Las Vegas ITRA Global Conference 2013

Las Vegas ITRA Global Conference – April 5^th to 7^th, 2013

So far 2013 has been a busy one, here is a quick recap from my trip to Las Vegas!

April 5th to 7th I attended the ITRA Global Conference hosted in Las Vegas.  A special thanks to Banner Travel in Rockledge, PA for assisting me in making my travel arrangements for this trip via Southwest Airlines and the Wynn Hotel.  When I arrived I was able to get tickets to the Cirque Du Sole show, KA at the MG M Grand. Ka was a spectacular show, if you get a chance to see it, go! Ka has been described as the following: “Ka… signifies life-force, consciousness, duty and destiny. In the vulgate, or low speech, it also means a place to which an individual must go.” 

CONFERENCE NOTES:

On Friday, Melissa Meyer President of Bruce International, Inc. (transcending translations) presented and did an excellent job. It was amazing to listen to her Top Ten Questions to ask our customers who maybe relocating out of our country, sending a team aboard, or a company locating in the US from somewhere else. Melissa also cited examples that highlight the reasons for using a specialized company, such as Bruce International, to assist with translations and customs of a culture if you are planning to do business outside of your own country.  There are cases where the  same words in a language can have different meanings or uses varying with the local culture; just think about the differences in the expressions of the British versus the US English.  During the presentation the question of the accuracy of Google Translation came up. This was an excellent example of a great tool that can translate out of context. The lesson we walked away with was, it is not worth it to insult or offend a client and to rely on a human translation vs an automated translation to ensure the translation is accurate to the situation and in context!

Many of the conference speakers were principals of other ITRA Global Affiliates. Other guest speakers included Matt Weirich and Ani Rangarajan, co-founders of ReaLync. On Saturday one of our ITRA Global members, Ron Pollina, Ph.D., shared his valuable experience in completing  Sale/Lease backs transactions.  The transactions  he used as examples were huge, significant sizes, in terms of dollar volume.

I gained a lot of good useful information  by attending the conference.  As an organization (ITRA Global) three new members were accepted to be exclusive ITRA Global Affiliates for Orange County (Corporate Realty Advisors), Los Angeles County (Mazirow Commercial), California, and Salt Lake City (Logical Move), Utah. Congratulations to our newest members, welcome to the team!