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REOPro’s First Year.

As of Saturday May 23, 2009 it will have been one year since I sat down at my laptop and decided to start REOPro. Looking back and reflecting on what has happened I am proud to see how we have grown. REOPro was started because I found it incredibly difficult to find reliable information about the Default Real Estate Industry and, it seemed no one wanted to help. Granted, I found all kinds of sites that made wild promises that for only $99.99 a zip code I could get hundreds of listings or for a monthly subscription fee of $299.99 I could purchase ad space with my picture on all the listings in my area. Needless to say, I lost a lot of money with absolutely no return. I was frustrated and discouraged by what seemed to be a consorted effort to take my money and, keep me out of the real business of REO. After making several Better Business Bureau complaints against a number of companies and reading complaints on other real estate open networking sites, I realized I wasn’t alone. Instead of feeling used, abused and thrown to the curb, this insight just made me angry and more determined to blow the doors off this industry and expose the frauds from the legitimate business. For those of you, who don’t know me personally, let me jump of topic a bit and share a personal story with you so you have a better understanding of how REOPro came into existence. I am a gamer or in other words, I love to play internet games like World of Warcraft, GuildWars or EveOnline. Most of these Massive Multiplay Online Games have huge networking clubs you can join to learn more about the game as well as get organized to actually impact your personal game play. I had personally organized several of these gamer clubs and had seen what kind of power these social networks had on the evolution of these games and the success they could propel players to within the gaming world. I am not exactly sure how I made the connection between taking the networking side of these games and applying that knowledge and experience to the REO Default Industry but, it happened. I guess you can call it a stroke of genius or madness…depending on your point of view. I simply asked myself, what would happen if I could organize REO Default Industry Professionals like I was able to organize several of my gaming clubs? I had several successful gaming clubs growing so why wouldn’t I be able to use the same set of skills and apply them to a professional environment? Well, I definitely didn’t see why I couldn’t, I only saw that I could….so, I did. First, I Googled “Professional Networking Platform” and several came up, NING among them. I then asked around and quickly found that NING was going to satisfy my needs. The next step was a catchy name. Well, I had seen several people calling themselves REO Professionals but, I wasn’t sure if that would work so, I made a beta site on a FreeWebs account, called it REO Professional Agents, slapped a Google tracking code on it and boom, it was getting hits within the hour. I had learned from gaming, that people like short, catchy, easy to remember names so, REO Professional Agent was fine but, I needed something a bit more catchy so, after about 2 days worth of thinking aloud and my partner’s invaluable insight, REOPro was born. REOPro is and will always remain a free professional / social networking site dedicated to the people who work in the Real Estate Default Industry. Currently we have over 1850 members who take advantage of their own REOPro page, comment walls, blogs, forums, picture sharing, video sharing, online chat and most recently Ask the Asset Manager. As far as I know, we are America’s largest free networking site dedicated to REO. I hope REOPro has been as much an asset to you as it has been to me. Thank you to each of you for your contributions and commitment to our success. I also want to offer a special thank you to Adam Cothron, the designer who came up with our logo. Adam is a integral part of our success and I look forward to working with him in making this site better. Good luck to each of you and thank you, once again.
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