrain that is my filing cabinet. So now, it is absolutely official. Office Depot may hate me for this – their stock price might even drop (you never know) – but Signature Real Estate will be paperless in 2009. Any one want to buy a couple of file racks? They’re on such a sale right... 

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Posted by Erion Shehaj in Economy, Featured Articles on October 19, 2008 | 2 Comments

The Obama campaign and lessons for devel...

Reading the title, you are probably expecting a liberal political piece about the greatness that is the Democratic candidate for president. You are mistaken. It is not Obama’s politics that interests me right now. It’s his campaign’s economics. I believe that developing countries could learn valuable economic lessons from the way Obama’s run his campaign. The fundamental fundraising concepts used in it can be utilized as a rough blueprint to promote growth and prosperity. Why would this interest me in the first place? I come from Albania - a (barely)... 

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Posted by Erion Shehaj in Marketing on July 8, 2007 | No Comments

Limited Resources make better marketers...

Do advertisers with limited resources make better marketers? I would argue so. When you just don’t have the funds to explore certain avenues, that in a way forces you to probe deeper and try to find opportunities that are either free or just more cost effective. In my experience running a young independent brokerage with limited advertising budgets, I have found that I was often very skeptical about where my advertising dollar went. I would question every opportunity thoroughly and make a decision based on a return on investment perspective versus an inclination to just... 

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Posted by Erion Shehaj in Best Of, Business, Featured Articles, Marketing, Real Estate on June 21, 2007 | 1 Comment

Google and the rise of the little guy...

It was around the time when Google was going public that I asked myself for the first time: What is so special about this company that makes them so successful in business? I think yesterday I found the answer! I will grant you that Google is the number one search engine company in the world with a market share that exceeds Yahoo and Microsoft, combined. But that is not it. Google makes money from every imaginable word in the dictionary through its Adwords advertising system that was the first in its class. But that is not it either. In my view, Google’s success is more... 

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Posted by Erion Shehaj in Featured Articles, Real Estate on May 2, 2007 | No Comments

Why the classic real estate model is sti...

Now that the national housing market has hit a bit of slump, you don’t hear about them as much in media’s feature stories but I remember about six months ago when every other day CNN Money was covering some new concept real estate company that was slashing commission rates and how it all was going to mean the end of the classic model of real estate commission system. I remember, because it was around that time that after three years in real estate, I had gotten my brokerage license and had setup my own real estate firm. The concept of reinventing the wheel sounded... 

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I was born in Tirana, Albania back when leg warmers and Duran Duran were trendy – then experienced the fall of communism first hand in 1990. Came to the United States in 1999 a seventeen year old kid and graduated from the University of Houston with honors in Accounting and Finance. Looking for a career that would combine my affinity for numbers (fancy term for “geek”) and love of people, I chose real estate as the perfect medium to achieve that balance. These days, I run Houston’s feistiest and most innovative real estate company as its Real Estate Rainmaker, President and C.E.O. I am a perpetual student of good business and I write about marketing, technology and real estate.