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Chris Stephenson | CRE AI, OPS, MKTG

@TopherNOW

Apr 28

My fiancé & I flew biz class to Tokyo on Singapore Air, round trip

& stayed in the Kyoto Park Hyatt Regency 5 nights

Did it all for free.

That’s (roughly) $8,000-12,000 worth of travel.

Here’s a 🧵on how we took the best, cheapest trip we’ve ever taken.

Even tho getting these plane tickets for free was a goal of mine for 2023, I wasn’t planning on posting about it. But thanks to @nickgraynews there’s probably approx a million people on X thinking about going to Japan rn.

So if I can save one of you $8,000-12,000, I might as well 🤷‍♂️.

Plus I’ll mention 1 travel hack that I’d never heard of anywhere ever until I found it.

TLDR: The short answer is we got the tix with credit card points, but with going to Japan it’s a bit more complicated than that.

I’ll start with the big ticket, the business class flights ✈️, because getting the hotel was a bonus.

The main things you need to know:

1. Traveling to Japan is looked at as a points and miles “sweet spot”. This means you can get A LOT of $$ worth of travel for a relatively low amount of points.

2. In fact, you can get a business class ticket from US to Asia for as low as 75,000 points with ANA airlines.

If you want a rundown of the options, there’s a great podcast from @hutchins that outlines them here. This is what turned me on to the idea:

And a great article from @thepointsguy here:

3. It’s worth noting that we paid a lot more points than the ANA rate, because we flew Singapore, which is arguably one of the most high quality airlines you can fly to Japan on. We didn’t necessarily want this but based on when we were booking and when we wanted to go, it’s how the chips fell.

But I’d 100% do it again (if we had the points). The flight from LAX to Tokyo was about 12 hours, and on Singapore airlines I could have gone another 12 hours. The food is awesome, plenty of space to work on a laptop, the most attentive crew I’d ever seen. Fantastic movies, layback seats, noise canceling headphones. Just awesome from top to bottom.

4. There’s 2 pieces of bad news. 1: The word is out that flying to Japan on points can be cheap, so competition has gone up, and depending on when you want to go it’s competitive to get the flights, and they go for more points than the crazy rates quoted in the articles above. 2: Booking these flights is kind of a PITA. You need to figure out what flights you want to take, on which air line.. And because you want to see how much they cost with points and miles you’re not going to be able to use Google flights, you’ll need to use the Airline websites (which aren’t quite as easy to navigate as local airlines), or you’ll need to use an app that DOES let you search these airlines based on award bookings. You also have to book the flights as separate legs in some cases (they won’t show up if you search round trip.)

But if you’re willing to spend SOME money, there’s actually an easier solution 👇allthehacks.com/travel-hacking…
thepointsguy.com/guide/travel-t…

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Chris Stephenson | CRE AI, OPS, MKTG

@TopherNOW

Jan 6

Most CRE firms don’t invest in SEO. If you do, you’re ahead of the competition, but most don’t know how.

Here’s 5 EASY SEO tips that brokers and brokerages can roll out in less than a week, and get ahead of your competitors 🧵

1. Create Category X City pages for your listings:

What kind of listings do you have? What cities are they in? Create listing pages to let Google know! If you list “retail properties for lease in Tulsa, OK”, create a page featuring those listings, so that you will rank on Google when someone is searching for that keyword. Create the page and make sure the property and the location is included in the page title, the meta description, the header tags, and in a short paragraph on the listing page. You might not know what a header tag, but the person who runs your website should.

Create listing pages like this for every city/ market you have a substantial number of listings in. Here’s a great example of ours that generates leads for us every week (our brokers are generalists so it’s less specific than yours might need to be).

#retwit #crex #seo

2. Write articles about your market niche and post them to your website. These can take many forms: Market updates for the area you work in, insights on a current trend like office to apartment conversations, or even just a list of recent key transactions in your niche. Make it specific to the city or state that you work in, it doesn’t need to be long, but make it something you’d want to send to your clients and that they’d actually want to read!

This is easier than ever now with ChatGPT. Below is a thread with a prompt that will do a lot of the heavy lifting:

Whatever the topic is, make sure the topic and the area it pertains to is prominently featured in the title, meta description, and the other SEO hotspots outlined in tip #1.

We have an article on Maine Construction Costs was written 6 months ago and gets at least 30 hits a month. That might not sound like much but it’s 30 people interested in the topic seeing our broker’s face and seeing them as an authority on the topic.

3. Create a Google My Business page for your brokerage, and optimize it.

If someone is searching for “commercial real estate brokerage in (insert city), some of the first businesses they’ll see aren’t business websites, they’ll be Google My Business pages.

Create the page, link it to your website, create a keyword rich description of your business summarizing your services and who you provide them to. In order for this page to be fully optimized, don’t skip any of the sections, when in doubt, fill it out, everything from the services section to your hours of operation.

Here’s a great podcast episode with more tips on this.

open.spotify.com/episode/63LGe5…

Read 6 tweets

Chris Stephenson | CRE AI, OPS, MKTG

@TopherNOW

Dec 27, 2023

The big question: Can you actually use AI to get a commercial real estate deal done?

Google Bard is now tied into Google maps data, making it a killer tool for leads.

Here’s how you can use it to find tenants and buyers:

🧵

#crex #retwit #ai #googlebard #GenAI

Say you’re marketing a strip mall and looking for a pizza shop as a tenant. You may want to approach the ones doing well to see if they want a new location.

Ask Bard to provide you a list of the best pizza shops in the area based on their Google review scores, and put them into a table with additional info you’re looking for. Shout out to @bethanyjbabcock for sharing the idea of hunting for retail users based on their Google reviews!

Next make the info actionable. Google Bard isn’t just tied into Maps, it’s also tied into Google Workspaces, so you can easily take any lead lists it provides you and export them to a Google sheet.

(It can also summarize your emails and grab details from your Google docs but that’s another thread).

Read 6 tweets

Chris Stephenson | CRE AI, OPS, MKTG

@TopherNOW

Jul 23, 2023

If you’re not using AI in #CRE, you’ll fall behind, it’s a matter of when.

But there’s 100’s of new #AI tools every week, and most of them are useless.

Here are 5 tools that will ACTUALLY save you time. 🧵

#retwit

📼AI Video Clips: Do you or your brokerage invest in video content? Take one long-form video and automatically break it up into 10 short videos to use for TikTok or Insta with OpusDotPro. It finds the right segments, adds the captions, let’s you edit.

📄 Talk to your documents: ChatGPT is great but use the ChatWithPDF plugin to unleash your productivity. Instead of flipping through a 100 page doc to find info, upload it to this plugin, and ask its whatever questions you want. WARNING: Use your discretion with confidential info

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Chris Stephenson | CRE AI, OPS, MKTG

Chris Stephenson | CRE AI, OPS, MKTG

Chris Stephenson | CRE AI, OPS, MKTG

Chris Stephenson | CRE AI, OPS, MKTG

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