Let’s Get Acquainted

“We believe: That faith in God gives meaning and purpose to human life;
That the brotherhood of man transcends the sovereignty of nations;
That economic justice can best be won by free men through free enterprise;
That government should be of laws rather than of men;
That earth’s great treasure lies in human personality;
And that service to humanity is the best work of life.” – Jaycee Creed

ICIWorld.com is a Real Estate Listing Service dedicated to the Real Estate industry for Real Estate professionals, specifically Real Estate Brokers and Salespeople, to empower them with Internet tools and concepts to serve the public in helping them to achieve their goals and objectives.

Quick Look at my C.V.

What is a CCIM? (Certified Commercial Investment Member)
Past Chairman of the 1999 CCIM International Commercial Real Estate Conference
Past President of the CCIM Central Canada Chapter
What is CIPS? (Certified International Property Specialist)
Real Estate Broker since 1974 and in Real Estate since 1972.
Past Mortgage Broker
Past AMP What is an AMP? (Accredited Mortgage Professional)
Specializing in helping Real Estate professionals use the powers of the Internet to help their prospects and clients since 1994.
Past President of the Hamilton Junior Chamber of Commerce (Jaycees). The above Creed best expresses what we believe in. It is a great learning organization and is all about leadership training through community involvement.
Past Chairman of the Hamilton Happening, a city wide 125th-anniversary celebration attended by over 75,000 people.
Past Chairman of the 1999 CCIM International Commercial Real Estate Conference Toronto Westin Harbour Castle
Past President of the Central Canada CCIM Chapter
Membership Chairman Central Canada CCIM Chapter www.ccimcanada.com
Past Manager of Real Estate office
Past Broker/Owner of a Real Estate Franchise
Attended Ryerson Polytechnical Institute for Civil Technology and
Laurentian University for Engineering
First on the Internet for Real Estate in 1994 as an information service.
Seminar presenter at hundreds of Real Estate offices, associations, Real Estate boards Mastering the Power of the Internet.
Webinar presenter over the Internet Harnessing The Powers of the Internet for Licensed Real Estate Brokers and Salespeople
Available as a speaker for seminars worldwide live in person or by way of Webinar.
Plays senior men’s basketball.
Former Baseball Coach Burlington Optimist Minor Baseball Association
Hockey Coach
Coaching baseball several years at Camp Olympia
Spends time weekly with parents.

Teamwork is the key to making it all work.

Our service started with networking information, Haves and Wants, an interactive database on the Internet. As our clients’ needs and wants grew, we grew with them. Now providing this database for our member’s websites and more.

Early Days

Actually, it starts with my story, a history of how ICIWorld.com started.

Settle in. This is the beginning of a book . . . someday.

Gary Nusca was born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario, not far from Brantford where the original telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell. I feel a special kinship as an inventor of this service and the trials and tribulations of inventing and taking advantage of new technology and then how to make it work, roll it out and how to have people use it successfully.

MLS actually started in the late 1800s. Hamilton was also where MLS and the idea of sharing information on listings were started in 1933 (not confirmed). Now the facts may not be exactly right, and others will claim to have started MLS, but that is not the issue, I simply felt a kinship with people who started MLS, services based on either a need or a service. If it wasn’t for the Queen of England trying out a telephone between her castle and the stable so she could call to get the horses ready, the telephone was having a time of its life trying to get accepted. It was considered a play toy by many. Fax machines too had a challenging time getting started and now look, they came and now went to other technology.

The start of an information service shares many of the same challenges of growth and more, where people either do not take it seriously or do not know how to make it work or simply do not believe. “Well I have always done business this way and it works for me, I don’t need these new computer things.” or “I tried it for a listing and it didn’t work.”

Today we say, if your car has a flat tire, you do not abandon the car. You take it to get fixed. The same is true for an information service. If you are not generating leads off the Internet then you need to call us. Today with five billion people using the Internet and experience that we have every member connects to do business otherwise call us to help.

See Our Pledge.

Junior Chamber of Commerce

My dad encouraged me to join the Junior Chamber of Commerce in the 70s and I chaired the Hamilton Happening in 1972. This was a festival celebrating the 125th anniversary of Canada. 75,000 people attended and it was a great event. We made presentations to the city council to have a great family day for the citizens of the Hamilton area. I later became president of The Junior Chamber of Commerce. The junior chamber has as its goal to develop leadership abilities through service to mankind. See US JAYCEES.

Chairing these events and the chapter taught me many things about the team, delegating responsibility, getting people excited about a common goal, encouragement, follow-up, and much more.

Along the way, we read books like Dale Carnegie, Napolean Hill and other leaders in the industry of what it takes to succeed.

Perhaps the best is “what the mind of man can conceive and believe he will achieve.”

I got into Real Estate into 1972 and had something like fourteen opportunities of offers fall through. The broker at the time encouraged me to continue by saying he never had a young person start with so many transactions at least started. So close. Around that time we had the Xerox professional selling skills program presented to us. This, of course, is based on the soft sell. You learn to probe and ask questions to identify what is the problem, minimize it and provide a solution, you uncover areas of dissatisfaction and then show how to make things better, you learn about skepticism and learn about using third-party proof statements to convince people of things. Some salespeople just talk and talk on and on without addressing any of these situations and wonder why they are not making money. Learning how to address the needs of others can help one serve the public better.

In Real Estate for fourteen years selling an average of one end a week year in and year out, selling new homes and resales was fun and profitable. Personal changes such as a divorce threw me for a loop and I could not bear seeing happy families when mine was upside down. I had tears in me and could break down just thinking about it at the time. Now I am okay but then it was difficult. I moved into commercial Real Estate.

CCIM Designation

The best move was the CCIM designation and the group of people.

www.ccim.com

CHAPTER WEBSITE

This ICIWorld.com is an independent service owned and operated by Gary Nusca, CCIM.

It has no relationship with the chapter other than as a sponsor.

I happen to be the Past Membership Chairman, of the Central Canada CCIM Chapter and I personally would like to invite you to join for the education, networking, camaraderie, technology and more.

To give you an idea of the meetings and speakers CLICK HERE.

The first CCIM course CI101 takes the mystery out of Commercial Real Estate. You would have an understanding of the before and after tax implications of investing in any income producing Real Estate. At the same time, there was the talk of something in the future called the Internet. No one knew what it was just some kind of buzz that was connecting people. When I got into commercial Real Estate computers were just coming in and prior to that were big black boxes that housed phones in your trunk. Mobile phones that were of the army type that you carried around. They were the rage.

The software on computers was edlin . . . ouch, WordPerfect, and Alta Vista was the search engine.

Somehow I built a database of buyers to keep track and after building it, saw an industrial building for $1M that met some criteria that could be interesting for someone. I sold it and made $25,000. Wow, computers, mobile phones, CCIM, Real Estate, fun!

My son was born in 86 and we did Disney World, had a boat, motorhome, home, and enjoyed life.

I had to make a decision. Was my extra special interest in technology going to benefit just me or could I use this knowledge to benefit the industry worldwide and then dedicate myself to this industry?

What was the thinking behind this?

One problem. A solution that has not only lasted to this day but continues to grow.

The problem.

Real Estate Brokers and Salespeople got together in CCIM chapter meetings at the Toronto Real Estate Board to network Real Estate opportunities. Haves are the properties for sale and for lease. Wants are what buyers and sellers are looking for. Brokers and Salespeople spend a lot of time in commercial Real Estate exploring and searching opportunities. Opportunities are problems waiting to be solved. A property has to be sold. This is a problem. The solution finding the right buyer, easier said than done.

A Commercial property is different from residential. 90% of apartment buildings, shopping centers, etc. are not on Real Estate Boards. So salespeople who wanted to sell these would gravitate to a brokerage where there were a few people who knew the owners and or had relationships with buyers and/or sellers.

At marketing sessions for CCIM’s and SEC’s (Society of Exchange Counsellors) salespeople would stand up and say I have a shopping center for sale. Anyone who was interested would hold up their hand with their business card and we would deliver the business cards to the salesperson who had the shopping center. At one time 65% of the members of the CCIM Chapter had done business with each other.

It was about developing business relationships with each other that led to doing business.

Real Estate Opportunities

These were opportunities not on Real Estate Boards. A member of the chapter had a good business relationship with an owner or buyer and simply talked about it at the meeting. If you developed a good business relationship with him/her, where you could depend on them not to go direct to the owner and work through you only, then the transaction could work. Whenever someone tried to go direct it could throw a monkey wrench into the whole deal. No one knows the dynamics of the owner or buyer better than the person who is dealing with them in the first place.

Everyone would quietly be excited because any connection made can make one a lot of money. Many of us would be writing down the Haves and Wants on paper so feverishly that at times you could not keep up. Names, phone numbers, what was it, how much, where were they looking, and on and on.

All I could think about was would it simply not be much easier to put it on a computer to share, if you wanted to share, put out as little or as much as you wanted to, make a connection where you could qualify the person interested, and go from there.

Digitial Media, the Bulletin Board, a Break through in Communications

If it could only be in a central place where we could simply see a phone number, call up the broker who had the buyer who was looking and make an appointment with my seller and do a deal.

I started a bulletin board system in 1992 with Quickbbs software, with incoming telephone lines, an online bulletin board system CIBBS – commercial investment bulletin board system. The name serves to this day. www.cibbs.net

We got on the Internet in 1994 when there were only 14 responses worldwide on Alta Vista the search engine at the time. And then slowly and agonizingly started to promote the concept. Yes, we were a non-profit corporation for a very long time. When you think others would share the concept and get on in droves, how could they not be excited? One deal in ten years could help them make $50,000 and pay for the $240 per year membership. They would be members for life, right? Wrong.

And it did not happen like that. We had one broker who made $250,000 selling hotels in the Niagara Falls area and when it came up for renewal did not remember he got the deals as a result of his membership in ICIWorld.com.

We had many many disbelievers. Then we published testimonials proof positive that everyone can do deals, and did this help? Yes but just a little. No buzz, no excitement. Why not when there were these opportunities to network information industry-wide so easily?

Some tried but they actually could not click a mouse click one after another fast enough to double-click. Others could not find the on and off switch on a computer. We are talking about pre-1999 in time. Others did not have computers. Of course we always felt in our heart of hearts it was absolutely inevitable that everyone will someday get a computer, someday learn how to use it, someday learn about our service, someday learn how to work information not just advertise listings, and would you believe it, it is happening now in 2013 better than every.

There were others who said ICIWorld.com was a threat to MLS. Everyone was going to lose their livelihood. So this rumour so easy to start so false. If Real Estate salespeople do not want to use a service they do not have to. So only if a service is good for them will they use it. And ICIWorld.com is demonstrating it is very compatible with organized Real Estate so much so that in actual fact ICIWorld.com would love nothing better than for a Real Estate association or board, to adopt us, partner, buy, license or somehow get it working for ALL their members because in our opinion salespeople who do not use the service as intended are missing out for the time being unless they join themselves now directly.

It was built for licensed Real Estate salespeople to serve the public. Like Real Estate classified ads it is a service that allows one to advertise. If theoretically it was better for licensed Real Estate salespeople to use and they were making money using it and they did why not? That is what a Real Estate board is for, to help them serve the public in a professional manner and serve the best interests of their members in their service to the community. If a Real Estate board could own the newspaper that publishes Real Estate classified ads, that can be a good thing if it is done properly.

Many who started in 2000 to 2010 started and stopped. It was few years why we could not understand why they did not rejoin. And then we started studying it more closely. Readership was an issue. If a person placed an ad in a newspaper and placed the same ad on a Real Estate board and placed the same ad on ICIWorld.com, the others were getting more calls. So why should a person continue a membership? Another problem, we placed a banner on a members website to click on yet people who visited that person website never clicked on it. Yet it said millions of dollars of Real Estate. We figured out that everyone thought it was just an ad. They had no idea you could click on an image to get the results! As soon as we put a statement right under it, bingo the calls started happening for the members. Years of struggling with no great results yet the power of the networking were at work. Along the way, there were connections made of a string of shopping centers in California, 15,000 acres in Peru were sold as well as local connections.

Some of the people from the public using the service turned off some of the members of the service. Members said they were not well qualified and were wasting their time. Others used the service, gave out the addresses of properties and found out later the property sold and it sold to the people they gave the address too!

Others got a computer, got on the Internet and started getting harassed and approached by scammers, thieves from Nigeria and other con artists. Then we hear about all the things that can go wrong on the Internet. And then legitimate mail starts getting blocked inadvertently by Internet Service Providers in their quest to make the experience on the Internet better, blocked all perceived spam mail and ending up blocking legitimate mail at the same time. Did anyone ever send you an email that somehow you never got? It could be sitting in the spam blocker of your internet service provider on your behalf! You can actually call them and ask to see all the blocked mail and members have told me they found personal mail from their loved ones there and they could not believe it.

Then we have members who start and then because they are so busy do not do anything with their membership and say it is not for them, it did not work.

What I was now seeing was a lack of education in the use of computers, technology, the Internet and the proper competent and professional way in which information must and can be handled in a confidential fashion.

It was trial by fire, belly to belly in the trenches going for many years but the overall concept is an absolute dream.

You have a $1M property, I have a buyer. Let’s get together and see if we can put this deal together and you do. In some cases, brokers have told me they put in a total of two hours work and made $50,000.

In some other countries, if you want to sell a property, you write it on a piece of paper and bring it to the hardware store and post it on a bulletin board in the store. Advertise it in a newspaper. There is no MLS or world wide information service such as ICIWorld.com that is known to that area. All that is changing. This is an introduction to the second coming of the Internet, the mobile revolution.

There are now more mobile devices in the world today that there are humans. People are on phones five times as much as on a computer.

For Real Estate salespeople this is great news. Not only is the Internet here, but now access to the information is in everyone’s hands!

ICIWorld.com was built to put Real Estate Have and Want information in the hands of people so that we can say “it is information at your fingertips.”

Information is the gold that is on the Internet. In the Klondike you need trucks, and shovels and you have to dig for gold in the cold weather of all kinds. On the Internet, you can find one buyer in the comfort of your home, make an appointment to show a property, show it, get an offer, get it accepted and do a deal and make money. And make money they are! Members of ICIWorld.com are serving the public successfully. In fact, 75% of the information on ICIWorld.com is of an exclusive nature, Real Estate buying and selling information.

This is better for the public because otherwise, this information is not available.

It is simply natural for this to be.

All Real Estate Brokers and Salespeople should embrace networking information with a passion and make it work in their area.

Our goals:

to help Real Estate salespeople serve the public with information technology
to help Real Estate salespeople network Real Estate information, exclusive information not available on other services and advertise Real Estate board listings
to help Real Estate salespeople generate leads, provide services and do business
to provide access to Real Estate Have and Want information worldwide
to help you connect with others to do Real Estate business
to help the public find Real Estate opportunities not available on other services
to provide one place in the world where every single person in the world can network Real Estate and business information Haves and Wants
to provide an easy way for people to enter their listings once and reach the world
working with the organized Real Estate industry to develop these services to serve the public in the most economical way possible in the world today
to continue to develop services compatible with the Real Estate industry in their service to the public.

Get your information on the mobile app.

Get your information instantly on 1,000 other brokers websites.

Get your information delivered to 20,000+/- people in the industry

Get your information displayed in a Database available to tens of thousands of people from over 100+ countries as well as locally

Get assistance to get your website triggering leads for you because other Brokers and Salespeople have agreed to allow their listings to be advertised on your website

Your responsibility?

LOG IN TO YOUR WEB SITE ONCE PER MONTH log in to your web site once per month if you have one of our web sites. It keeps your information active to the industry where there are 300,000 Real Estate salespeople using these websites. Look after your To DO List which one item is to approve handshakes because other brokers who join the service are allowing their listings to be on your website and if you do not do this you are not allowing their listings to be on your website yet they could easily be the next ones that someone visiting your website might like and if they do not see them you can easily be missing doing a deal and not know it.
ADD AND SEARCH LISTINGS FROM TIME TO TIME. If you do not place your opportunities on ICIWorld.com you can easily be missing reaching any one of 50,000 people seeing it, calling you, and doing a deal. Searching? The web site we supply automatically sends out new listings that match what your buyers are looking for. But you need to also search from time to time.
PROMOTE YOUR WEBSITE. The largest Return On Investment (ROI) of any industry on the Internet is for Real Estate. That is because one lead can make one a lot of money. If you can get one extra person this next week to visit your website and they see a $1M listing they would like, then call you, bingo you have a chance to make some money. This is your office building on the Internet. Promote it on social media, business cards, ads, and more. But make sure it has the links from ICIWorld.com that provide listings for your viewers in a way the viewers have to call you. It is absolutely inevitable that you generate leads unless you have no traffic to your website. We have solutions for this.

But it is a money-making service for licensed Real Estate salespeople and provides more choice for the public. And it provides protection for the public because salespeople are trained in consumer protection.

We appreciate the opportunity to be of service.

Sincerely

Gary Nusca, CCIM, CIPS, Realtor, Broker 48 years.
Founder and Manager
ICIWorld.com Global Real Estate Networking
The ICIWorld Association of Real Estate Brokers and Salespeople

PS: feel free to call anytime at 416-214-4875